“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. They have exchanged the truth of God for falsehood, by worshipping and serving created things, rather than the Creator.” — St. Paul, Romans 1:21, 25 (CEV).
On Friday in Newtown, Connecticut at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, more than two dozen, mostly children, were gunned down in an act of evil.
Children cry out for their mommy and their daddy. Young men on the battlefield, as death comes over them, do the same. It is a natural instinct at life’s end for the young. Just the thought of the children crying out for their moms and dads as they died overwhelms the senses of those of us far removed from the tragedy. It is an instinct, though, that we should confront.
Instead, two days removed from the horror of Friday, we are beginning again the debate and confrontations about gun control. It is a debate probably worth having and, whether we want to or not, we will have it. Much, if any, of what will be proposed would not have stopped the massacre.
It only took Obama a mere sixty hours to bring his entourage of black GM
President Barack Obama used the Sunday evening memorial service for the murdered kindergartners and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School to launch a partisan campaign that could expand government intrusion into parenting and gun control.
“The job of keeping our children safe, and teaching them well, is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors and the help of a nation,” Obama said at the vigil, which was held only a short distance from Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“We will have to change. If there is even one step we can take to save another child, or another parent, or another town, from the grief then surely we have an obligation to try.”
It is not clear if Obama actually will develop a national anti-violence crusade that would reshape families’ ability to raise their children. He may simply be using the Sandy Hook shooting to paint Democrats as defenders of the nation’s children from the GOP-backed gun industry.
But Obama promised imminent action via Democratic-affiliated lobbies, such as the mental-health sector and the teachers’ unions.
“In the coming weeks, I will use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens — from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators — in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this,” he declared.
Through his 18-minute speech, Obama’s language promised a partisan and divisive project.
For example, he suggested the voters’ only choices are either to do nothing, or to follow his yet-to-be-described plan to combat gun violence in schools and street corners throughout the U.S.
I recall his emotional tearful speech at the University of Arizona Memorial service for the victims of the shooting at the Tucson shopping center where 6 people, including a 9-year old girl were murdered, and 12 were wounded including a U.S. Congresswoman. In this speech he blamed our uncivil society and the ranker of his political opponents, especially conservative talk radio. At the time he called for a more “civil society” with tolerance towards those with whom you do not agree. Yet, in 2012, he and his minions ran one of the most uncivil, divisive political campaigns in the history of the country. What hypocrisy utters forth from this man’s mouth.
Now as Rahm Emanuel his close advisor and Mayor of Chicago, one of, if not the most, the most gun violent city in the United States where gangs rule the streets, says; “never let a good crisis go to waste.” Obama, tutored on the writings Saul Alinsky, is taking Emanuel’s advice to the nines. It should be noted that Obama made no such speech after the shootings at the Aurora, Colorado theater complex because he did not want to broach the subject of gun control during the presidential campaign.
“We can’t accept events like this as routine,” he said. “Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children — all of them — safe from harm?” he added. “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?”
Before the bodies of murdered children had been removed from Sandy Hook Elementary on Friday, Barack Obama was, shamefully, stacking up the coffins of innocent kindergartners as a platform for his disarmament agenda, which he and his socialist cadres will conceal behind a thin façade of "concern for public safety."
Just one paragraph into his brief remarks, on Friday, about the murders in Newtown, Obama tearfully exclaimed:
"We've endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years. We're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics." (Emphasis added)
New York Democrat Rep. Jerrold Nadler was less discreet in his insistence that Obama use the deaths of these children to advance the Left's gun prohibition agenda: "I think we will be there if the president exploits it." Sen. Charles Schumer added, "I think we could be at a tipping point where we might get something done."
Within hours of the deaths, Sen. Dianne Feinstein promised, "I'm going to introduce in the Senate — and the same bill will be introduced in the House — a bill to get weapons of war off the streets." That should solve the problem. What about commando knives and bayonets?
At the Sunday evening vigil in Newtown, Obama again politicized the attack, framing his remarks around his gun-prohibition agenda. He asked rhetorically:
"Can we say that we're truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose? If we're honest with ourselves, the answer is no. And we will have to change. What choice do we have? Are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?" (Emphasis added)
For the record, Connecticut already has banned "assault weapons," and the Newtown school was already a "gun-free zone," but that didn't prevent the murders of these precious children and six adults.
Of course Obama’s rhetoric ignored many measures that could reduce gun violence without further increasing government’s role.
