It Didn’t Take Obama Long

“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 SUVs with flashing red and blue lights and a myriad of armed secret service agents, staff members, and teleprompters to Newtown for national televised address where he could bathe in the light of the tragedy.

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.)

Stop the Continuous Prattle

“Here comes the orator! With his flood of words, and his drop of reason.” — Benjamin Franklin

I usually begin each blog post with a quote from a famous person that I believe is pertinent to the subject of the post. I realize I have used this quote by Benjamin Franklin before, but I could not find a more appropriate drop of wisdom for this post than the one from Mr. Franklin. I therefore apologize for the redundancy.

Yesterday I attended a family Christmas party hosted by my sister-in-law, a fourth grade school teacher and my daughter-in-law who has two daughters in school — one in elementary school and the other in middle school.

I was hesitant to bring up the subject of the Newtown school massacre, but somewhere in the conversations the subject was broached My daughter-in-law left the room and my son said that she just could not watch or talk about the subject as it upset her so very much. I can understand her emotions as she feared for the safety of my granddaughters and hearing the constant news reports she was translating them to her own life — a perfectly natural and human action of a caring mother.

I did not discuss the issue with my sister-in-law for two reasons. One she was busy preparing the dinner and second I felt this was not the appropriate time to discuss school safety with her. There will be plenty of time for that at a future date.

With that said I am not insensitive to the reports of the killer’s motives, mental health, or how he carried out this massacre. Most of these reports are not very accurate and are changing almost on an hourly basis as investigators release more information. Also, I am not indifferent to the stories of heroism of the teachers and the parents of the victims. I understand the 24/7 news cycle and the business of TV news. This is a big and ongoing story and there no doubt is a great desire by the viewing public to learn as much as they can as fast as possible. But at some point we need time to grieve for the victims and their families — including the family of the killer.

There have been school shootings before but this one was particularly painful to learn about.

In the first place the children were so young and innocent — kindergartners. In the second, it is the season when young children are especially full of happiness. Their homes are filled with Chanukah and Christmas decorations and gifts. Their houses smell of yummy things to eat. Families make a special effort to be together for the holidays. One account of the incident underscores this. Kaitlin Roig, who rescued her first grade students by locking them in the bathroom and barricading the door, told reporters, "The kids were being so good. They asked: 'Can we go see if anyone is out there? ...I just want Christmas... I don't want to die, I just want to have Christmas.' I said, you're going to have Christmas and Chanukah. I tried to be positive."

Now families will come home from the morgue to face their unimaginable losses surrounded by presents still unwrapped, joyful decorations now trimming houses robbed of all joy. Siblings and parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and neighbors stricken with sadness.

I think of the survivors' families, too. Parents dealing with traumatized children and trying to comfort grieving neighbors, relatives, and friends.

Last but not least I mourn for the teachers and emergency workers who viewed the carnage and certainly will not forget it as long as they live.

No sooner did the news hit the wires than the political prattle about it began. Stop it.

For once, act like human beings. Can the gun talk; hold up on the sociological musings; button your lips on all the usual chatter when horrors occur. Maybe people spend too much time on TV programs where there's a wrap-up after half an hour and expect real life to follow that schedule.

For some things there are no easy explanations or solutions,

This it seems to me is one of those things.

For once, think of Newtown, the town where Christmas will never be the same. A place where school will never hold the same sense of security for the children or their families, Parents in Newtown will never drop their children off at the school doors again without telling them how much they love them.

It's not the first or the worst such disaster. I look back to the Bath, Michigan School bombing in 1927 where a mad school board treasurer killed 45 people (including himself) and wounded 58, mostly schoolchildren, when he blew up the school, his house, and farm buildings. For good measure he detonated his own car also packed with explosives so the rescuers were also killed.

Nor is it the only such disaster in the world. On the very same day that this occurred, the Chinese suffered another in a series of knife attacks by madmen at a school. This one resulted in the stabbing of 22 children and an elderly woman, The Mail recounts the Chinese school assaults:

“No motive was given for the stabbings, which echo a string of similar assaults against schoolchildren in 2010 that killed nearly 20 and wounded more than 50.

The most recent such attack took place in August, when a knife-wielding man broke into a middle school in the southern city of Nanchang and stabbed two students before fleeing.

Most of the attackers have been mentally ill men involved in personal disputes or unable to adjust to the rapid pace of social change in China, underscoring grave weaknesses in the antiquated Chinese medical system's ability to diagnose and treat psychiatric illness.

In one of the worst incidents, a man described as an unemployed, middle-aged doctor killed eight children with a knife in March 2010 to vent his anger over a thwarted romantic relationship.”

I watching the news on Saturday I saw a clip from ABC where Diane Sawyer was interviewing Kaitlin Roig, the teacher who barricaded her students in the bathroom. This woman was used by Sawyer, using her saccharine voice, to coax her into tears for the benefit ratings. Ms. Roig was in no emotional state to give such an interview at this time. This was not unique to Sawyer or ABC. It is prevalent on all news programs and channels.

There is a great deal of talk about evil, faith and God — most in a positive vain. But some question why God would allow this to happen. It was God who allowed his son to be sacrificed and murdered for our salvation. Look how much good came from this.

It is amazing that how many of those interviewed who were in the school at the time of the shooting turned to prayer and God. We don’t allow prayer in school or the public square, but when things go wrong people turn to the very thing that has been outlawed. We live in a society dominated by secular progressive thought — a society where the government does all it can to ban prayer. Prayer in school is banned. High school football teams are not allowed to hold hands in prayer before the game begins. Christmas pageants where a Christian theme is portrayed are forbidden and we wonder why there is a lack of moral behavior. Mike Huckabee had a very good commentary on this subject on Fox News the other night when he said; “for fifty years we have systematically tried to have God removed from our schools and public activities but the moment we have a calamity we wonder where he was.”

