AS SEEN ON TWITTER

I'm near certain that you heard about the armed couple in St. Louis

I'm also near certain that you haven't heard about the six Chicago children shot dead in a single week https://t.co/FBqoVxKUaJ

— Cameron Gray (@Cameron_Gray) June 29, 2020

When Heroes Aren't Human

Another month another school shooting and the never ending debate trying to understand the seemingly unknowing, why?

Why are young men in the freest most prosperous nation in human history killing their peers? Seemingly without remorse or any sense of humanity.

The go to battle lines are formed around the gun "debate" but there really is no debate there is just a divide. An insurmountable divide which will last far into the future. The divide between those who believe that guns are the problem and those who believe people are the problem. There is one undeniable fact which is that when all the guns are gone, there will still be people. And people kill people, Cain slew Abel and there was not a gun in sight.

The question should not be are guns the problem, the question should be, why are young men in the freest nation in human history killing their peers? It is sad but true that far more young people are killed due to gang violence than at school as the result of a mass murder, but that does not make these mass killings any less horrifying and far more difficult to understand.

There is, in a way, a correlation between these two seemingly different American tragedies. A desire by young people to belong. This is obvious when it comes to gangs. Gangs are formed and survive because of a desire by their members to belong, a natural need for camaraderie.

Camaraderie, there is an old fashioned word, one of those archaic ideals being ripped asunder from modern culture. But a concept critical to the psyche of the male of the species like another word not in vogue brotherhood. In a very real emotional sense it is not unlike belonging to a sports team, a fraternity or a club. Although gangs are not a justifiable outlet for this normal male desire for camaraderie , it is at least understandable.

But what of the school shooters, most of whom are outsiders and loners with no attachment to teams, groups, clubs or even gangs?

When you don't "fit in" you may find a place to "fit in" with others who have suffered as you have. Your heroes your mentors may turn out to be those who paved a path to the outlet for the frustration you so deeply feel. You may choose to join the club, the ever larger club of those who found release through massacre.

As the club grows, so too does it's opportunities for recruitment. The boy who does not identify with the Parkland shooter may, as the most recent shooting appears, identify with the Columbine murders'. As the events grow in number and frequency so too does the possibility for a spark to be lit inside a darkened soul.

Worse yet as the numbers increase so too does the justification for joining the club become easier within a tormented mind. "I am not alone, lots of people do it."

In a truly brilliant if chilling article written several shootings ago Malcolm Caldwell explored this phenomena Thresholds of Violence , How school shootings catch on.

In his essay he makes the following observation:

We misleadingly use the word “copycat” to describe contagious behavior—implying that new participants in an epidemic act in a manner identical to the source of their infection.

The key word here is contagious. The problem is not guns, young people are, as he also notes, being infected. They are catching something which their immune system cannot resist. They are susceptible to evil acts because they do not have the antibodies to fight off impulses.

It is widely accepted that gangs are primarily the result of and incubated in poverty. Add to that the increase in fatherless households and you have a toxic mix that will lead young men "astray." Not so the school shooters. A vast majority who come middle class and higher income households. Most do not come from fatherless homes. Often times it is shocking the "normal" families and homes where these killers are raised.

Which makes this epidemic even more frightening.

So again why? Why are young men from "normal" homes committing evil against their peers and society? I would suggest that there are many reasons which ferment this tragic brew. Explaining the spread of the epidemic does not explain the cause. Why in the last half century have more and more boys sought out relief from their pent up frustrations by joining this evil cult?

Let's begin with this:

Abortion is not a choice in American society today it is a cause; death should never be a cause. When the death of an innocent unborn baby becomes a political cause for individual liberty, a tool to be used to promote political agendas and a defining measure of womanhood in popular society, we truly have lost our way.