At the federal level, such modest reforms could include funding for the institutionalization of disturbed people, or for training teachers who choose to carry a weapon to work. The federal government also has some authority to restrict the sale of high-capacity bullet magazines and body armor, as well as the ability to boost the financial rewards (through the tax code) for parents who stay married.
State and local government are also free to adopt similar measures.
In Texas, for example, at least one school district — Harrold Independent School District — encourages teachers to bring guns to work.
Some states, including Connecticut, have experimented with stringent control on guns, partly because many influential university-trained professionals abhor guns being sold to poor Americans. But Connecticut’s stringent anti-gun laws did not stop the murders at Sandy Hook
Any honest American should be deeply offended by politicians who are so calloused that they would use the deaths of innocents as political fodder for their agenda.
Could Obama not exercise the most basic decency and allow time for genuine grief to pass before exploiting this incident? Obviously not, according to the first chapter in his political playbook: "Never let a crisis go to waste."
It is no small irony that the political party that has made killing children prior to birth a pillar of their platform expresses such indignation when a sociopath places so little value on life that he murders children. Of course, it's easier to kill children who are faceless — and I am certain that in the eyes of the sociopathic killer in Newtown, his victims also had no faces.
"Obama has asserted erroneously, “The vast majority of Americans would like to see serious gun control, but it doesn't pass because there is this huge disconnect between what people think and what legislators think and are willing to act upon.” Endeavoring to close that gap every time there is tragic mass murder where the assailant used a gun Democrats offer the disingenuous rationale that violence is a "gun problem" rather than a cultural problem. Of course it's easier to blame guns than culture, and that serves the Left's political agenda.
After years of arguing that Democrats should be willing to bear the political costs — lost votes in the South, in particular — of gun control measures, advocates Saturday began cautiously to make a different case. Gun control leaders and other progressive figures told BuzzFeed that, whether or not Democrats can get new legislation through Congress, they should be winning elections on the issue of guns.
Gun regulation "is moving to the center, and past it,” said Jim Kessler, who helped Sen. Charles Schumer pass gun control policy in the 1990s before founding the D.C. think tank, Third Way.
“For the first time in decades, Republicans are losing on social issues — they’re losing on same-sex marriage, they’re losing on contraception, and now they could lose on guns because their position is so intractable,” said Kessler. “Except for a vocal minority, people know and expect that something can be done.”
However, acknowledging that the majority of murders and other violent crimes in our country are the direct result of social and cultural degradation on urban welfare plantations would be, first and foremost, an indictment of the socialist welfare state advocated by Democrats. Thus, they call for more gun control — on top of the myriad of gun control laws now on the books.
Fact is, on average almost 50 people are murdered every day, two-thirds of them with guns. It is statistically notable that about one-third of murders are not committed with guns, and moreover, blacks and Latinos commit a grossly disproportionate number of all murders and the victims are predominantly blacks and Latinos. Just watch the 11 pm local news.
In fact, the very weekend that Obama and his race hustlers attempted to politicize the shooting of Trayvon Martin by "white Hispanic" George Zimmerman earlier this year, the Chicago Sun-Times (Obama's hometown paper) reported that in just 48 hours, 10 people were murdered and at least 40 others were seriously wounded. Most of the assailants and victims were black or Latino, but not a word from Obama about those murders.
As for the media misrepresentation of the Newtown attack, though virtually every news outlet is reporting that this was the "worst school attack in history," the most lethal attack on a school occurred in 1927, when a disgruntled Bath, Michigan, school-board member murdered 45 people, including 38 elementary students — with a bomb.
Additionally, virtually every media reference to the assailant in Newtown refers to him as "the shooter." Well, there are some sixty million Americans who are "shooters." The assailant who murdered 27 women and children in Newtown was a sociopathic murderer who used a gun. He murdered them, not the gun.
