COLUMN OF THE WEEK
It was after a school shooting near Spokane last September that Spokane
Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich addressed a clutch of reporters: “When I was in
high school, every one of those rigs in the high school parking lot had
a gun in the gun rack. Why? We went hunting on the way home. None of
those guns ever walked into a school, none of those guns ever shot
anybody... Did the gun change or did you as a society change? I'll give
you odds it was you as a society. Because you started glorifying
cultures of violence. You glorified the gang culture, you glorified
games that actually gave you points for raping and killing people. The
gun didn't change, we changed.”
It seems clear to me the sheriff was speaking about rap music with its
hateful, violent and misogynistic lyrics, and video games like Grand
Theft Auto, where you can have sex with a prostitute then strangle her
or pull an innocent person out of a car, beat him, then steal his vehicle.
I am a First Amendment purist and don't want to see expression censored
in any way. And I don't argue that there's a straight line between any
specific cultural creation and bad acts. But surely, a culture in which
those in authority approve of and argue for things like gangsta rap and
GTA — and indeed for the use of violence to silence speech that offends
them — well, such a culture becomes a machine for transforming madness
into murder. The left wants to defend gangstas and "transgressive" art
and antifa thugs — but when the shooting starts, they blame the guns.
The left wants to get rid of feminine modesty and masculine
protectiveness and social restrictions on sex — but when the abuse and
rape and harassment rise to the surface, they start whining about toxic
manhood. Perhaps they should have listened to the Catholic apologist
G.K. Chesterton, who wrote about the difference between reforming
society and deforming it — a passage that was neatly paraphrased by John
F. Kennedy: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it
was put up."
Now the left wants to legitimize disrespect for the flag and for
Christianity. They want to ignore the rule of law at the border and
silence protests against Islamic ideas that are antithetical to every
good thing the west stands for. They should look to Europe where all
that's been accomplished. And now, when European women are molested in
the public square, the gormless authorities advise them to behave more
modestly lest immigrants get the wrong idea. When Islamic knives come
out and Islamic bombs go off, the police rush to harass — who? Those who
question the dictates of the Koran.
The left wants us to reel in shock that Donald Trump chased women or
praised Russian strong men? Who was it who defended the infidelities and
possible rapes of Bill Clinton? Who was it who turned a blind eye to
Barack Obama consorting with terrorists and hate-mongers like Farrakhan?
For fifteen years and more, I have been complaining that the right is
silenced in our culture — blacklisted and excluded and ignored in
entertainment, mainstream news outlets, and the universities. But the
flip side of that is this: the degradation of our culture is almost
entirely a leftist achievement. Over the last fifty years, it's the left
that has assaulted every moral norm and disdained every religious and
cultural restraint. The left owns the dismal tide. They don't like the
results? They're looking for someone or something to blame? Maybe they
should start by hunting up a mirror.
https://pjmedia.com/
As calls grow louder for gun control, even outright repeal of the Second
Amendment on some social media threads, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R)
said those arguments miss the point.
Guns have been with us since the nation's founding, but school shootings
are a relatively recent phenomenon. So it's not the gun, it's the
culture that's changed, Gov. Bevin told Fox News's Tucker Carlson Monday
night: “There are more gun restrictions now. There are more rules about
who can and can't own a gun or how a gun might be acquired then there
were 50 and 100 years ago. And yet, 50 and 100 years ago, children did
not slaughter other children at school. What has changed? It isn't the
gun….”
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/
When Will We Have the Guts to Link Fatherlessness to School Shootings?
https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/
No comments:
Post a Comment