[I]n so called popular American society today, those who oppose an unnatural act are somehow considered villains and uncaring, whereas those who promote the unnatural destruction of life are considered enlightened. This is not only backwards, it is sick and it is by any moral precept-wrong. Worse, this backward, sick, immoral thinking is promoted and championed in our society to the detriment of our moral structure which corrodes the very fabric of any truly progressive society. When any society champions death over life, the death of that society is inevitable.

I wrote those words many years ago and they are no less true today. The school shooting epidemic is not a gun issue, and no it is not an abortion issue, it is a societal issue. It is about what we believe and how we teach, or do not teach, our children to believe. If you begin with promoting the death of the most innocent how can you teach children the respect for life?

In a very real sense it is not unlike the old canard "A man who stands for nothing, will fall for anything." In this case "a boy who believes in nothing is capable of anything." Life is either precious or it is not and if in your formative years you are taught not to respect life...well you figure it out.

When I was growing up, and for the generations before me, I was surrounded by heroes. Not because I lived in a unique environment or location or time but because that is the way boys were raised. Boys will be boys is not a curse it is the pathway to manhood.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" Is not just a question it is an invitation, an invitation to look around you to see what you admire. "I want to be a cowboy, I want to be a policeman, I want to be a soldier. In today's "popular culture" all these and many other heroic figures are not only not held up to the youth as worthy role models they are vilified. Many of the heroes of my youth are now portrayed as villains in some way or another.

If a boy has no great dreams and examples of heroism he will never be a hero. Unless boys have totally changed since I was one, boys love to dream of being the hero. If they don't our society is lost. Heroes made the world, especially the ones we never heard of.

Try to go to a movie today where the heroes are even human, they are cartoon characters. Humans especially the male of the species are no longer allowed to be the heroes unless they are from a Galaxy far far away or a world that does not really exist. American society not only treats life as a throw away commodity we have created a heroless society less someone be offended by the glory of another.

So now we raise boys ridiculed and even drugged for their natural metabolism. They are chastised for their impulses and desires while their opposite gender is glorified for their blatant promiscuity meant to entice their male counterpart who is belittled for being what God and nature made him to be.

Not to mention that a girl in today's society is not only allowed to kill her "mistake", Barack Obama's words not mine, they are glorified for doing so. The boy? The boy is a lecherous scoundrel preying on noble womanhood. This is the world we raise our boys in, and worse.

All this is happening while "popular culture" actively promotes the degradation of normal role models and promotes the less natural alternative life styles which only confuse young males as to who they are and what they should be.

It is not that boys are stigmatized by video games or movies, it is that it becomes their escape from a society which is increasingly hostile to their nature. The outcome is the same though. Living in an imaginary world with comic book heroes and rules that defy nature will lead to more and more young men not being men at all.

It is hard to be a man when you do not know what a man is in a society which is telling you how to think and feel when you do not think and feel that way at all.

What we need are heroes. Not comic book ones but real men who know what a man's place is and proudly explain it and more importantly live it for all to see, especially the boys.

Guns are not the problem, but increasingly for the broken boys of our broken culture guns are becoming the answer.

Gun Manufacturers Fire Back at Dick's Sporting Goods, Halt Sales

Gun Manufacturers Fire Back at Dick's Sporting Goods, Halt Sales

Sporting goods retailer "Dick's" is losing access to several popular gun manufacturer's products in a retaliatory strike, as the companies withdraw their business following a series of public moves by the popular store. Dick's made some news last month when they first pulled from their shelves,&n...

Looking for 'solutions' to mass killings? Start with punishing failure.

Looking for 'solutions' to mass killings? Start with punishing failure.

Law enforcers might prevent more disasters like school shootings if they faced consequences for failure. Incompetence should be penalized. Law enforcement keeps failing, and people keep dying. Where are the consequences? Where is the accountability? Despite receiving a warning directly from the Russian government, the FBI failed to stop the Tsarnaev brothers from staging the Boston Marathon bombing.