"Arguments over the merits of gun control are made all the more difficult to navigate by the Left's stubborn denial that we are already having a debate on the issue. Gun control propositions are by no means new, and nor is there a lack of a 'national conversation on the subject.' Instead, the national conversation is ongoing, and the Left is losing it badly. Gun control advocates may talk of national soul searching and dialogue, but in truth that already exists; what they mean is that they'd like to win for a change. ... There are at least two hundred million privately owned guns in America, and Connecticut regulates access to them more strictly than most. To believe that [Friday's] crime could have been prevented, you have to presume either that a man willing to go to such grievous lengths could have been deterred from doing so by stronger laws, or that those stronger laws could rid America of privately available guns completely -- thus making the killer's task an impossible one. I believe neither thing. To pass a law is not to achieve its aims, and one suspects that any attempt at gun control in America would be destined to be filed next to Prohibition and the War on Drugs in the annals of man's folly. American liberties, including the Second Amendment and the 40-plus state-level guarantees of the right to bear arms, pre-exist the federal government, and are defined and protected in the same document from which the state derives its authority and its structure. In a free republic, the people cannot be disarmed by the government, for they are its employers, and they did not give up their individual rights when they consented to its creation. There is no clause in our charters of liberty that allows for the people to be deprived of their freedom if and when a few individuals abuse theirs." National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke
Of course it is not possible to enforce laws against illegal immigrants, but the progressives want to have law enforcement take on citizens who have not broken and laws. 11 million illegals who can get away with anything from illegally entering the country to drunk driving and murder, yet the progressives want to impose sanctions against 30 million constitutional and legal gun owners.
On September 10, 2012 John Lott wrote for Fox News:
“So why did the killer pick the Cinemark theater? You might think that it was the one closest to the killer’s apartment. Or, that it was the one with the largest audience.
Yet, neither explanation is right. Instead, out of all the movie theaters within 20 minutes of his apartment showing the new Batman movie that night, it was the only one where guns were banned. In Colorado, individuals with permits can carry concealed handgun in most malls, stores, movie theaters, and restaurants. But private businesses can determine whether permit holders can carry guns on their private property.
Most movie theaters allow permit holders carrying guns. But the Cinemark movie theater was the only one with a sign posted at the theater’s entrance.”
As you can see James Holmes, like most of these killers, pick their targets very carefully. They do not want someone shooting back at them. I doubt a killers like Holmes or Lanza would select a school in the Harrold Independent School District.
But though the proposals that will soon be most seriously considered would most likely not have prevented what happened, men and women of goodwill — and most are — will make the proposals because it lets them feel in control. People want to do something. People, acting corporately, want to legislate and regulate because it is, next to election of leaders, the most powerful act of a democracy.
The efforts, even if they are successful, will not stop this cycle of violence.
Discussions of gun control are easier to have than discussions about mental health. But they too are easier to have than those about the collapse of the American family. History and multiple studies show that the most stable foundation of a society is a two parent nuclear household with multiple children.
God and good exist. The devil and evil do as well — the incarnation of the absolute void left in the absence of God.
Colossians 1:17 states, “[Christ] is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” As our society drifts further and further from Christ, our society holds itself together less and less. The rise of secularism coincides with the decline of family and the rise of societal chaos.
In our society, it is political incorrect to say this. Many who reject this mock Christians. They wonder why God or Jesus was not in that school room protecting those children. Liberal gay-rights activist Dan Savage on Friday was openly ridiculing Christians and mocking God when he tweeted: “God is everywhere. Except your kid's school. God too busy pouting about separation of church & state to save your kid”. Liberal pundits were retweeting him.
They choose not to understand. They have chosen the very society that generates the heinous act we saw on Friday — a society replacing ourselves and our standards with those of God. It is a society St. Paul described quite accurately in Romans 1.
“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator. Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.”
On Friday in Connecticut, an evil creature entered a classroom and gunned down children in our ever increasing Romans 1 society.
At this Christmas season we should remember the part of the Christmas story we often do not dwell on. Two thousand years ago, King Herod sent his soldiers to Bethlehem where they slaughtered all the boys age 2 and under. The coming of the Risen Lord was answered by this world with the loss of the innocents.
The world is full of sin. It is easy for the non-Christian to look at what happened and rationalize away that the person was mentally ill, we need gun control, etc. It is harder, especially at this time of year, for those who do believe in God to find comfort in him instead of demanding “why?” But God does not spare us the effects of sin in the world, nor does he spare the little children.
But we know by faith that “Jesus wept.” He weeps now. He welcomes home the little children and calls for us to persevere and, if we will, to turn back toward him and bring our society with us. But our society must be prepared to have larger conversations than whether or not we should regulate guns or bullets.
As a person who had a family member murdered by an alcoholic, abusive, and sociopathic husband with a shotgun I understand the difference between the weapon and the killer.
In the words of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, circa 45 AD, "Quemadmoeum gladuis neminem occidit, occidentis telum est." (A sword is never a killer, it is a tool in the killer's hands.)
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