Tag Archives: murder

Education, Guns, Right?, Politics 2017

It Won’t Stay in ‘Vegas

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The atrocious murdering took barely ten minutes. It is very likely that not one person who was killed or wounded one Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, knew the man we are told was their killer. Ostensibly Stephen Paddock had been accumulating weapons for “years.” He sent his “girlfriend” back to her native Phillipines two weeks ahead of the carnage he was planning, and then wired her money. He may have been trying to set up a shooting a week or more earlier but couldn’t obtain the rooms he needed for his desired perch. So, it’s possible that all of the weapons, volumes of ammunition and loaded clips, and other preparations were solely the work of one secretive, virtually unknown man. Maybe.

The current profile of Paddock indicates that he wanted to shoot at country music fans. On the other hand, he was a Democrat. Does that paint him with a group identity that explains anything? He owned guns – like 50 to 80 million other Americans. That makes him part of the American “gun culture.” It hasn’t been reported whether he owns a power drill or handsaw, or possibly a router, like 50 million other Americans, so it’s not clear whether Paddock was part of the “power tool” culture. However, he must, must, be placed in a hated group and “gun owners” will do perfectly.

One reporter has already been fired for stating that country music fans were likely “Republican gun-toters” who deserved no sympathy. She made the mistake of stating how rabid leftists feel, and that’s a political no-no.

Legal gun owners woke up Monday, October 2nd to find that they were all potential murderers, kept from shooting up public gatherings, nightclubs, elementary schools and churches only by the thinnest of membranes between sanity and insanity. Who knew? Paddock had prepared his “blind” to be relatively immune from armed response. Most of these kinds of attacks place the shooter(s) at the scene where, in good likelihood, armed targets could have shot back.

What liberals never consider, and gun owners fail to proclaim, is that every year in the united States, more than 800,000 times (not every instance makes the papers), a private gun owner stops a crime or a criminal, usually with NO shots fired. In many instances, a non gun-owner overpowers an armed criminal and wrests a weapon from his hands and subdues him. Eight hundred thousand (some estimates are well over a million) are a lot of incidents. Essentially, open America could not maintain a civil society without private gun ownership. Oh, the horror.

The alternative is a police state. Thoughtful people should realize that they do not really want to live in a nation that will confiscate private property that is deemed undesireable by the government! Some think that that same government will somehow add to “freedom” by limiting it… so long as the limits are placed on the “group” they don’t like. Those same accuse President Trump of being “Hitler,” when the exact opposite is the case. Those who want the government to have more power to regulate this or that disapproved group, are playing the game that Germans played as Jews and Slavic peoples were systematically rounded up, stolen-from and finally eliminated in camps. Oh, the ignorance.

It should be clearer, by now, that individual freedom is the most precious of jewels, yet faced with freedom’s challenges, leftists are quick to trade it away for shifting quantities of safety and even for convenience. For shame. While a crude freedom, the ability to self-defend is excruciatingly fundamental to individual freedom. Yet the first reaction of socialists and communists of every stripe (stay mindful of the fact that Hitler, that old ultra-left socialist, disarmed Germans, too) is to limit this fundamental freedom.

In the United States, with supposedly universal public education, the most costly in the world, the lessons of history and the majesty of the ideas of America, ought to be fully appreciated. But, on balance, it appears that the rest of the world appreciates our exceptional promise of individual freedom, far better than we do, ourselves.

Freedom is a tremendous threat to socialist, controller types: those who naturally gravitate toward governments everywhere, especially bureaucrats who, never neutral, impose increasing structure and regulation on populations. By establishing itself merely as well as was done in 1776, the idea that created “America” out of disparate colonies has forever drawn enemies and subversion, and lately, outright attacks.

None of that speaks directly to Stephen Paddock’s craziness, but to the distinctly divided reactions to it. The “Left” immediately wants to restrict everyone’s rights to, theoretically, prevent future murders, mass and otherwise; the “Right” wants to enforce existing laws and employ better methods to inhibit crazy people and proto-criminals from obtaining or using weapons, including strict sanctions on less-murderous misuse of weapons. We can’t make the wild actions of one deranged screwball into a pattern that justifies attacking our rights.

What we can do is share information to identify unusual purchasing and collection patterns that might identify individuals who are potential threats. But we must guard our Fourth Amendment rights. The visceral urge to control people in order that they’ll be “safe,” cannot be allowed to subvert our privacy and personal sovereignty. Paddock was a monster and he’s now dead. Let’s not destroy our freedom because of him. Far, far more people are killed by handguns involved in gang and drug activities, almost every month.

We don’t count the innocents aborted by the tens of thousands.

Culture, Education

GRADUATED CHANGE

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Prudence attended graduation at a well-known college in Boston’s Fenway section recently.  This particular school graduates no chemists, engineers, lawyers or business majors; no biologists, entomologists or astronomers; no materials scientists or agronomists or hydrologists, and no oceanographers.

