On Thursday evening, "Tucker Carlson Tonight" examined the carnage in Florida from various angles - the warning to the FBI that went nowhere, gun laws at home and abroad, mental health issues, etc.
On the Democrats' reflexive trope, the "gun control" argument will go nowhere, and everybody knows it. In 1996 Australians owned guns at a far lower rate than Americans do, and their sense of themselves and their nation's liberties was not so intimately bound up with private gun ownership as America's is. You would have to persuade freeborn citizens fundamentally to rethink their conception of gun rights, and Dems aren't in the persuasion business - not when it's easier to sneer at tens of millions of law-abiding gun owners who not unreasonably resent having the depravity of the usual mentally-ill misfit loner hung around their necks.
So the Aussie example is irrelevant unless Democrats want to provoke a civil war.
As for the FBI, that makes "Nikolas Cruz" (as I said down in the comments section yesterday) a non-jihadist example of the "known wolf" - and another cautionary tale in the limits of the panopticon security state with unlimited resources.
Gun-control advocates often say that, well, the Second Amendment was passed in the age of muskets, before all these big, scary-looking semi-automatics came along. In fact, there's a mere quarter-century between the death of the last Founding Father (Madison, in 1836) and the invention of the first continuous rapid-fire gun (the Gatling, in 1861). It's a 19th-century technology, like almost everything else other than the computer. But not until the late 20th and early 21st centuries did schoolboys think to use that 19th-century technology to slaughter their classmates.
So we - or at any rate some of us - have changed, and for the worse. And the question is why that is: The decline of organized religion, the rise of ersatz substitutes, the collapse of the family, the spread of mass media, the expansion of education, its descent into social engineering, the epidemic of over-medication, the absence of men, the metastasization of narcissism and the worship of the self... Maybe we could have weathered two or three of these, but, as I've said before, we changed too much too fast - and somewhere in the void a particular combination of factors incubated the depressingly similar young men who gun down their fellow pupils.
On Tucker's show, I came last, and we tried to formulate some final thoughts. Click below to watch:
My compatriot Kathy Shaidle has revisited a piece of hers from 2012: "Ban Schools, Not Guns." Actually, I think I got to that one almost twenty years ago, in The Daily Telegraph of May 22nd 1999. You'll notice the already weary familiarity of the media analysis:
To mark President Clinton's visit to the grieving citizens of Littleton, Colorado, some kid in Conyers, Georgia, decided to shoot six of his classmates.
Their wounds were described as 'non life threatening' but, even so, the usual experts found themselves dragged back to the TV studios to say all the things about guns, the Internet, gloomy pop music and absentee parents that they said a month ago. Nevertheless, the argument has subtly evolved over the last month. Instead of pondering whether firearms, video games and Hitler worship are to blame, the unsayable is at last beginning to be said: the reason kids are shooting up high schools is ...high schools.
My own view was that the fetishization of "self-esteem" assists the transformation of every "repressed lonely fantasist into a narcissistic psycho". And, since then, the hyper-reality of Internet identity has assisted it further: The self-confident loser is a very contemporary phenomenon. On the TV the other day, someone said there had been as many school shootings in the first seventeen years of this century as in the entirety of the last.
More broadly, as I often note, in 1939 the average American had an Eighth Grade education. Eighth Grade America won the Second World War and went on to dominate the planet. Today's Twenty-Eighth Grade America prolongs education interminably but to little purpose, even for those of a scholarly bent. It's obvious to those of us who have children in high school that by junior year there are any number of boys in particular who have ceased learning and on whom the burdens of daily attendance and deferred adulthood are beginning to chafe. Instead of promising to send every child to college, we should be thinking of ways to telescope education and enable those of non-academic inclination to leave with a meaningful qualification at, say, sixteen.
~If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club, feel free to disagree in the comments. You can find more details about the Club here. And please join Mark later today, Friday, when he'll be launching this month's brand new audio adventure in Tales for Our Time.
