An entire country is in shock as we continue to watch the funerals of these innocent children and adults in Connecticut. It's not merely shock, but horror and revulsion, at the second-bloodiest school shooting in our history. It is sickening even to rank them in this way, to admit that there have been so many as to require it, but it is true: yet another child has killed yet more children in cold blood.
We don't have to worry about foreign terrorists coming to our country: we are better at hurting ourselves than they are at hurting us, and we always will be. Such innocuous places as theaters, shopping malls, and elementary schools are the scenes of massacres, of slaughter without any regard for human life.Again and again, parents, teachers, friends and loved ones see the warning signs and yet don't act until there is a murder, often followed by a suicide. The media, Hollywood, hip hop, and the entertainment culture must share blame: it’s not enough to simply blame the existence of guns.
We hear a lot about black on black crime, lack of a family structure in the African-American community, and yet the largest and most cold-blooded of these massacres happen in the suburbs. Why don't the media and the so-called experts discuss how these young white males consume the music, violence,liberal-run Hollywood product and perpetrate these unconscionable acts?
These crimes were non-existent 50 years ago. What has changed in America that the media and there so called experts refuse to bring in the media spotlight?
As if by reflex, leftists have fired up their word processors to try to use the blood of dead children to take our most basic and essential freedoms away. This, too, is disgusting, and it is a testimony to their detachment from reality: rather than accept that there is a great deal of evil in this world, and that we must be prepared for it, they think that, with a gun ban (enforced by gun-wielding police), the problem will go away.
It won’t. Is there more of a gun problem in formerly gun-ban Chicago or formerly gun-ban Washington, or in the gun-appreciating rural areas of our country?
The existence of guns is definitively not the cause of this or any shooting. No gun forces you to pull its trigger. The essential problem is the basic corruption of all humanity, the fallenness of our species, the tendency toward evil. We must accept this, and reject the modern, Rousseauvian naivety about mankind. We are corrupt by nature, and we must change.
What makes this emphatically worse is left-wing permissiveness, which is, after all, rooted in the same naivety. Logically, domestic permissiveness cannot be a justification for Left-wing Big Government and social programs, and yet, that is precisely what these leftists argue. They create a problem, and then apply a solution that creates another problem. They put a program on top of another, failed program, ad infinitum. This is, of course, their entire modus operandi.
We have a violent culture, caused not by the intrepid American spirit, not by patriotism, not by American foreign policy, not by strong families, not by strong religion, not by a strong military. In fact, it is the lack of all these things: abandoning morality, parental discipline, and an overall obsession with instant gratification. In many schools today,religion is non-existent. In our homes, violent video games consume more of our children’s time than anything else: how could these things not have any impact? Can it be clearer that they do?
Parents can't even punish their children anymore. The family law code is longer and more commented on than ever, the family more regulated than ever, and, thus, more impotent than ever. We have outsources the basic duties and responsibilities of parents to the government, and, to our great surprise, have found that we are worse parents for it. In New York, parents can even be arrested for verbally challenging their kids.
This is a time to reflect, not on what rights we can take away from our fellow citizens, but on appreciating what we do have, and bearing in mind always, how tenuous and fleeting are all our goods in this brief life. Times like these burn away all of our illusions, all of our feelings of entitlement, and remind us that we must adapt ourselves to reality, and not vainly try to adapt reality to ourselves.