So spare us all for a decent interval the self-serving babblings of gun control, the amateur psychoanalysis, and the morbid and soul killing paparazzi shots of parents learning for the first time of the slaughter of their children.

Let's have a decent silence to contemplate the eternal nature of evil and the tragic loss we all feel.

Back away from the microphones.

Put down those cameras.

Let us just grieve.

We Cannot Accept Evil

“The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference — they deserve a place of honor with all that's good. — George Washington “

While watching the news of the Sandy Hook Elementary School where 26 people were killed 8 adults and, 18 children) by a sociopathic madman I heard a lot of talk of evil and guns. A person can be evil but a gun is an inanimate object, like a knife or a club that in the hands of an evil motivated person will be used as a weapon to carry out his evil deeds.

Fox News reported

“Twenty-seven people, including 20 children, were killed Friday when a gunman clad in black military gear opened fire inside his mother's kindergarten class at a Connecticut elementary school.

The shooter, who sources identified as Adam Lanza, 20, shot his mother, Nancy Lanza, in the face at their home in Newtown, Conn., and then went to nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School where she taught and gunned down her entire class, according to sources. Lanza was found dead inside the school, according to officials. Eighteen of the children and six more adults were dead at the school and two more children died later, according to Connecticut State Police Lt. Paul Vance.”

Right now the news is in flux, as it always it in situations like this, so we do not know much about Adam Lanza or why he might have executed his mother and her class of kindergarteners. I am sure in the days to come we will learn more about this psychopath, his mental history and what might have drove him to commit suicide by first taking the lives of 25 people.

While we know little of the shooter or the victims it did not take long for the anti-gun crowd to lump on the band wagon of more gun control As Rahm Emmanuel said; “never let a good crisis go to waste”, and they will certainly not. They will, like they did with the Aurora, CO theater shooting, the Tucson, AZ shooting, and the Virginia Tech massacre, push their anti-gun agenda forward on the back of the victims. They will not address the issue of evil, as most of the progressive left do not believe in God, evil right and wrong. They believe that man can control everything if he works hard enough at it. They believe in the kingdom of man, not of God.

Even the President in a statement supposedly to console the grieving could not resist the opportunity to bring his political agenda into the fray along with his crocodile tears when he stated:

"These neighbors are our neighbors, and these children are our children, and we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this -- regardless of the politics." (Emphasis added)

Immediately after Obama’s remarks Several Democratic lawmakers were also calling Friday for stricter gun control.

What meaningful action is Obama talking about? Is he talking about better psychiatric evaluations of potential anti-social people? Was he talking about the violence portrayed in our culture in movies and video games? Was he talking about the music industry with their degrading and violent rap lyrics? Was he refereeing to social media where young people with borderline personality diseases such Asperger syndrome? Was he talking about the coarseness of our culture and the progressive control of a K-12 education system that does not teach right from wrong and morals based on our Judeo- Christian heritage? I don’t think he was. He was talking about one thing and one thing only — anti Constitutional gun control. This is how progressive solve problems. If you want to stop alcoholism you ban booze. I am sure any debate will not include all of the above.

This is not the first school shooting in the United States or the World. Here is a list of the major school shootings in the United States:

• Dec 14, 2012: Newtown, CT -- Sandy Hook Elementary School --- 26 are dead - 8 adults, 18 children.
• Feb. 14, 2008: A man fired into a lecture hall packed with students at Northern Illinois University, killing five people and wounding 18 before shooting himself dead.
• April 16, 2007: VA Tech, Blacksburg, VA - A student killed 32 students and faculty at Virginia Polytechnic and State University in the worst single act of gun violence in U.S. history before killing himself.
• October 2, 2006: A local milk truck driver who was not Amish, tied up and shot 10 Amish schoolgirls aged 6 to 14 in their classroom, killing five of them before turning the gun on himself in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, about 60 miles west of Philadelphia.
• March 21, 2005: A 16-year-old high school student gunned down five students, a teacher and a security guard at Red Lake High School in far northern Minnesota before killing himself. He also killed his grandfather and his grandfather's companion elsewhere on the Chippewa Indian reservation.
• April 20, 1999: Littleton, CO -- Two students killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 others before killing themselves at Columbine High School.

• On March 24, 1998 Michael Johnson (age 14) and Andrew Golden (age 12) walked into the Westside Middle School near Jonesboro, Arkansas and killed five people and injured ten. Until yesterday this was the deadliest massacre at a United States middle school.

• August 1, 1966: Austin, TX -- A University of Texas student, Charles Whitman, killed 16 people and wounded 32 others, including his mother and wife, in and around the campus.

Note that in all but the University of Texas shooting the gunman committed suicide. The Texas Tower sniper was killed by a courageous police officer who climbed the tower and confronted the shooter.

There have also been school shooting in the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, and France where they have very strict gun laws. And let’s not overlook the fellow in Norway who in 2011 killed 69 and injured 110 after setting off a car bomb that killed 8 and injured 209. All of this in a country with very strict guns laws. It should be noted that in Belgium it was a 20-year old man who used a knife to kill and wound kids at a day care center.

And there have been numerous knife slashings in the Hounslow area of London and by gangs in Singapore where no one owns a gun.

It’s not the gun, the knife or the club. It’s the person. While writing this I looked for a quote on the existence of evil. Of course there was the old over used quote by Edmund Burke; “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” I selected the quote by George Washington because he saw that the gun was a deterrent to evil and tyranny.

What gun control advocates fail to appreciate is that every school that faces such a tragedy is an individual isolated event that demands our respect and does not deserve to be desensitized into a political debate.

