https://www.frontpagemag.com/f
ot-gun-control-daniel-greenfie
FRONTPAGE MAG
"INSIDE EVERY PROGRESSIVE IS A TOTALITARIAN SCREAMING TO GET OUT"
WE NEED CRIMINAL AND CRAZY CONTROL, NOT GUN CONTROL
<https://www.reuters.com/artic
SKCN0T504J20151116>
When criminals and psychos aren't locked up, then everyone ends up in jail.
August 9, 2019
Daniel Greenfield <https://www.frontpagemag.com/
"Mass murder isn't caused by the tools you use. The Nazis were not inspired
to kill Jews by the invention of Zyklon B. The Japanese did not decide to
kill hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians because of the availability
of airplanes. The Soviet Communists did not commit their acts of mass murder
because their arms stockpiles didn't need a waiting period to obtain machine
guns for their mass shootings.
Murder is not a technical problem. It's a moral problem. It happens because
of internal decisions made in the mind, not external tools. The tools are
used to implement the decisions of the mind.
A society with mass murder is experiencing a moral problem.
America's moral problem is more complex than that of Nazi Germany or its
Communist counterparts. We don't have a government that is actively killing
people. Instead we have a government that has made it easy for killers to
operate by dismantling the criminal justice and immigration systems, making
it very difficult to stop the three primary categories of killers, gang
members, terrorists and the insane.And media corporations have been allowed to glamorize killers who seek fame through massacres.
Gun controllers insist that the Founding Fathers never anticipated the
problem of mass shooters. That's probably true. But they would have also
never tolerated the conditions that brought them into being, a permissive
criminal justice system, a failure to institutionalize the mentally ill, and
a media that promotes these acts of violence under the guise of condemning
them and clamoring for gun control.
The America of the Bill of Rights could have had modern weapons without
constant mass shootings.
The Founding Fathers understood that murder was not a technical problem, a
matter of tools, but a moral problem. The Bill of Rights was meant for a
moral society. It cannot function in an immoral one."--- Daniel Greenfield
<https://www.frontpagemag.com/
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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an
investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic
terrorism.
Mass murder is not a gun control problem.
In 2003, Kim Dae-han, a middle-aged taxi driver, killed 192 people and left
151 others wounded, by setting a South Korean subway train on fire using
paint cans filled with gasoline. In 2016, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a
Muslim terrorist, killed 86 people and wounded 458 others by ramming a truck
into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in France. In 2001, Muslim terrorists
killed 2,977 people and injured 6,000 more, by using box cutters to hijack
airplanes and fly them into buildings.
Guns are a tool. There are a whole lot of other devastating ways to kill
lots of people.
American mass killers often use guns because they're convenient and
available. There are plenty of alternatives like trucks, boxcutters,
pressure cooker bombs and paint cans full of gasoline.
Mass murder isn't caused by the tools you use. The Nazis were not inspired
to kill Jews by the invention of Zyklon B. The Japanese did not decide to
kill hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians because of the availability
of airplanes. The Soviet Communists did not commit their acts of mass murder
because their arms stockpiles didn't need a waiting period to obtain machine
guns for their mass shootings.
Murder is not a technical problem. It's a moral problem. It happens because
of internal decisions made in the mind, not external tools. The tools are
used to implement the decisions of the mind.
A society with mass murder is experiencing a moral problem.
America's moral problem is more complex than that of Nazi Germany or its
Communist counterparts. We don't have a government that is actively killing
people. Instead we have a government that has made it easy for killers to
operate by dismantling the criminal justice and immigration systems, making
it very difficult to stop the three primary categories of killers, gang
members, terrorists and the insane.
And media corporations have been allowed to glamorize killers who seek fame
through massacres.
Gun controllers insist that the Founding Fathers never anticipated the
problem of mass shooters. That's probably true. But they would have also
never tolerated the conditions that brought them into being, a permissive
criminal justice system, a failure to institutionalize the mentally ill, and
a media that promotes these acts of violence under the guise of condemning
them and clamoring for gun control.
The America of the Bill of Rights could have had modern weapons without
constant mass shootings.
The Founding Fathers understood that murder was not a technical problem, a
matter of tools, but a moral problem. The Bill of Rights was meant for a
moral society. It cannot function in an immoral one.
"Government would be defective in its principal purpose were it not to
restrain such criminal acts, by inflicting due punishments on those who
perpetrate them," Thomas Jefferson wrote in a Virginia criminal justice bill
submitted a few years after authoring the Declaration of Independence.
It is not the purpose of government to control weapons, but to control
criminals.
