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Brown Claudia's avatar

I hardly know where to begin in response to the excesses of this essay. Perhaps one needs to have grown up in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s to understand that the country was still a place where gun use and ownership was in many locations more common than television reception — that some kids (usually not urban) got their first gun at about age twelve, and it might be stowed in an unlocked vehicle when as teens they drove into town to attend high school.

There is still such a thing as responsible gun ownership — what is in much shorter supply are young people whose minds have not been poisoned by every imaginable sort of de-humanizing propaganda, from violence-permeated entertainment (the worst of it in video games), exploitative and deviant sexual pornography, and that other kind of pornography found in the home-screen obsession with hybrid monsters, ghouls, vampires, and rank satanism — available all day, any day, in households where kids have one thing in common: they are almost always ALONE.

It is obvious that in any society with a plummeting birth rate, children are disliked and unwanted ON PRINCIPLE by many adults who value work, money, and self-oriented free time more than anything else — and have completely lost touch with the cultural heritage which once passed on the value of family. As such people begin to dominate the culture (and make their ethos into political issues), those who have either chosen or fallen into the position of being parents are being constantly hammered with the idea that children are an irritating burden — so if you’re lumbered with them, by all means give them access to whatever will focus their attention away from the busy parent. Give them private access to a screen.

Among the things they learn from the screen is how deliciously satisfying it is to put other people down — to insult and exclude anyone who doesn’t measure up to a certain level of cool. We are all aware of the intellectual emptiness of youth who spend their 12 or 16 years in school without absorbing much human history or classic literature — absorbed instead in modern psychology and politics. One of the most heinous results of their ignorance of great literature is that they are never exposed to genuine VIRTUES: charity, forgiveness, loyalty, courage, EMPATHY. They don’t know what it looks like. And they are not likely to learn it in a home where they seldom sit down to a meal with family (this is a genuine problem, among all socio-economic groups), and spend their home-time with their screen.

Obviously the parents who dropped everything and ran to the Robb school, then fought with the inactive police force to try and rescue their children, are the best kind of parents. And it is horrifying to discover that they had entrusted the care of children to a variety of adults SOME of whom were the detached, impotent, self-absorbed kind. But society is full of such types — they run cities, schools, police and military bodies, mainline churches, and entire countries.

As to the content of the essay printed here, there is much rubbish to be sorted through.

“I also understand that, as all the statistics I have seen seem to show no evidence … that legal gun owners are, statistically speaking, more law abiding than average.“ Please, cite the source of such statistics. I don’t believe this for a minute. In a country with differing State regulations and no national gun registry, I would think that such generalizations are impossible to substantiate.

“I cannot but recognize the same irrationality, the same obtuseness, the same inhumanity, in much of the pro-gun discourse after these atrocities as we see so often in pro-abortion arguments.” Please, I challenge you to cite one single instance of post-tragedy rhetoric in which gun-rights advocates have expressed the gruesome, repugnant GLEE shown by crowds of pro-abort demonstrators at the knowledge that the inconvenient lives of small children have been snuffed out at the corner clinic.

“Still less can I fathom what seems to me like the neatly patterned normality of these mass shootings in the public life of this country, from the formulaic press conferences to the oven-ready point-counterpoint to assign political blame.” You are correct about the formulaic press-conferences from the politicians in frantic search for the right anodyne utterance which will not hurt their poll numbers. But to normal human beings there is nothing remotely like a “patterned normality” in mass shootings. And it is NOT a distraction technique to point out the patterned normality of sick, isolated, drug-addled kids going berserk to stop the pain, probably doing precisely what they have chosen to do because of the likelihood that they will die as a result.

“Indeed, the two realities seem obviously linked — we are a society which has normalized the mass killing of its children as a (most regrettable) byproduct of our conception of freedom and rights.” About abortion, this is patently true. As a characterization of the right to legally own a firearm, it is, as the Brits might say, “bollocks”.

While I did grow up in a very different Unites States, I have spent most of my adult life in Canada, where the divides, and sheer distance, between urban and rural life are more stark than in the US; there are far more strict gun laws everywhere, without exception; the process for obtaining a license is almost as onerous as military weapons training, and there is a national gun registry. Yet gun crime in some cities is soaring — Toronto’s serious problem gets worse by the day. Ownership of guns in Toronto is easy for the same reason it is easy in many American cities: illegal guns are coming over the southern border in droves. It’s just a different southern border. But the ultimate sources (South American gangs) are probably the same. The dismal quality of national “leadership” in Canada is on a par with that of the US — and unfortunately it doesn’t have to go through nearly as many hoops to slip into dictatorship.

The simplest lesson out of the Uvalde tragedy seems to me that possessing a gun is a neutral act — what matters is whether the laws on ownership are realistic and effective (and include taking into account one’s mental fitness to own one — also I see no reason why some form of Canadian-style owning-and-operating course would not be appropriate). What also matters is that those who have the highest clearance for carrying a gun — the police force — will have the nerve to use them when circumstances warrant. One is forced to wonder whether the gun-shy cops have an underlying fear that if they ever use deadly force, regardless of the situational details, their lives will be ruined by posturing ninnies who reflexively hate both cops and guns.

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Dave Wells's avatar

We have idolized individual freedom, whether it is the right to bear arms or the right to "choose." I'm glad to see others make this connection as well. Until we recover some sense of the Common Good, a sense that the rights of my neighbor (including those in the womb) have a claim upon the free exercise of my individual rights, we will continue down this path of destruction. Lord have mercy upon us.

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