By grouping today's Sandy Hook massacre as just one of "such incidents in the U.S.," politicians and gun control advocates show zero respect to any of the victims and the families affected by immediately turning this tragedy into a debate on gun control.

As our nation mourns collectively, each of the parents and family members who lost loved ones Friday face a different level of individual sorrow. They deserve our respect. And they also deserve not to have their pain used as political equity.

Before we jump to conclusions and make this a debate about the second amendment, it appears that the shooter, Adam Lanza borrowed his mother's guns for his heinous acts of murder. The guns were purchased legally and his mother was a collector of guns.

Make no mistake about it we have to do everything in our power to prevent a tragedy like this one from occurring again. Over the next few weeks we will learn about Lanza and whether he had any mental health issues that went ignored.

You will hear people mistakenly argue that no matter how big of a monster Lanza was, the “real” villains who entered Sandy Hook Friday morning were the guns in his hand.

Are we sure the absence of guns would have definitively prevented Lanza from killing? It didn't prevent Zheng Minsheng from walking into a classroom with a knife in Fugian Province on China's East Coast in 2010 and stabbing eight children to death and seriously wound five others. I am sure the parents of those eight children feel the same unimaginable pain that the parents in Connecticut feel today.

Killers find a way to kill and more laws will not stop them!

As I stated above we live in a culture where progressives deny the existence of the devil and therefore the existence of evil. Just look at what happened in Lansing, Michigan on Monday where a group of union thugs physically attacked a person who they did not agree with Shouting “I’ll Kill a Mother F***** With a Gun”! Our mainstream media (ABC, CBS and NBC) elected not to cover this outrageous behavior as it did not coincide with their progressive agenda. It’s a sad day for American TV journalism when The Huffington Post is a more honest news outlet than ABC, CBS or NBC.

That story was about how Fox News contributor Steven Crowder and others were attacked by union thugs during the protest against the new “right-to-work” law. ABC, CBS and NBC covered the protests but only ABC made mention of police having to deal with protesters. None of them mentioned the attack on Crowder or showed the videos of that attack and the thugs tearing down a tent with people in it, both widely available on the Internet hours before the evening news show broadcast. No network quoted Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa predicting “civil war” between lawmakers and union members.

All of this came after Obama told a crowd of UAW workers in Detroit:

“I’ve just got to say this,” Obama said at the Daimler Detroit Diesel plant in Michigan before a small crowd of workers. “What we shouldn’t be doing is trying to take away your rights to bargain for better wages and working conditions. We shouldn’t be doing that.

“You know, these so-called right-to-work laws, they don’t have to do with economics, they have everything to do with politics,” Obama added to applause and cheers from the crowd. “What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money.”

It’s no wonder these union tugs were fired up after the President gave them plenty of verbal ammunition.

Where were Obama’s comments on this behavior? Is it any wonder why many young people today are growing up with little or no knowledge of right and wrong or good and evil? When they can post their mentally deranged thoughts on social media and see no consequences for evil or immoral behavior why shouldn’t they grab a gun and act out the sociopathic fantasies. It’s not more gun control we need; it’s more teaching of right from wrong and a better way to determine those who are a danger to society.

The Anti-Gun Culture

“A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks.” — Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Cartwright — 1824

Suppose an armed robber came into your place of business and pointed a gun in your face. He then locked your assistant in the restroom while he held the gun at your head and ordered you to open the safe. As in many of these cases you knew he would probably kill you — this often times is the case. While you are fumbling with the safe your assistant, a young Air Force veteran, manages to get out of the restroom and race out to his truck where he grabs his Glock 40mm gun and runs back in the front door and orders the robber to freeze. The when thwarted with this armed force bolts out the door and the manager calls 911. When the police arrive they ask the Air Force vet why he didn’t kill the robber and he relied that once the threat was removed he was more concerned about his manager. The local sheriff praised this young man and called him a hero. What do you think the owner of the store did to reward this young hero? Did they give him a bonus or a raise — no they fired him for violating corporate policy of bringing a gun into the store. Did this really happen? Yes it did in York County, Virginia.

According to a report by Todd Starnes of Fox Radio an AutoZone worker who stopped an armed robbery by retrieving a weapon from his truck said he was fired by the company for violating their gun policy. Mr. Starnes reports:

“Devin McLean and his store manager were about to close the AutoZone in York County, Va. when a gunman barged into the store.

“He pulled a gun from his waist band and demanded me and my manager go back into the office,” McLean told Fox News.

At some point, McLean was left in a restroom while the gunman made the manager open the store safe. That’s when McLean, a 23-year-old Air Force veteran, bolted through a side door and ran to his truck.

He returned through the front door holding a Glock 40 – pointed directly at the masked robber.

“I told him to freeze and to drop his weapon,” McLean told Fox News.

Instead, the robber took off – last seen running down the street from the store.

“I watched him run down the street,” he said. “I came back inside and made sure my manager was okay and he called the police.”

The York County Sheriff’s Dept. believes the bandit is responsible for as many as 30 robberies across the region.

“One of the officers asked why I didn’t shoot the robber,” McLean said.

Sheriff J.D. Diggs told Fox News he considers McLean to be a hero.

“He did a very brave thing,” the sheriff said. “He put himself in jeopardy in an attempt to make sure his friend was safe. He did a very brave thing.”

The part-time worker’s manager was especially thankful and credited McLean with saving his life.

But two days after the robbery – and just a week before Thanksgiving – McLean was fired.

Television station WTKR reported that McLean violated corporate policy by leaving the store and returning with a weapon.

The station spoke to a representative from the company’s corporate office who said they had a “zero tolerance policy for employees having weapons inside the store.”

An AutoZone spokesman told Fox News they will not discuss the matter.