As Seen On Twitter

#ICYMI A fed-up gun-owner in North Carolina demands answers from his elected officials as to why they refuse to stand up for the majority of their residents. #2A #NRA pic.twitter.com/OYkNBWAXHE

— NRA (@NRA) April 6, 2018

"Don't tell me words don't matter"

The current political environment to me seems to have begun after the 2000 election. It has gotten progressively worse with the rise of the Progressive's panic.

That panic is based on the fact that they do not always get their way. Unfortunately they get their way far more than is sustainable for a stable society. Notice how I threw in one of their favorite terms there.

As this millennium has unfolded I find it is increasingly more difficult to discern what I see and hear with any form of common sense.

I know the reason for this. The reason is that the beliefs and values that I learned and believe in are not the bedrock values of my political opposition.

Today's political and societal dysfunction is nothing less than two opposing camps not only seeking a different destination but attempting to reach their destinations using two completely different maps.

One of those contradictory maps is language.

In a 2008 response to Hillary Clinton's criticism of his campaign being built on "just words"  Barack Obama replied with the instantly legendary  "Don't tell me words don't matter" speech.

The fact that the line and the gist of the speech were a rip-off of another black politician, Deval Patrick were pretty much overlooked in the quest to make Obama president by the media and for the media Amen.

 But the line is true, words do matter.

When words or phrases have no meaning or distorted meaning, sincere and honest dialogue and debate are difficult if not impossible.

I recently had an interesting conversation on Twitter with a young progressive woman about abortion. It was very civil discussion right up to the point where she determined that I was not worthy of future debate since I was "a man."  God forbid.

What set her off was when I asked the very simple question,"did you love your child before she was born?" Her response was that "they bonded after birth" and that I was being too "personal."

I did not respond with my belief that murdering the unborn is personal to me. Instead I asked
what pretty much ended the conversation, "did you name your daughter before she was born?"

Progressives especially politicians appeal to people's emotions to garner support for their ideals. Often times the words are just a superficial icing meant to sweeten what is non existent or illogical substance below the surface. After the sugar rush of eating the icing you are left with nothing but the rotten reality of the core ideals.

Progressivism  is like a dish of whipped cream covered rotten strawberries. Kind of like Obamacare.

Another example of this is in the current never ending debate over "gun control." Not being a "gun person" in some ways is like being "a man" in the abortion debate. It allows me the opportunity to sort of look at things a bit more dispassionately than people who are directly affected by the issue.

I think they call that objectivity, but that is one of those "values" not in vogue these days.

The term that gets me in the gun debate is "assault weapon".

Aren't all weapons assault weapons?

weap·on
ˈwepən/
noun
a thing designed or used for inflicting bodily harm or physical damage.

And here is the truly crazy thing about the term, almost anything can and has been used as a weapon. Pick something, nearly anything, and you will find that at some point someone has assaulted someone else using it.

A toothbrush, a chair, a shoe, a pan, a TV, a picture, a rug, a lamp, a book, hell I used to get into trouble for throwing my dirty socks at my sisters.

Which brings us back to the truth. It is not the weapon, it is the assault. Assault is an act not an object. Just as a fetus is a living child not a medical condition.

The sad fact is that abortion is a premeditated assault while an AR-15 is an inanimate object with no conscious power on its own.

This should not even be debatable. This is reality having nothing to do with politics or religion, it is truth.

When truth ceases to be a standard for political debate then where do you go?

In the years leading up to the Civil War proponents of slavery created their own truth. They determined that "nigras" were not eligible to be treated equal, less alone free citizens because they were not intellectually or morally capable of living in society.

Of course this is not true, we know that. Many of those who espoused that doctrine then knew it was not true then. But as the Philosopher Karl Popper observed,

"No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude."

Like the young woman on Twitter, when you are on the irrational side of an argument, your only defense is to take to the offense, usually by being offensive.

To end, what is already too long a diatribe, I can only say I am not offended by the lack of common sense by those on the left. I am however greatly concerned for the future of my country should their distortion of words replace critical thinking as a basis for policy.

