Month: February 2018

So much recently has been said about this topic since the latest school shooting. We have mainstream news media advocating the outlawing of a whole class of rifles. We have teenagers rallying for change, not really identifying what that change would look like, but pressing for change of some obtuse kind. There are a lot of people emoting, very little of this emotion is leading to any real solutions.

We have a problem in our country that needs to be addressed. The problem is not guns, but the type of people that perpetrate these crimes, and the lack of enforcement of existing laws and controls that preclude these people from obtaining firearms in the first place. We also need to explore how we protect our common areas from these miscreants.

Who are these people? They are those in our society that have mental issues, those that have no moral center, those who cannot distinguish between right and wrong. These people are the end result of our countries fall from being a Christian based society to one that is gravitating towards a political Atheism by design. When there is nothing offered except moral relativism, society begins to break down, and tragedies like this are bound to happen.

Why are we not catching these people before they buy weapons?  Frankly, it is because our system to catch them is deeply flawed.  States are not required to report people of interest to the federal background check system.  This is a stunning revelation that shows that little real thought went into system design.  There are also those in the FBI and local police department that ignore blatant warning signs.  This latest shooter was expelled from as many as 6 high schools, and was visited by the police at his residence dozens of times due to violent behavior.  In fact the FBI was put on notice 2X before the shooting, once being notified that this suspect was posting on social media sites that he was going to be a school shooter, and again weeks before the shootings by a neighbor that indicated to the FBI that this man had weapons and a desire to commit mass murder.  All to no avail, as the FBI and local police did nothing to follow up on this troubled individual.

We have to fix the current system.  It can work if we tighten up on reporting, and hold people responsible for the jobs they are supposed to do.  The President wants to elevate the age to 21 for purchasing a firearm, and to make the screening system more elaborate and inclusive.  He also has floated the idea that teachers should be armed, and that measure might actually have the biggest effect.  All this will make it much harder for the next person that has a desire to kill schoolchildren, or for that matter to kill anyone anywhere.

The left would like to ban a whole class of rifles.  AR15 based designs are in their sites, and they want them outlawed.  That would do nothing to solve the problem of school shootings.  There are plenty of other gun choices for them to select from, many that are also semi-automatic.  Their solution is actually not meant to solve school shootings, but to incrementally get the ball rolling towards an eventual total gun confiscation program.  This is obvious to many and will not happen.  The second amendment was actually designed to prevent the type of tyranny the left would like to implement.  Disarming our society would put us in jeopardy of losing all of our freedoms.

People cause these problems, not guns.  There never has been a gun that committed a single crime.  It has always been people.  We can in the short term come close to solving this problem by making it hard for bad people to access firearms, and insuring that we protect our common areas adequately.  Long-term, as a society we need to examine how we raise our children, how we help them acquire values and mores that make for a more peaceful and just community.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to the movies to see “THE DARKEST HOUR”. We don’t go to the movies much, but this topic caught our interest.  For those that don’t know, it is a movie about Britain in the early days of WW2, where Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister of Great Britain, and the world was then spiraling into another maelstrom.  This new war threatened to engulf Great Britain, as the last bastion of Western Civilization left in Europe, and Neville Chamberlain and others in his party were ready and willing to negotiate surrender with the Nazi’s.  It was indeed, their “Darkest Hour”.

From political obscurity, out comes Winston, who previously was considered washed up in the political field because of his somewhat harsh leadership skills and military bent.  Dusted off, polished up, and appointed Prime Minister by the King, Winston rallied the British people, and kept the Nazi’s at bay until the USA entered the war.  His speech before Parliament, where he announced that “We will never surrender”, rallied the fighting spirit of his great nation, and lead them to eventual victory. Without Winston, surely Great Britain would have been lost, and all of Europe would have become part of the Third Reich.  This one man, through the power of personality and persuasion, saved the day.

It strikes me that sometimes, when it seems that there seems to be no way out of a bad situation, someone rises to lead a nation out of their dire straights.  The USA is in a bad situation now, with the deep state rising, usurping our elected government, attempting to “fix” elections, eroding personal freedoms, and attempting to personally entrench themselves into powerful, unelected, and uncontrolled positions in government.  These men are becoming our defacto rulers, making their own government regulations at a rate of 10X what the congress does, our elected body that is charged with representing us, citizens of the United States of America.  These bureaucrats rule as if they are part of a nobility not seen for centuries.  They seem unstoppable.  Then along comes a man for the season, a man that cannot be corrupted, a man that has a vision, a man that has promised to “drain the swamp”, a man named Donald Trump.

As with Winston Churchill, he is not popular with the “ruling class”.  He is not popular with the party that caused the problem, he is not popular with the media, and not popular with the opposition voters.  He is not a politician, and does not play by their rules.  He keeps his promises, and he has promised to “drain the swamp”, a swamp made up of bureaucrats and corrupt entrenched politicians that are bringing our country down, transforming it into some semblance of a “third world dictatorship”.  He is hard at work fulfilling his promise.  No other leader at this point in time is capable of doing this job, and time will tell if President Trump can.  He is however, our best hope, and we can only pray that his tenacity is as great as Winston’s was, and get behind him with the support he deserves in his quest to save our nation.