“It was a surprise to me,” McLean said. “I did the right thing. I saved the company $2,000. I saved one of their manager’s lives – and you’re letting me go? It was a slap in the face.”

McLean said the firing came at a difficult time. He’s about to be a first-time father.

“We’re having a little boy,” he said. “I remember when the guy came in with that gun. My initial thought was I want to make it home to my family. I want to have the opportunity to meet my son and for my son to meet his dad. And for someone to come in and shove a gun in your face?”

So why not just keep running? Why go back inside the store – and risk your own life?

“I regard them as my family,” McLean said of his co-workers. “You’re not going to leave your brother or sister behind.”

It’s a lesson he learned in the Air Force.

“Never leave a man behind,” he said. “I’m not going to leave my brother in a room with a guy with a gun – that’s threatening his life.”

In spite of losing his job, McLean said his actions would be the same if it happened again.

“I wouldn’t change anything,” he said.

The sheriff said he was disappointed to hear that McLean lost his job on account of stopping the robbery.

“That’s certainly unfortunate,” he said. “They should be doing something to reward that young man instead of firing him.”

Sheriff Diggs said AutoZone has also sent an unintended message to the community.

“The company has now sent a message to every would-be robber out there – ‘Hey we’re open for business and unarmed. Come on in and take our money,’” he said.

Meanwhile, the backlash against AutoZone is spreading. Cam Edwards, of NRA News, called AutoZone’s decision an “injustice.”

“It may have been corporate policy to fire Devin McLean, but it’s also an injustice. He came to the aid of a fellow employee threatened by an armed robber and was canned. They should have named him employee of the year.”

He said the nation needs more people like McLean.”

James Madison stated in Federalist No. 46:

“Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.”

The Second Amendment to the Constitution (Bill of Rights) states:

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

As simple as these word are, we have been arguing about what they mean for a long time. Part of the problem is that many people engaged in the argument do not interpret the 2nd Amendment with respect for its historical context, but rather in light of what they want it to mean in support of their purposes. If we want to be honest about it, we must look to the origins of the amendment to understand it in the context of the framing of the U.S. Constitution, and only then can we consider it in our present context. The issue is further complicated by the fact that an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population has no experience in the use of arms; they see arms as irrelevant to their lives at best or a threat at worst. This is important because the 2nd Amendment is always susceptible and becomes vulnerable when too many think it is an archaic artifact.

Such language has created considerable debate regarding the Amendment's intended scope. On the one hand, some believe that the Amendment's phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms" creates an individual constitutional right for citizens of the United States. Under this "individual right theory," the United States Constitution restricts legislative bodies from prohibiting firearm possession, or at the very least, the Amendment renders prohibitory and restrictive regulation presumptively unconstitutional. On the other hand, some scholars point to the prefatory language "a well regulated Militia" to argue that the Framers intended only to restrict Congress from legislating away a state's right to self-defense. Scholars have come to call this theory "the collective rights theory." A collective rights theory of the Second Amendment asserts that citizens do not have an individual right to possess guns and that local, state, and federal legislative bodies therefore possess the authority to regulate firearms without implicating a constitutional right.

In 1939 the U.S. Supreme Court considered the matter in United States v. Miller. 307 U.S. 174. The Court adopted a collective rights approach in this case, determining that Congress could regulate a sawed-off shotgun that had moved in interstate commerce under the National Firearms Act of 1934 because the evidence did not suggest that the shotgun "has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” The Court then explained that the Framers included the Second Amendment to ensure the effectiveness of the military.

This precedent stood for nearly 70 years when in 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court revisited the issue in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller (07-290). The plaintiff in Heller challenged the constitutionality of the Washington D.C. handgun ban, a statute that had stood for 32 years. Many considered the statute the most stringent in the nation. In a 5-4 decision, the Court, meticulously detailing the history and tradition of the Second Amendment at the time of the Constitutional Convention, proclaimed that the Second Amendment established an individual right for U.S. citizens to possess firearms and struck down the D.C. handgun ban as violative of that right. The majority carved out Miller as an exception to the general rule that Americans may possess firearms, claiming that law-abiding citizens cannot use sawed-off shotguns for any law-abiding purchase. Similarly, the Court in its dicta found regulations of similar weaponry that cannot be used for law-abiding purchases as laws that would not implicate the Second Amendment. Further, the Court suggested that the United States Constitution would not disallow regulations prohibiting criminals and the mentally ill from firearm possession.

Thus, the Supreme Court has revitalized the Second Amendment. The Court continued to strengthen the Second Amendment through the 2010 decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago (08-1521). The plaintiff in McDonald challenged the constitutionally of the Chicago handgun ban, which prohibited handgun possession by almost all private citizens. In a 5-4 decisions, the Court, citing the intentions of the framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment, held that the Second Amendment applies to the states through the incorporation doctrine. However, the Court did not have a majority on which clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the fundamental right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense. While Justice Alito and his supporters looked to the Due Process Clause, Justice Thomas in his concurrence stated that the Privileges and Immunities Clause should justify incorporation.

Bart Wilburn writes in American Thinker:

“The 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was derived from our understanding of the British experience that militias were necessary to curb the tyrannical powers of the king. In our case, 'well regulated militias' were necessary as a condition of the colonies to agree to subordinate their sovereignty to a federal government. They wanted a guarantee of power to insure that some future federal government could not egregiously exceed its powers prescribed in the body of the constitution they agreed to. Furthermore, like the militias of the English barons, these state militias were formed ad hoc from the populace as needed on short notice and therefore depended on the populace being already proficient in the art of arms. The only way the Founders of America could guarantee this capability was to encourage civil proficiency in arms and make private ownership and use of arms a tenet of the constitution establishing the government. For these reasons, it should come as no surprise that the rights of freedom of speech and to 'keep and bear arms comprise the first and second amendments to the constitution establishing them as rights of citizenship. We should not consider this rationale archaic. Democracy is fragile and always susceptible to despotism, and we should not be so arrogant as to suppose we are not equally susceptible.

