The Western World has embraced a Pro Death Culture. Our elites, politicians, and the media are pro abortion, pro suicide, pro assisted suicide, pro euthanasia, pro legalization of drugs, pro violence, pro looting, pro killing the elderly, pro welfare, pro anti religion, pro anti family, pro anti human being, and pro risky behavior. Children learn from example. Maybe we need to change our example. The Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill" is not a suggestion.
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.
"Friends smarter and more familiar with the American political and legal systems than I assure me that it would take a constitutional amendment to truly resolve either issue. And that is impossible. It is impossible for the same simple reason that it is necessary — we are no longer the kind of coherent society that ratified the Bill of Rights in the first place and which is required to change it."
This, for me, is the most sobering takeaway from all this, and one that is not said enough. There is no solution, because a people capable of implementing a solution wouldn't be in these circumstances to begin with.
I'd like to see at least some of our bishops openly acknowledge this and offer some vision of how to proceed in the meantime, instead of continuing to propose courses of action (like "finding consensus" and "pursuing the common good") that are at present impossible.
I grew up in Houston and I now live in Tyler. My family did not have guns in the house and still don’t. Everyone is commenting on the situation as a Monday morning quarterback. There are probably a bunch of small towns that would not be equipped to deal with this in my state and elsewhere in this situation. I heard a state senator comment on what they need for the families right now. There is one psychiatrist in the town and since the pandemic most medicine is done by telemedicine. The town is about 15000 people and 60 miles from San Antonio
Re: It boggles my mind that apparently otherwise sane people are prepared to propose that schools be secured and guarded like super-max prisons as the necessary condition of preserving a “free society.”
When people attack airplanes, we increase armed security.
When people attack politicians, we increase armed security.
When people attack parades, we increase armed security.
When people attack schools, we say that we don't want our kids going to school in a supermax prison, and we don't increase armed security.
Guns are not the problem, but are part of the solution. We simply refuse to think of them that way.
What has become of our society when the ownership of a destructive piece of metal is more important than our children? As one who has spent 50+ years teaching beautiful children, I cannot let my mind go to that classroom butI must. Our church,bishops,pastors etc. spend so much time talking about the evil of abortion and evil it is but it is almost an obsession. Life in the womb and outside is equally precious in the eyes of God. If God can weep His tears must still be flowing for what happened this week. As a Catholic as a human being look into your soul,spend a minute off of your phone and think of the world we are leaving our children,grandchildren,nieces,nephews. Let go of your arguments pro and con and focus on a God who loves. You and I can change this broken world.In God’s name what are we waiting for?
You have written a heartfelt response to the terrible events of this past week. I add a few thoughts.
I feel we need to stop blaming "mental illness". I know many people with "mental illness" and they would never consider killing another individual, though in a moment of darkness some might consider ending their own life. We need to go back to calling that which is evil what it is - evil. We pray in the St. Michael prayer the demons who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. I know atheist moving towards believe because they recognize evil, so recognize that a force for good must also exist. The mental ill are not evil and the evil are not mentally ill.
We feel immense pain for the students and families at the school, but do we recognize that sometimes as many children as were killed at the school are killed in a weekend in various cities across our nation? Our media focuses our attention on one, but not the other. That is worth pondering.
Gun ownership surged in the last few years. The people who in the last few years have purchased guns who never thought they would include working women who cannot count on safely reaching their car or means of transportation to work, people who saw the police do nothing to protect property during riots, people who saw their elected leaders turn into petty tyrants during the "emergency powers" of the pandemic, people who live in cities where the police will not or cannot respond to "less serious" crimes like assault. Gun ownership is a symptom of a much larger problem that those of us who live in smaller towns where we will not likely be molested (except by a drunken student) have little experience.
The notion of "the common good" was also abused during the pandemic. Any well trained pulmonologist (I am married to one) or immunologist knows that NO vaccine for a respiratory illness prevents transmission if given systemically. Because such vaccines bypass the separate respiratory immune system, they cannot stop transmission - but this known medical fact was ignored as all were told what they must do for the "common good". The real factors which would be for the common good - work very hard to keep your marriage intact, love your children but don't smother, live simply, care for creation - live as Jesus taught - that message in its true form has been supplanted by the seductive lies of the Father of lies - virtue through a sign in the yard and attention focused on getting "stuff" and the ends justifies the means.
The event of the past week is horrific in itself. It is also horrific in that for a short time we all become aware of the massive amount of evil and sin which lies under the surface of our world.
"...as all the statistics I have seen seem to show, there would appear to be no obvious evidence that cities and states with stricter firearms laws necessarily have less gun crime..."