Their purview is social work, and a healthy dose of “education.”  That is, education B.S. degree-recipients who, I think, they hope will teach the next generation along the lines of ultra-liberals who have been taking over education aggressively for the past 75 years. Fortunately, they sometimes fail and a graduate escapes with her (mostly hers and wannabes, there) internal philosophy intact, her understanding of reality clear, and her intense desire to educate young kids, rather than indoctrinate them, ready to run.  One such is Prudence’s only reason for attending.

Prudence’s eyes were opened, however, to the existence of this and other nests of socialist vipers, who churn out radical “change agents,” as were frequently referenced in the interminable speeches and last-second directives that made not a single reference to God, although the very last instructress managed to say, “… let the Divine …” which was amorphous enough to get through.  That tiny reference was among the last dozen words of last-second directions to the posse of Bachelors and Masters ready to change America.

The otherwise clear, May, day began with breakfast – free food, so to speak, catered in to the College’s Brookline facility.  Being observant was revelationary.  The professors are constantly professing, we noticed.  Tattoos, for example, profess attachment to the odd fascinations running rampant through society where women, sometimes grossly obese versions, have acres of “body art.”  It’s a statement of inclusion… or a test.  After all, if our campus is one of welcoming and inclusion and non-discrimination for students, then it must be for their instructors, too.  See how it works?

There seemed to be a single statement being uttered by a large fraction of both staff and graduates: There is no weirdness on OUR campus – all are welcome.  Prudence has no argument with the “welcom(ing)” part.  In other words, if you are as different and as unusual as you can make yourself, come, attend our college – we’re just as unusual as you!

Every speech underscored the same concepts of challenging the status quo; the difficulty is, today, that the status quo, having grown fairly weird itself, requires ever more strangeness from those who wish to challenge it.  This might explain, in part, the number of strange appearances of students, but it is unnerving to apply the same measure to staff and professors… at least it was to Prudence.

Sexuality is key to both protest and education, it seems.  Prudence needn’t describe sexual appearances and apparent expressions as most are indescribable and likely wide of the target.  But, unusual male-female iterations are more commonplace on college campuses than elsewhere in the world.  Perhaps it’s simply because these are the age groups where “youthful” experimentation is most likely.  Shouldn’t some adults guide these wandering – and wondering – children toward the most appropriate paths of action and belief?

Aren’t we intending to create new adults of our culture and social fabric?  Or is it our purpose to indulge every strange, interruptive feeling and treat it as if it were as valid as reality?  Reality is so restrictive: two genders… huh.  Are we kidding?  I mean, honestly!

Are there any lines a culture shouldn’t cross?  It’s not a trick question.  We used to decry drug use and numerous other forms of debasement.  Why?  Because it makes for a stronger, more nurturing society.

We used to require people to make their own way, no welfare and all the rest.  It inadvertently made for stronger people and children.  Problem free?  Of course not.  Too many fell through the “cracks,” as it were.  Some level of social support was required for simple fairness TO CHILDREN, and civil kindness to the helpless.

We used to require universal education that reinforced moral lessons, some Biblical, without damaging ANYONE, reinforcing shame for bad actions and strengthening the consciences of individuals… and their basic honesty.  These were good, strengthening-of-society kinds of structures.  Phenomenally, we have succumbed not to foreign powers but to our own cleverness, talking ourselves out of our heritage, our very culture, and of shame, itself.

We are so smart.

Murder, for example, now has shades of evil, some not so bad as to require equivalent sanction.  Indeed, abortion-at-will, deemed “murder” by half of the nation, has amorphous codified status and taxation support!  Suicide by drug overdose is a form of murder by drug-pusher, but we, the wealthiest, most sophisticated culture on earth, with more police forces per hectare than any other, has failed steadily for 60 years to clamp down firmly on drug commerce.

Now we are in a race to legalize ever purer and stronger pot despite its risks (there aren’t any, according to pot users) and to arm first responders with Narcan.  We’re smarter than we even realized.

The largest “industry” in the United States is welfare of a thousand titles.  Statists have found that the philosophies of the most rock-ribbed, self-made American stalwarts can be purchased with enough dependency, as recent “conservative” outcries against threats to Medicare makes clear.

The higher education “industry” is nothing if not opportunistic.  With TRILLIONS of dollars flowing from the Federal and state levels, colleges have justified turning out an army of social workers to soak them up.  Here and there people in need are truly helped, but the lion’s share of those dollars goes to the army of concerned, compassionate care-workers and, especially, to the army of administrators who make sure they are not wasting any money.

Somewhere, and here and there, are schools, churches and other institutions that respect and promote the concepts of self-reliance, absolute personal responsibility, honor and sublime integrity.  They must struggle against an onslaught of socialist control of budgets and information.  Is the ultimate success of the ultimate anti-God philosophy certain to overwhelm what made the U. S. great?

That future depends upon the ignorance of a majority of Americans.  How smart did you say we are?

 

Guns, Right?