Limiting the power of the federal government to subjugate the populace is the primary purpose of the 2nd Amendment, and nothing in it restricts the use of arms consistent with maintaining proficiency consistent with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What we do with guns is the subject of existing criminal law, but having them is not. Arguments against the 2nd Amendment based on recreational use of arms and the futility of home defense are deflections. Under the 2nd Amendment, owning and using guns is not simply permitted, but is presumed; local, even federal, laws and regulations cannot lawfully infringe on it. The 2nd Amendment is always susceptible to tyrants, but is vulnerable if too many of us are ignorant of its purpose.”

As an update to the Court’s action regarding state’s violation of the Second Amendment it should be notes here that yesterday (December 11, 2012) a federal appeals court struck down Illinois' ban on carrying concealed weapons — the only total concealed-carry ban in the country. Fox News reported:

“The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals gave state lawmakers six months to come up with their own version of the law that legalizes concealed carry.

"We're extremely pleased with the ruling," Illinois State Rifle Association leader Richard Pearson said. "Now that the court has ruled we will work as soon as possible with legislators to craft a concealed-carry bill for the state of Illinois."

The 2-1 decision marks a huge win for gun rights advocates who have argued that the ban on concealed weapons violates the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment and what they see as citizens' right to carry guns for self-defense.

A new law could be in place by January, Pearson said. A bill has already been written by Rep. Brandon Phelps that includes background checks, field provisions and other issues.

"Christmas came early for law-abiding gun owners," said Phelps, whose proposed legislation came within three votes of passing in 2011.

"I said on the floor, `A lot of people who voted against this, one of these days, you're going to wish you did, because of all the limitations and the safety precautions we put in this bill, because one of these days, the court's going to rule and you're not going to like the ruling.' Today's the day. The court's pretty much said there's no restrictions," he said.

Judge Richard Posner wrote in the court's majority opinion that the state "had to provide us with more than merely a rational basis for believing that its uniquely sweeping ban is justified by an increase in public safety. It has failed to meet this burden."

According to a 2005 Gallup Poll shows that 3 in 10 Americans personally own a gun; most gun owners say they use their guns to protect themselves against crime, for hunting, and for target shooting. Gun ownership varies by different groups in the country, with men more likely to be gun owners than women, Southerners and Midwesterners more likely than Easterners or Westerners, Republicans more so than Democrats, and older rather than younger Americans. In the past five years gun ownership has skyrocketed with more gun sales to women than men. Today it is estimated that there are 100 million legal owned guns in the United States.

Every time there is a widely reported shooting at a public place or involving a celebrity the anti-gun lobby gets on its high horse and begins attacking the people who own guns and the Second Amendment. I am sure there will be a flood of anti-gun rhetoric pouring out from the liberal progressive media and their fellow travelers after this latest shooting at the Clackamas, Oregon Town Center Mall where a gunman, who witnesses say, was wearing camouflage and a white plastic mask opened fire in the shopping mall near Portland, Ore., killing two and wounding one other before killing himself.

We don’t, and may never know, why this whack job decided to do what he is accused of doing, but I am sure in days to come there will be more news about this shooting than the case of Jill Khawam Kelley who was the hand-picked lobbyist for Muslim nations and their agenda at Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida. (Kelley is part of the soap opera that the Petraeus scandal spawned).

Remembering Pearl Harbor

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941--a date which will live in infamy--the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” — President Franklin Roosevelt, Speech to Congress, December 8, 1941.

At 7:55 a.m. Hawaii time on a beautiful Sunday morning 71 years ago on this date, a Japanese dive bomber bearing the red symbol of the Rising Sun of Japan on its wings appeared out of the clouds above the island of Oahu. A swarm of 353 Japanese warplanes followed, descending on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in a ferocious assault. The surprise attack struck a critical blow against the U.S. Pacific fleet and drew the United States irrevocably into World War II.

With diplomatic negotiations with Japan breaking down, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his advisers knew that an imminent Japanese attack was probable, but nothing had been done to increase security at the important naval base at Pearl Harbor. It was Sunday morning, and many military personnel had been given passes to attend religious services off base. At 7:02 a.m., two radar operators spotted large groups of aircraft in flight toward the island from the north, but, with a flight of B-17s expected from the United States at the time, they were told to sound no alarm. Thus, the Japanese air assault came as a devastating surprise to the naval base.

Much of the Pacific fleet was rendered useless: Five of eight battleships, three destroyers, and seven other ships were sunk or severely damaged, and more than 200 aircraft were destroyed. A total of 2,400 Americans were killed and 1,200 were wounded, many while valiantly attempting to repulse the attack. Japan's losses were some 30 planes, five midget submarines, and fewer than 100 men. Fortunately for the United States, all three Pacific fleet carriers were out at sea on training maneuvers. These giant aircraft carriers would have their revenge against Japan six months later at the Battle of Midway, reversing the tide against the previously invincible Japanese navy in a spectacular victory.

The day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, President Roosevelt appeared before a joint session of Congress and declared, "Yesterday, December 7, 1941--a date which will live in infamy--the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan." After a brief and forceful speech, he asked Congress to approve a resolution recognizing the state of war between the United States and Japan. The Senate voted for war against Japan by 82 to 0, and the House of Representatives approved the resolution by a vote of 388 to 1. The sole dissenter was Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, a devout pacifist who had also cast a dissenting vote against the U.S. entrance into World War I. Three days later, Germany and Italy declared war against the United States, and the U.S. government responded in kind.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was intended to neutralize the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and hence protect Japan's advance into Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, where it sought access to natural resources such as oil and rubber. War between Japan and the United States had been a possibility of which each nation had been aware (and developed contingency plans for) since the 1920s, though tensions did not begin to grow seriously until Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria. Over the next decade, Japan continued to expand into China, leading to all-out war between those countries in 1937. Japan spent considerable effort trying to isolate China and achieve sufficient resource independence to attain victory on the mainland; the "Southern Operation" was designed to assist these efforts.