Due to the potential for reverse causality (places with more gun crime--like cities--respond by instituting stricter gun control), it is unwise to think you can draw reliable conclusions from a casual look at raw statistics. Even when you look carefully, though, I (a ph.d. economist) agree that the picture is unclear with regard to certain specific policies: https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/100/2/232/58452/How-Do-Right-to-Carry-Laws-Affect-Crime-Rates (article paywalled but the abstract tells the basic story)
However, the basic intuition that more guns means more gun violence is borne out not only by basic cross-country comparisons but also by the most rigorous studies:
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.
It’s really sad what has came out about Uvalde. Lying to the DPS and to the governor is awful. Lots of mistakes that caused children and teachers their lives.
"I simply do not know how to process this other than as an existential civilizational crisis."
Wise words.
Solving this probem in a culture that idealizes individual accomplishment over family responsibility; a culture that says that State and Federal bureaucracies can solve all problems through legislattion; a culture that thinks humanity can discern its own truths apart from the philosophical concept of God, a culture that says freedom is the ability to be whoever I wish to be, a culture that priotitizes consumption over production and effeciency over beauty, will not be accomplished by normal means.
As Macintyre so brilliantly pointed out is that we must patiently and calmy change the priorities of our culture from the individual to the family, large central government solutions to subsidiarity, the accumulation of personal capital to modest simplicity, absolute freedom of self expression to the idea of man as created in the image of God, efficient industrial mass production of goods to a family centered economy, and moral subjectivism back to the idea of transcendent divine truth. That will take some time and work, and most like some true calamity of which we have never seen to wake us up.
About the World Economic Forum, I suggest you to check on Jacques Attali. Look into his book, "A brief history of the Future" and his interview in Dr Solomon's book (1980), The future of Life in which he says that any path our future society will take, euthanasia is necessary as an economical solution for an aging society. Jacques Attali is extremely powerful and influential. He is the think tank of the WEF.
As an economist he is deeply anti-christian and describe the Beatitudes as an aberration.
I really hope you will write some article about the danger of the W E F for the world.
The Western World has embraced a Pro Death Culture. Our elites, politicians, and the media are pro abortion, pro suicide, pro assisted suicide, pro euthanasia, pro legalization of drugs, pro violence, pro looting, pro killing the elderly, pro welfare, pro anti religion, pro anti family, pro anti human being, and pro risky behavior. Children learn from example. Maybe we need to change our example. The Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill" is not a suggestion.
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.
"Friends smarter and more familiar with the American political and legal systems than I assure me that it would take a constitutional amendment to truly resolve either issue. And that is impossible. It is impossible for the same simple reason that it is necessary — we are no longer the kind of coherent society that ratified the Bill of Rights in the first place and which is required to change it."
This, for me, is the most sobering takeaway from all this, and one that is not said enough. There is no solution, because a people capable of implementing a solution wouldn't be in these circumstances to begin with.
I'd like to see at least some of our bishops openly acknowledge this and offer some vision of how to proceed in the meantime, instead of continuing to propose courses of action (like "finding consensus" and "pursuing the common good") that are at present impossible.
I grew up in Houston and I now live in Tyler. My family did not have guns in the house and still don’t. Everyone is commenting on the situation as a Monday morning quarterback. There are probably a bunch of small towns that would not be equipped to deal with this in my state and elsewhere in this situation. I heard a state senator comment on what they need for the families right now. There is one psychiatrist in the town and since the pandemic most medicine is done by telemedicine. The town is about 15000 people and 60 miles from San Antonio
Re: It boggles my mind that apparently otherwise sane people are prepared to propose that schools be secured and guarded like super-max prisons as the necessary condition of preserving a “free society.”
When people attack airplanes, we increase armed security.
When people attack politicians, we increase armed security.
When people attack parades, we increase armed security.
When people attack schools, we say that we don't want our kids going to school in a supermax prison, and we don't increase armed security.
Guns are not the problem, but are part of the solution. We simply refuse to think of them that way.
What has become of our society when the ownership of a destructive piece of metal is more important than our children? As one who has spent 50+ years teaching beautiful children, I cannot let my mind go to that classroom butI must. Our church,bishops,pastors etc. spend so much time talking about the evil of abortion and evil it is but it is almost an obsession. Life in the womb and outside is equally precious in the eyes of God. If God can weep His tears must still be flowing for what happened this week. As a Catholic as a human being look into your soul,spend a minute off of your phone and think of the world we are leaving our children,grandchildren,nieces,nephews. Let go of your arguments pro and con and focus on a God who loves. You and I can change this broken world.In God’s name what are we waiting for?
You have written a heartfelt response to the terrible events of this past week. I add a few thoughts.
