Reality Check 101

Sometimes truth and goodness expose themselves most during grievous evil.  It should not have to work that way, but this is a broken and all to violent world.  History is full of human depravity.  It is just as saturated with the human ability to find the wisdom and clarity to endure throughout the trauma in order to find truths and do goodness on the other side.  Gun violence throws all of this in our faces.

There is the other path however, anger and desperation.  They make it easy to attack things and people rather than the problems.  In the wrong hands, boiling emotions become useful tools, strategic distractions from facing hard truths about human fallenness.  They are the stellar opposites of the self-control that manages to penetrate the immediate suffering to gain a greater good.

Strategic distraction is how liberalism has convinced some parents and their children that there is power over evil through impotence, that cowering and waiting for a broken bureaucracy to act is better than defending themselves on their own initiative in the moments between life and death.  The liberal media has endlessly paraded traumatized children before our eyes crying, sometimes literally, for safety from the same bureaucracy that so brokenly cause the murder of their friends and loved ones.

But most of the public’s perceptions are products of cultivated imagery.  In all the rush to target things and 18-year-olds, has the media managed to present another survivor’s insights from a maturity gained over time?  Hear the unreported survivor testimony of Columbine survivor Colorado state Rep. Patrick Neville who has pushed to end gun-free zones in his state – “I’ll tell you, for every one student that came out publicly supportive of the bill, there was at least 30, if not more, students who [also] support it” (“Why This Columbine Survivor Wants to End Gun-free Zones”).  Rep. Neville says that public stigma keeps these survivors silent.

Thomas Jefferson said it well in 1785 in a letter to Peter Carr:  “As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a 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 the constant companion of your walks.” ( https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/firearms )

Odd, is it not, that ideas like removing an 18-year-old’s Second Amendment rights until they are 21 has gained traction?  Yet, they can drive a potential weapon anywhere or any time, carry a weapon into battle (and maybe be drafted to do so), sit on a jury with the authority to overpower another’s rights, help determine the direction of the nation by voting, create a family, the foundation of society, or just make a baby and leave, not to mention work full-time, get credit cards, and create debt.

There are also the numbers.  But, as we have witnessed over the last three weeks numbers do lie.  The worst misrepresentations have been the incredible claims of mass killings.  The left’s numbers look like a school campus bloodbath nightmare because they count shooting accidents, strays from off campus, one-on-one vendettas, gang drive-byes, suicides, non-students using campus parking lots, etc.

The horrible truth is that various types of mass murders are “contextually distinct”. (Harvard School of Public Health & Northeastern University, 2014 to Mother Jones).  If the five mass shootings from 2016 through Parkland Florida are added to Crime prevention Center’s data spreadsheet of 1998 through 2015 (Mass Public Shooting cases 1998 to 2015 Public ), a far different picture emerges.  This is a huge issue for all the policy makers currently running panic-mode into mis-guided actions.

Over the past 20 years there have been 57 mass murders that resulted in four or more deaths.  Of that number, only two, yes two, that took place where guns were allowed to be present.  That means that 96.5% of the victims were in gun-free zones.  Of the 57, only 10 specifically involved school campuses from kindergarten through colleges.  Only 7 of those have been k-12 schools, a ratio of approximately 12%.

An article by Allie Nicodemo and Lia Petronio of Northeastern University (Boston) published some surprising findings given the liberal hype Americans are being fed at the moment.  Findings taken from “The Three R’s of School Shootings…” by James Fox and Emma Fridel, reveal that mass school shootings are actually very rare.  Since the 90’s, incidents have actually been declining.  In 35 years, so-called “assault rifles” were used only five times.  It becomes clearly evident that schools are safer than have ever been to date.

School violence could be a mental health problem.  But “mental health” casts a very broad net.  In some circles it can snag everything from psychology and physiology to spirituality.  It all depends on which “expert” is pontificating at any particular moment and what their definitions are.  And, if we are so concerned about student mental health, why, according to Fox and Fridel, was the Student-to-counselor ratio only averaging about 482-to-one during a period from 2014 to 2015?

Secular theories about violence abound.  In a paper entitled “Virtuous Violence (2014), Tage Rai & Alan Fiske summarized the two leading violence thinking and offered some of their own.  In one theory, people have violent impulses that are usually held in check but their moral sense get broken, knocked down or blocked.  Another camp believes it is simply a way to achieve goals, an instrument to achieve ends, whatever that may be.  Rai and Fiske say that violence is really a function of the offender’s sense of morality.  It is justified their sense of rights due and obligations.

In the end, violence is part of the human condition and few are willing to start at that root before blame-shifting to inanimate objects or other innocent Americans.  It is only checked by the authority of power, the authority of a remade heart, or both.

The options are pretty clear, empower good, give it the authority and means to be successful, or immaculate it.  Thus far emasculation has cause untold misery.  The purging of the soul that began in the 1960’s rebellion has yielded horrendous consequences.  The question is, will wisdom finally begin to prevail or will anger and desperation win the day again?