From December 1937, events such as the Japanese attack on the USS Panay and the Nanking Massacre (more than 200,000 killed in indiscriminate massacres) swung public opinion in the West sharply against Japan and increased Western fear of Japanese expansion, which prompted the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to provide loan assistance for war supply contracts to the Republic of China.

The attack had several major aims. First, it intended to destroy important American fleet units, thereby preventing the Pacific Fleet from interfering with Japanese conquest of the Dutch East Indies and Malaya. Second, it was hoped to buy time for Japan to consolidate its position and increase its naval strength before shipbuilding authorized by the 1940 Vinson-Walsh Act erased any chance of victory. Finally, it was meant to deliver a severe blow to American morale, one which would discourage Americans from committing to a war extending into the western Pacific Ocean and Dutch East Indies. To maximize the effect on morale, battleships were chosen as the main targets, since they were the prestige ships of any navy at the time. The overall intention was to enable Japan to conquer Southeast Asia without interference.

Striking the Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor carried two distinct disadvantages: the targeted ships would be in very shallow water, so it would be relatively easy to salvage and possibly repair them; and most of the crews would survive the attack, since many would be on shore leave or would be rescued from the harbor. A further important disadvantage—this of timing, and known to the Japanese — was the absence from Pearl Harbor of all three of the U.S. Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers (Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga). Ironically, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s top command was so imbued with U.S. Admiral Mahan's "decisive battle" doctrine — especially that of destroying the maximum number of battleships — that, despite these concerns, Yamamoto decided to press ahead.

Japanese confidence in their ability to achieve a short, victorious war also meant other targets in the harbor, especially the navy yard, oil tank farms, and submarine base, could safely be ignored, since — by their thinking — the war would be over before the influence of these facilities would be felt

The American contribution to the successful Allied war effort spanned four long years and cost more than 400,000 American lives. There were many naval and land battles during the ensuing years including such names as Midway, The Battan Death March, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa that saw some of the most vicious fighting of the Second World War. Finally after 1,347 days and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Japan's Emperor Hirohito announced his country's unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of "a new and most cruel bomb."

Today I wager that not many people in the United States under the age of forty are familiar with the causes and effects of the Japanese attack on our naval base at Pearl Harbor. I am sure they are ignorant of the viciousness of the Japanese soldiers and the many atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese forces, especially to their captives — including men, women and children. They are also not aware of the horrific medical experiments carried out on civilians by Unit 731 in Manchuria to develop chemical and biological weapons — more horrific than anything the Nazis did in their concentration camps.

These younger citizens while not knowing much about the causes and atrocities of the Japanese during World War II are able to quote page and verse about the evils of our dropping the two atomic bombs to end the war. This is what they learn in our schools today. The other day while listening to a radio talk show I heard a caller state that his fourth grade daughter came home with an assignment that was based on a child’s book about a little girl who had lived through the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The caller, a former Marine, after reading the book was so incensed that he requested a meeting with the teacher to discuss what he was teaching. The caller went on to state that when he confronted the teacher on the lack of context for this atomic bomb book and the reasons we were at war with Japan and the ferociousness of the atrocities of the Japanese Imperial Forces he said the teacher had no answer. All the teacher could say is that this was the required reading according to the prescribed lesson plan. In other words the teacher was clueless about the events of the Second World War and Japan’s involvement.

We have revised and perverted history in our public school system to such an extent that our K-12 students no virtually nothing about our involvement in the Second World War — or much anything else. All they seem to learn today is about civil rights, Gay marriage, and redistribution of wealth. The latest example of this is a new animated video released by the California Federation of Teachers that shows the rich “1 percent” urinating on and stealing money from the less fortunate and middle class. The purpose of the video is to explain “economic inequality” and the need for wealthy people to pay their “fair share of taxes.”

According to the Blaze:

“Tax the rich: An animated fairy tale, is narrated by Ed Asner, with animation by award-winning artist Mike Konopacki, and written and directed by Fred Glass for the California Federation of Teachers. The 8 minute video shows how we arrived at this moment of poorly funded public services and widening economic inequality. Things go downhill in a happy and prosperous land after the rich decide they don’t want to pay taxes anymore. They tell the people that there is no alternative, but the people aren’t so sure. This land bears a startling resemblance to our land. After you watch this video, click here to share with friends, and send an email to your elected officials to let them know they need to restore higher federal tax rates on the wealthy so that we may once more enjoy properly funded public services.”

Tax the rich: An animated fairy tale, is narrated by Ed Asner

There have been several films made about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Three come to mind; Tora, Tora, Tora; Pearl Harbor, and Air Force.

Of all of the films Tora, Tora, Tora (Tiger, Tiger, Tiger) is by far and away the best and most accurate portrayal of both the Japanese and American sides of the attacks. Made in 1970 with the cooperation of the United States Navy the film details the intelligence and tactical failures of our government leading up to the attack and how the Japanese planned the attack. It also has a fantastic musical score by Jerry Goldsmith along with some terrific aerial combat scenes that are not computer generated.

Air Force, made in 1943, before all was known about the attack is based on the story of the nine B-17 bombers flying into Hickham Field during the attack. It’s basically a true story based on the crew of this B-17 Bombers.