Western countries have instead focused on controlling guns, while failing to
control criminals. This has led to absurdities such as 'knife control' in
the UK and public bollards to control car rammings. Flying has become an
experience once relegated to traveling to Communist dictatorships. Gun
control measures encourage doctors to inform on their patients. Schools
implement zero tolerance for pocket knives.
When criminals aren't locked up, then everyone ends up in jail.
When we fail to lock up criminals, society becomes a prison. When we don't
institutionalize the insane, then society becomes the insane asylum. When we
don't stop foreign gangs and terrorists from entering our country, then we
wake up to realize that we are living in El Salvador, Mexico, Pakistan or
Iraq.
A moral society locks up dangerous people while a progressive society locks
up everyone.
Gun control is a sensible measure in a society where criminals, madmen and
terrorists freely roam the streets. This attempt to turn society into a
prison won't work because of the problem of scale. You can prevent guns from
entering a prison of thousands of people, but not a country of millions.
"We should be more like Europe," the gun controllers say.
But then why are French and Belgian soldiers deployed across major cities
after Islamic terrorists carried out attacks with heavy firepower that
killed over a hundred people? You can get a 'military weapon'
in the capital of the European Union for $1,000 in
under an hour. Gun control doesn't work there. Or here.
<https://www.reuters.com/artic
SKCN0T504J20151116>
There are two ways to cope with mass shootings and killings.
We can work to turn our societies into giant prisons in the hopes of
impeding that 0.1% of the population which is inclined to violence over
drugs, deranged fantasies or the Koran from shooting up malls, ramming cars
into crowds, setting off pressure cooker bombs or flying planes into
skyscrapers.
Or we can get rid of that 0.1% and actually have a free and safe society.
We've tried turning our country into a giant prison while failing to protect
our borders, crack down on gangs or stop the psychos. And the experiment has
devastated virtually every major city, cost tens of thousands of lives, made
flying miserable, and brought our country to the brink of destruction.
Maybe we ought to try common sense instead.
Either that or we can pass the latest raft of "common sense" gun control
laws that haven't worked before while letting every Islamic terrorist and
Latin American gang member enter the country, while letting every Chicago
gang continue fighting its feuds, and while letting every deranged monster
plot an attack while ignoring the warning signs until it's too late. Surely
gun control will stop all of them.
Every single one.
Constitutional conservatives often echo, "Guns don't kill people, people
do." But they neglect the obvious corollary. "Don't lock up the guns, lock
up the killers."
Murder is a moral problem.
When societies such as Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan kill, it's everyone's
moral problem. But when societies such as ours enable killers by failing to
restrain them, that's also true. A society engaging in mass murder has to
remove its leaders. But a society where mass killers operate has to restore
its morality by removing those, as Jefferson put it, "whose existence is
become inconsistent with the safety of their fellow citizens." Their
existence is physically inconsistent because it's morally inconsistent.
What unites mass killers, the terrorists and the psychos, the Neo-Nazis and
the Antifas, the gang members and the drug dealers, is that their moral
outlook is completely incompatible with ours.
Some criminals don't have a moral outlook at all. Mentally ill killers may
be so out of contact with reality that they are incapable of having a moral
outlook. And terrorists have their own moral outlook, but one which would
turn our society into a killing field and prison overseen by Islamists,
Nazis or Communists.
The Left insists that we ought to take away guns and other freedoms equally
from everyone.
We all ought to live in prison. Or none of us should live in a prison.
And we've tried it their way for three generations. We've built walls
everywhere except around our borders. We share our communities with
criminals and the insane. Every house has an alarm system. There may be as
many as a million law enforcement officers in the United States. Are we
better off?
The first prerequisite to any morality is understanding that actions
originate within individuals. The Left is hopelessly immoral because it
believes that actions originate within external social conditions. It
insists that murder is caused by the social conditions of capitalism, the
gun industry or poverty. It justifies its own massacres as attempts to
remedy the social conditions of capitalism by force.
That's why murder thrives under leftist governments, whether in Venezuela or
Chicago.
If we want to stop mass killings, we have to restore a moral society based
on individual responsibility. The alternative is living in one giant
progressive prison with the killers, the psychos and the terrorists.
Either we control the criminals or we lose all control over our own lives.
The moral equation of murder wasn't altered by the technology of the
automatic weapon. The most ancient societies in the world have known how to
deal with it. We chose to forget.
When Cain slew his brother with a rock, G-d drove him out of the civilized
lands.
G-d did not ban rocks. He banned murderers.
If we want to stop killings, mass or singular, we have to drive our own
Cains out of our civilization. Or reconcile ourselves to living in a society
where Cain has a gun and Abel is always on the run.
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ABOUT DANIEL GREENFIELD
<https://www.frontpagemag.com/
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an
investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic
terrorism.
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