The Guardian Program

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1-minuteman-grangerIt is time that we institute a national program I call “Guardian.” The Guardian program will be populated by men and women who are trained to take emergency defensive steps in all sorts of venues, and who are willing to carry and employ firearms as part of those steps. Each would be carefully investigated by the U. S. Marshall service, and trained, at partly their own expense, at certified gun safety ranges and, later, at police academies in each state. The idea is that these thousands of individuals would have a form of interdiction powers, such that one might stop an incipient crime or shooting by presenting his or her weapon and a trained stance, in situations where an idiot wielding a firearm would have expected no resistance whatsoever.
Copious history supports the likelihood that a fool with a gun will usually abandon his plans and submit or attempt to flee when faced with a defender with a gun. At the worst, like the examples of Adam Lanza at Newtown, or James Holmes at Aurora, Colorado, or even the two dopes at Columbine High School, a single armed and trained individual would have stopped the carnage before or immediately upon its beginning in all three of those circumstances.
Guardians would also be equipped with “911” buttons, so to speak, that would be required equipment anytime they are carrying a firearm. One push of the button would open a 911 channel unique to that purpose, such that the wearer could explain what was happening as it unfolded. Police could respond at their fastest, knowing it was a potential shooting incident, probably active.
Guardians would be insured under a federal policy, and held harmless from prosecution unless true negligence were established. It will be at some risk that a gun owner might submit to the rigors of Guardianship, but, aside from announcing the existence of the program and the numbers of Guardians in the country, neither their identity nor their locations – even generally – would be published.
Obviously they would be witnesses, but perhaps better-quality witnesses – part of their training. Masking their identities at trial is not an insurmountable problem.
Many of the objections raised to the free exercise of 2nd Amendment rights eventually come around to “that’s not the kind of country we are,” or, “we aren’t that kind of people.” Such statements are correct, in the worst way. America is increasingly occupied by who must be seen as “non-Americans.”
That is, there are, ANNUALLY, many thousands of illegal and legal entrants added to our population, who have no desire or intent to “become” Americans. In other words, they are not interested in our culture, morals or heritage of individual responsibility. Many of these entrants and immigrants, come to the U. S. for no more than personal gain. They may work, but this means “under the table” for a large number. They may be granted refugee status and this provides various forms of welfare support without waiting, and it is as likely as not that what is claimed to earn “refugee” status is a lie. They may have a distant relative already here, making it easy to “win” welfare status.
They may simply be criminals, drug merchants or otherwise, ready to take full advantage of liberalism’s open arms. Despite their receipt of welfare and education, these criminal types remain members of criminal gangs who ply death amongst us.
The rise of indigenous gangs is another source of extreme criminality that soft hearts and softer heads attempt to explain, rationalize and justify as a fault not of the criminals involved, but of society -American society – itself.
None of these sources of sociopathy can be traced to the mere availability of guns, nor to the legal ownership of guns, regardless of number. What these sources have done, similarly to the influx of Italian gangs in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, is to introduce a new element of danger and criminality to American society, with two significant differences.
One is the scale and reach of modern criminality – largely connected to drugs – which reaches down to virtually every street, unlike “organized crime” that may have profited from many streets, but which limited its murderous effects to rivals in its own universe. The other is that, today, murder is a way of doing business, even crappy, penny-ante neighborhood-dominance business. Kids are being shot before they can overdose.
The conditions for widespread death-dealing are a direct result of federal policiy failures. Yet many are afraid to recognize – or are blind to – that fact. As suburban kids, from “good” towns and families run a race to eternity with heroin, fentanyl and pain-killers, not always beating the cops with the Narcan, at least not the first time, more and more parents, police, teachers and counselors are asking why things have sunk to this.
Having porous borders for not just the past 8 years, but for the past 30, has promoted the hard drug trade like nothing else. Instead of delivering drugs to retailers, loose immigration has enabled larger-scale wholesalers to establish themselves in every metropolitan area and in many mid-size cities. Drugs, now, are delivered in tons rather than pounds. Shipments of cash in return are measured the same way.
A federal administration that prevents arrest and deportation of illegals only compounds failures of policy marking the last 30 or more years. Compounding that, the policy of releasing convicted criminals, mostly drug dealers – re-defined as “non-violent” offenders – has made a mockery of federal law in general, and a mockery of the oath by every member of our armed forces, to “…support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”
Finally, we have entered a period of social confusion that seems more concerned with the misfortune of criminals than with that of their victims. A new faith in “rehabilitation” has infected our judicial network and we are less safe. Some can be rehabilitated, and God bless them. The other 80% of violent offenders – and I include drug dealers – will not be. Yet we feel compelled to parole them, somehow, to test arcane psychological theories. No one involved is held accountable when a parolee murders an innocent, and we are less safe.
Combined with the influx of new criminals from outside our borders, we have created our own, unfolding tragedy. Gun ownership is a perfectly logical reaction; self-defense an inherent right, the Guardian program a wise extension of those rights. I strongly encourage its adoption.