The worst film by far is the 2001 soap opera Pearl Harbor. This film follows the story of two best friends, Rafe and Danny, and their love lives as they go off to join the war. Eventually they have a conflict over a Navy nurse (the soap opera part) and end up flying two P-40 fighter planes to take on the Japanese. The film ends with the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. If you view this film to get your history you will end up knowing nothing. Don’t waste your time on this 2001 chick flick starring Ben Affleck, it’s basically a love story with very little historical accuracy — pure Hollywood.

Over the years there have been numerous books and articles promoting a conspiracy at the highest levels of our government to drag us into a war in Europe. Most of these “theories” blame Roosevelt for pushing Japan into a corner and forcing them to attack the United States. Due to Japan’s three party agreement with Germany and Italy after we declared war on Japan the Germans and Italian would be forced to declare war on the United States (which they both did).

It is oft times easier and more comfortable to believe fiction than the truth. In 1941 there were two major bureaucracies in the United States. One was the alphabet soup of federal agencies created during the past eight years of the Roosevelt administration. These bureaucratic agencies grew out of the efforts to mitigate the effects of the Great Depression and often worked at odds with one another. The other and more entrenched bureaucracy was the United States military. Since the end of the First World War the military had been dramatically downsized. In 1941 U.S. Army ranked seventeenth among armies of the world in size and combat power, just behind Romania. It numbered 190,000 soldiers. (It would grow to 8.3 million in 1945, a 44-fold increase.) When mobilization began in 1940, the Army had only 14,000 professional officers. The average age of majors — a middling rank, between captain and lieutenant colonel — was nearly 48; in the National Guard, nearly one-quarter of first lieutenants were over 40 years old, and the senior ranks were dominated by political hacks of certifiable military incompetence. Not a single officer on duty in 1941 had commanded a unit as large as a division in World War I. At the time of Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, only one American division was on a full war footing.

There was a constant conflict over dollars and appropriations between the Army and the Navy and the services did not share intelligence easily. This was very similar to the situation prior to 9/11 with the various intelligence agencies. It should also be noted that there were two air forces; one under the control of the Army and the other belonging to the Navy. They flew different airplanes and trained their pilots differently. The Army Air Corps wanted strategic bombers while the Navy wanted carrier-based attack fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers for fighting a war at sea.

It was this military bureaucracy that created the intelligence breakdown and lack of tactical preparedness at Pearl Harbor causing both Lt. General Short (Army commander) and Admiral Kimmel (the navy commander) to be relieved of their commands after the attack for negligence and disgraced throughout history. An example of the tactical errors was General Short’s commanding that all USAAF fighters (P-40) be parked in the center of the tarmac to avoid potential sabotage thus making them a perfect target for the Japanese planes. As for the Navy it was purely by luck that Adm. Kimmel ordered his three carriers out to sea before the attack thus saving these incredibly valuable naval assets from the Japanese.

By late 1941, many observers believed that hostilities between the U.S. and Japan were imminent. A Gallup poll just before the attack on Pearl Harbor found that 52% of Americans expected war with Japan, 27% did not expect war, and 21% had no opinion. While U.S. Pacific bases and facilities had been placed on alert on multiple occasions, U.S. officials doubted Pearl Harbor would be the first target. They expected the Philippines to be attacked first. This presumption was due to the threat that the air bases throughout the country and the naval base at Manila posed to sea lanes, as well as the shipment of supplies to Japan from territory to the south. They also incorrectly believed that Japan was not capable of mounting more than one major naval operation at a time.

The U.S. government has had ten official inquiries into the attack – the inquiry by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox (1941), the Roberts Commission (1941–42), the Hart Inquiry (1944), the Army Pearl Harbor Board (1944), the Naval Court of Inquiry (1944), the Hewitt investigation, the Clarke investigation, the Congressional Inquiry (1945–46) and the top-secret inquiry by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, authorized by Congress and carried out by Henry Clausen (the Clausen Inquiry; 1946). The tenth inquiry, the Thurmond-Spence Hearing, took place in April 1995. The Dorn Report resulted from this tenth hearing. (Click here to read Vice Admiral David Charles Richardson’s critical analysis of the Dorn Report)

All ten reported incompetence, underestimation and misapprehension of Japanese capabilities and intentions, problems resulting from excessive secrecy about cryptography, division of responsibility between Army and Navy (and lack of consultation between them), and lack of adequate manpower for intelligence (analysis, collection, processing).

One perspective is given by Vice Admiral Frank E. Beatty, who at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack was an aide to the Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and was very close to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's inner circle, with perspicuous remarks as:

"Prior to December 7, it was evident even to me that we were pushing Japan into a corner. I believed that it was the desire of President Roosevelt, and Prime Minister Churchill that we get into the war, as they felt the Allies could not win without us and all our efforts to cause the Germans to declare war on us failed; the conditions we imposed upon Japan — to get out of China, for example — were so severe that we knew that nation could not accept them. We were forcing her so severely that we could have known that she would react toward the United States. All her preparations in a military way — and we knew their over-all import — pointed that way."

Another "eye witness viewpoint" akin to Beatty's is provided by Roosevelt's administrative assistant at the time of Pearl Harbor, Jonathan Daniels; it is the telling comment about FDR's reaction to the attack — "The blow was heavier than he had hoped it would necessarily be. But the risks paid off; even the loss was worth the price. "

Ten days before the attack on Pearl Harbor", Henry L. Stimson, United States Secretary of War at the time entered in his diary the famous and much-argued statement - that he had met with President Roosevelt to discuss the evidence of impending hostilities with Japan, and the question was “how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

In the 71 years since the attack on Pearl Harbor no credible evidence has been uncovered to point to a willful conspiracy by members of the Roosevelt administration or the U.S. Military to allow the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Sometimes as Sigmund Freud stated “a cigar is just a cigar.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor began at 7:55 am Hawaiian Island time, which equates to 12:55 pm Eastern Standard Time. If you were at the New York’s Polo Grounds you would have been watching the Brooklyn Dodgers getting ready to Kick Off against the New York Giants. At Washington D.C’s Griffith Stadium where the Washington Redskins were playing the Philadelphia Eagles you would have heard the public address announcer page high-ranking government and military personnel who were in attendance, but did not mention the attack. Reporters were told to check with their offices.