My one big hope is actually based in objective reality. Although a cultural war can be won without guns, for a time. It cannot be won without baring children to carry it forward. The progressive left have planted their own seeds to their own destruction.

Murdering your offspring is not productive to a lasting movement, while baring arms wins most arguments.

There Is No ‘Epidemic of Mass School Shootings’

There Is No 'Epidemic of Mass School Shootings'

It's been two weeks since a heavily armed psychopath turned Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School into a war zone - and the survivors of that massacre have already changed gun politics in the United States for the better. With their acts of witness and advocacy, the teenage protesters of Parkland, Florida, shook many voters out of their complacency about pervasive gun violence.

As Seen On Twitter

I stopped by MSD this morning to visit my daughter’s memorial. The irony of what I saw is almost more than one can bear. Who speaks for the ones that can’t? #MarchForOurLives pic.twitter.com/ws3nfly5N5

— Ryan Petty (@rpetty) March 25, 2018

Actors at Casting Call Are Surprised by Real Gun Facts They're Asked to Read

Actors at Casting Call Are Surprised by Real Gun Facts They're Asked to Read

Here is what happens when people on both sides of the gun conversation in America are able to be heard. The producers of this video had a variety of actors cold read statistical truths about guns and crime in the United States. Much of this is known to pro-Second Amendment advocates but not to th...

As Seen On Twitter

.@Judgenap: "No-gun zones are killing zones. They are the most dangerous places on the planet and they should not exist." pic.twitter.com/xdsPRt69uC

— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) March 17, 2018

Disgraced Parkland deputy heard shots inside school building, told cops to stay away

Disgraced Parkland deputy heard shots inside school building, told cops to stay away

Roundly vilified for not entering a Parkland high school during a mass shooting, Broward Deputy Scot Peterson insisted publicly that he believed that gunfire was happening outside on campus - not from inside the building. But internal radio dispatches released by the sheriff's office Thursday show Peterson immediately fixated on Building 12 and even radioed that gunfire was happening "inside."

Don't Forget: The Infamous ‘Dred Scott’ Decision Was Largely About Preventing Blacks From Owning Guns

Don't Forget: The Infamous 'Dred Scott' Decision Was Largely About Preventing Blacks From Owning Guns

On this 161st anniversary of the Supreme Court's infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford to deny American citizenship to any black person, whether slave or free, the mainstream media have uniformly overlooked a key feature of that grave miscarriage of justice: the decision was rendered in large part to prevent blacks from owning guns.

As Seen on Twitter

Increasing age to 21 to buy guns would not have stopped these shootings:

shooting/age

Las Vegas, 64
Tucson Shooting, 22
Virginia Tech, 23
Charleston Church, 21
Orlando Night Club, 29
Sutherland Springs, 26
Fort Hood, 39
Aurora Theater, 25
Luby's shooting, 35
San Bernardino, 28

— Ryan Saavedra 🇺🇸 (@RealSaavedra) February 28, 2018

As Seen On Twitter

This is a thread, click on the tweet to read the thread (not the link)

CNN coached anti-gun school shooter survivor @cameron_kasky was calling for violence against Republicans, while now demanding gun control.

Did I mention he was recently with Fusion GPS employee Nellie Ohr? #ParklandStudentsSpeak pic.twitter.com/0ZDpgIIHeM

— Mike Tokes (@MikeTokes) February 22, 2018

Gun Shy

Via-REASON

Four Supreme Court justices make the case against constitutional rights.

Jacob Sullum

On Monday the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies to states and cities as well as the federal government. Judging from their objections, the four dissenters were still reeling from the Court's landmark 2008 decision recognizing that the amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.

In their dissenting opinions, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer (joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor) worry that overturning gun control laws undermines democracy. If "the people" want to ban handguns, they say, "the people" should be allowed to implement that desire through their elected representatives.

What if the people want to ban books that offend them, establish an official church, or authorize police to conduct warrantless searches at will? Those options are also foreclosed by constitutional provisions that apply to the states by way of the 14th Amendment. The crucial difference between a pure democracy and a constitutional democracy like ours is that sometimes the majority does not decide.