I feel we need to stop blaming "mental illness". I know many people with "mental illness" and they would never consider killing another individual, though in a moment of darkness some might consider ending their own life. We need to go back to calling that which is evil what it is - evil. We pray in the St. Michael prayer the demons who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. I know atheist moving towards believe because they recognize evil, so recognize that a force for good must also exist. The mental ill are not evil and the evil are not mentally ill.
We feel immense pain for the students and families at the school, but do we recognize that sometimes as many children as were killed at the school are killed in a weekend in various cities across our nation? Our media focuses our attention on one, but not the other. That is worth pondering.
Gun ownership surged in the last few years. The people who in the last few years have purchased guns who never thought they would include working women who cannot count on safely reaching their car or means of transportation to work, people who saw the police do nothing to protect property during riots, people who saw their elected leaders turn into petty tyrants during the "emergency powers" of the pandemic, people who live in cities where the police will not or cannot respond to "less serious" crimes like assault. Gun ownership is a symptom of a much larger problem that those of us who live in smaller towns where we will not likely be molested (except by a drunken student) have little experience.
The notion of "the common good" was also abused during the pandemic. Any well trained pulmonologist (I am married to one) or immunologist knows that NO vaccine for a respiratory illness prevents transmission if given systemically. Because such vaccines bypass the separate respiratory immune system, they cannot stop transmission - but this known medical fact was ignored as all were told what they must do for the "common good". The real factors which would be for the common good - work very hard to keep your marriage intact, love your children but don't smother, live simply, care for creation - live as Jesus taught - that message in its true form has been supplanted by the seductive lies of the Father of lies - virtue through a sign in the yard and attention focused on getting "stuff" and the ends justifies the means.
The event of the past week is horrific in itself. It is also horrific in that for a short time we all become aware of the massive amount of evil and sin which lies under the surface of our world.
"...as all the statistics I have seen seem to show, there would appear to be no obvious evidence that cities and states with stricter firearms laws necessarily have less gun crime..."
Due to the potential for reverse causality (places with more gun crime--like cities--respond by instituting stricter gun control), it is unwise to think you can draw reliable conclusions from a casual look at raw statistics. Even when you look carefully, though, I (a ph.d. economist) agree that the picture is unclear with regard to certain specific policies: https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/100/2/232/58452/How-Do-Right-to-Carry-Laws-Affect-Crime-Rates (article paywalled but the abstract tells the basic story)
However, the basic intuition that more guns means more gun violence is borne out not only by basic cross-country comparisons but also by the most rigorous studies:
https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/dranove/htm/Dranove/coursepages/Mgmt%20469/guns.pdf (Duggan, M. (2001). More guns, more crime. Journal of political Economy, 109(5), 1086-1114.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20150714022238id_/http://home.uchicago.edu:80/ludwigj/papers/JPubE_guns_2006FINAL.pdf (Cook, P. J., & Ludwig, J. (2006). The social costs of gun ownership. Journal of Public Economics, 90(1-2), 379-391.)
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.
It’s really sad what has came out about Uvalde. Lying to the DPS and to the governor is awful. Lots of mistakes that caused children and teachers their lives.
"I simply do not know how to process this other than as an existential civilizational crisis."
Wise words.
Solving this probem in a culture that idealizes individual accomplishment over family responsibility; a culture that says that State and Federal bureaucracies can solve all problems through legislattion; a culture that thinks humanity can discern its own truths apart from the philosophical concept of God, a culture that says freedom is the ability to be whoever I wish to be, a culture that priotitizes consumption over production and effeciency over beauty, will not be accomplished by normal means.
As Macintyre so brilliantly pointed out is that we must patiently and calmy change the priorities of our culture from the individual to the family, large central government solutions to subsidiarity, the accumulation of personal capital to modest simplicity, absolute freedom of self expression to the idea of man as created in the image of God, efficient industrial mass production of goods to a family centered economy, and moral subjectivism back to the idea of transcendent divine truth. That will take some time and work, and most like some true calamity of which we have never seen to wake us up.
About the World Economic Forum, I suggest you to check on Jacques Attali. Look into his book, "A brief history of the Future" and his interview in Dr Solomon's book (1980), The future of Life in which he says that any path our future society will take, euthanasia is necessary as an economical solution for an aging society. Jacques Attali is extremely powerful and influential. He is the think tank of the WEF.
As an economist he is deeply anti-christian and describe the Beatitudes as an aberration.
I really hope you will write some article about the danger of the W E F for the world.
https://henrycase.org/crumbs/2021/05/07/lavenir-de-la-vie-dr-michel-salomon-1980