President Roosevelt did not learn of the attack until sometime that afternoon and within a few hours his Solicitor General, Charles Fahy, was in the White House recommending the detention of some 1,000 Japanese-Americans in the Hawaiian Islands on suspicion of espionage. This was the beginning of one of the greatest civil rights violations in the history of the Republic.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized military commanders to designate “military areas from which any or all persons may be excluded.” The result: More than 110,000 Japanese-Americans, plus several thousand German — and Italian-Americans, were forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to remote internment camps — “War Relocation Camps,” — Roosevelt and other officials called them where they remained until 1945.

The Roosevelt administration argued that the internment of Japanese-Americans, most of who lived on the West Coast, was a matter of military necessity. Persons of Japanese ancestry living in the United States were, the administration said, suspected of disloyalty, espionage, and otherwise aiding their fatherland, with which the United States was at war. Moreover, wrote Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Command, “it was impossible to establish the identity of the loyal and the disloyal with any degree of safety.” Therefore, the administration maintained, the government had little choice but to relocate and incarcerate them all.

Some of the wronged parties fought back through the courts. In 1943, Gordon Hirabayashi challenged a curfew the government had imposed on Japanese-Americans, while the next year Fred Korematsu took on the internment policy. Both clearly had the Constitution on their side. Roosevelt had unilaterally suspended habeas corpus for Japanese-Americans, though the Constitution — Lincoln's precedent notwithstanding — only permits Congress to undertake such a drastic action, and then only “in cases of rebellion or invasion.” The Fifth Amendment prohibits both the curfew and the relocation because both deprived individuals of their liberty (and, in the case of relocation, their property) without due process of law. The 14th Amendment mandates that all persons be afforded “the equal protection of the laws,” yet Americans of certain ethnicities were being singled out for unequal treatment.

The Roosevelt administration, never much concerned with the document FDR swore four times to “preserve, protect, and defend,” was determined to defend its policies toward Americans of Japanese descent at all costs, even to the point of lying to the highest court in the land. Solicitor General Charles Fahy defended the administration’s policies before the Supreme Court in the cases brought by Hirabayashi and Korematsu. Fahy argued that the curfew and relocation were matters of “military necessity” and “military urgency.” The court bought Fahy’s arguments and upheld Hirabayashi’s and Korematsu’s convictions, thereby declaring the administration’s policies constitutional.

Fast-forward to 2010. In the course of doing research on some immigration cases, Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal began looking into the World War II internment cases. On May 24, 2011, at a Justice Department event honoring Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Katyal revealed the following:

“By the time the cases of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu reached the Supreme Court, the Solicitor General had learned of a key intelligence report that undermined the rationale behind the internment. The Ringle Report, from the Office of Naval Intelligence, found that only a small percentage of Japanese Americans posed a potential security threat, and that the most dangerous were already known or in custody. But the Solicitor General did not inform the Court of the report, despite warnings from Department of Justice attorneys that failing to alert the Court “might approximate the suppression of evidence.” Instead, he argued that it was impossible to segregate loyal Japanese Americans from disloyal ones. Nor did he inform the Court that a key set of allegations used to justify the internment, that Japanese Americans were using radio transmitters to communicate with enemy submarines off the West Coast, had been discredited by the FBI and FCC. And to make matters worse, he relied on gross generalizations about Japanese Americans, such as that they were disloyal and motivated by “racial solidarity.”

“It seemed obvious to me that we had made a mistake,” Katyal added. “The duty of candor wasn’t met.”

The Roosevelt Justice Department had done far more than simply make a “mistake.”

“This was a deliberate, knowing lie by Fahy to the Supreme Court,” University of California at San Diego Professor Peter Irons told the Los Angeles Times. In the 1980s, wrote the paper, Irons “had found reports in old government files that showed the U.S. military did not see Japanese Americans as a threat in 1942. His research led to federal court hearings that set aside the convictions of Korematsu and Hirabayashi. Congress later voted to have the nation apologize and pay reparations to those who were wrongly held.”

This internment was simply another act of a nation on the verge of panic after the attack on Pearl Harbor. We had been through 10 years of a devastating depression, giant dust storms on the Great Plains, migrations of thousands of unemployed, and the 1938 Orson Wells radio program scare of an invasion by Martians as he dramatized H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds.” The nation was ready to take almost any action to prevent the fear of an invasion of the West Coast by the Japanese. There are many today that point fingers at the civil liberties advocates who did not speak out in 1942 against executive order 9066, but I doubt they would have done much better in the context of the times.

The final chapter of the war with Japan ended on August 6, 1945 when a B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay dropped a 20 megaton atomic bomb on Hiroshima and 3 days latter a similar bomb on Nagasaki. On August 15, six days after the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan announced its surrender to the Allies, signing the Instrument of Surrender on 2 September, officially ending World War II.

To explain to students that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was ethically and morally wrong is pure nonsense. Without a thorough explanation of the causes that led to the dropping of these bombs the teacher or writer does a tremendous disservice to the students and the nation. This is one more example of how revisionist history plagues our K-12 school system today. I wonder, with trepidation, how the attack on Pearl Harbor will be remembered on the 100^th anniversary of the attack.

You can read a more detailed account of the attack on Pearl Harbor in my December 7, 2010 blog “Remember Pearl Harbor.”