Likewise, Stevens defends "state and local legislatures' right to experiment," while Breyer is loath to interfere with "the ability of States to reflect local preferences and conditions—both key virtues of federalism." Coming from justices who think Congress can disregard state decisions about the medical use of marijuana because a plant on the windowsill of a cancer patient qualifies as interstate commerce, this sudden concern about federalism is hard to take seriously.

Another reason to doubt the dissenters' sincerity: They would never accept federalism as a rationale for letting states "experiment" with freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or due process protections. Much of their job, as they themselves see it, involves overriding "local preferences" that give short shrift to constitutional rights.

Second Amendment rights are different, Breyer says, because "determining the constitutionality of a particular state gun law requires finding answers to complex empirically based questions." So does weighing the claims in favor of banning child pornography or depictions of animal cruelty, relaxing the Miranda rule, admitting illegally obtained evidence, or allowing warrantless pat-downs, dog sniffs, or infrared surveillance.

When they decide whether a law or practice violates a constitutional right, courts cannot avoid empirical questions. In cases involving racial discrimination or content-based speech restrictions, for example, they ask whether the challenged law is "narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest" and is the "least restrictive means" of doing so.

But unlike equal protection or freedom of speech, Stevens says, "firearms have a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty." How so? "Just as they can help homeowners defend their families and property from intruders," he explains, "they can help thugs and insurrectionists murder innocent victims."

Every right can be abused, with results that are immoral, illegal, or both. Freedom of speech can be used to spread hateful ideas, promote pernicious political philosophies, slander the innocent, or engage in criminal conspiracies. If there were no potential for harm from exercising a right, there would be no need to protect it, because no one would try to restrict it.

The dissenters' most frivolous objection is that making states obey the Second Amendment "invites an avalanche of litigation," as Stevens puts it. Every day we hear about cases in which people argue that the government has violated their rights under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, or Eighth amendment. Neither Stevens nor Breyer wants to stop this "avalanche." Only when the Second Amendment is added to the mix do they recoil in horror at the prospect that Americans will use the courts to vindicate their rights.

Stevens warns that "the practical significance of the proposition that 'the Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the States' remains to be worked out by this Court over many, many years." But that's because the Court for many, many years ignored the Second Amendment while gradually defining the contours of its neighbors in the Bill of Rights. There is a lot of catching up to do.

McDonald and how gun rights were essential to black civil rights

Via-Washington Examiner

By: David Freddoso

Within the text of the 214-page Supreme Court ruling on gun rights is a history lesson on how Americans’ right to keep and bear arms was a major issue in the struggle for black civil rights in the South after the Civil War. To wit, Southern resisters, black codes and lawless lawmen attempted to disarm freedmen (usually in order to make them more vulnerable to racist terrorism), and the federal government came to their rescue by protecting their 2nd Amendment rights.

The quotations and detailed references leave absolutely no question that Congress and the ratifiers of the 14th Amendment viewed it — and accompanying post-war civil rights legislation — as a safeguard against state infringement of the 2nd Amendment right of the people to keep and bear arms. It’s not a part of our history that the Left has much stomach for, but fewer people argue against the obvious now that the Democratic Party has all but conceded the gun issue.

I’ve removed the references and footnotes for clarity (you can get them all in the original PDF) and reproduced this section of Justice Alito’s opinion at length below:

* * *

By the 1850’s, the perceived threat that had prompted the inclusion of the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights — the fear that the National Government would disarm the universal militia—had largely faded as a popular concern, but the right to keep and bear arms was highly valued for purposes of self-defense. Abolitionist authors wrote in support of the right. And when attempts were made to disarm “Free-Soilers” in “Bloody Kansas,” Senator Charles Sumner, who later played a leading role in the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, proclaimed that “[n]ever was [the rifle] more needed in just self-defense than now in Kansas.”