Comment on this item (members only)
Submission of reader comments is restricted to Mark Steyn Club members only. If you are not yet a member, please click here to join. If you are already a member, please log in here:
Member Login
141 Member Comments
Remember the time of prohibition on alcohol. People obsessed and made wild claims against alcohol calling it the root of all evil in the society. Alcohol was to blame for everything and people were assumed to have no hold on it and have absolutely no control of themselves—a false and sensationalist claim.
Prohibition started and crime went through the roof; black markets, bootlegging, murder, mafia were rampant. The very politicians that prohibited alcohol were also the ones in the market to buy it and sell it.
Why then will we do the same things withguns? Are the left politicians eager to create this black market because they will profit from their black market sales? What do they really have up their sleeves?
It is crazy to believe that they really care about lives so much when they spend millions to foment abortion. Why don't they show they care more by providing school security the way they do for airports? You can't even say the word bomb in an airport yet you have a kid saying he's going to kill people and nobody pays attention?
It's also sad to think that the masses are so complicit and gullible. But they are. They readily blame Trump for every evil when he's only been in power just a year. What did Obama ever do about these crimes that happened in his 8 YEARS of power? Nothing. He turned the attention on something self-serving and worthless like blaming other people and republicans and betraying the military.
People need to read a bit more history than just get their information from Facebook. It's amazing how many people get their "facts" from Facebook instead of picking up a history book or actually doing some real research. We have become a society of ignorant idiots.
This short article is well worth a read Mr. Steyn. I came across it through a retweet from Jordan Peterson. I'm not on twitter myself but I view some feeds occasionally.
I realize that simply posting links is frowned upon, but I doubt I could add any kind of short comment that could improve upon this article.
A letter to the boys & young men of America.
http://jishirofinney.com/index.php/2018/02/17/533/
A lot of people are seem to be prefacing their observations with something like, "I'm not saying all guns should be banned but only (your choice here) should be banned to the public." It doesn't work that way. First (and I think the NRA is right on this) it ignores the "mission creep" and expansion of authority endemic to all federal bureaucratic institutions, particularly those of a law enforcement variety. If a full-scale ban on "X" weapon is decreed then a beachhead will have been created to expand government reach farther and farther toward full-scale confiscation. We saw this with Obama care which, let's face it, is never going away and will eventually result in single payor. The position of the "gun lobby" is correct - It is better to fight in the first ditch than the last.
Second - A ban on anything for which there is a demand will create an illegal black market with very bad people running it. We have been fighting a "War on Drugs" for nearly half a century - How's that been going? We have 2,300,000 people in prison and nothing to show for it but a spike in heroin overdose deaths. However the "drug enforcement bureacracy" is doing just fine thank you.
I don't know much about firearms but I do know this - The ONLY way you are going to eliminate things like the Parkland tragedy odd to burn the 4th Amendment and authorize full-scale searches without cause of persons, property and dwellings. If that's what you want then you may as well say so.
I wish more people would do some critical thinking instead of going crazy into "guns are the roof of all evil" histeria. I am amazed at the power the left has at proselytizing. They spend an incredible amount of resources to do this and we just let them. They win people over by exhaustion and flooding all channels with their hysterical propaganda.
If you are a Christian it is simple John 1 5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. The darkness comprehends it not ... Darkness is spreading over planet at an alarming pace
One of my favorite sci-fi books and films is "Solaris" by the Russian author Stanislaw Lem. There's a lot going on in both book and film but the central idea seems to be, "What if we made contact with aliens (or they made contact with us) and we found we could never, ever understand them?" The main character tries and it slowly dawns on him that Solaris (the sentient planet) just doesn't care about either him or his colleagues, all of whom have been driven mad by the attempt.
So too individuals like the Parkland and Las Vegas shooters (although it looks like there is more to the latter than meets the eye.) We have banished the idea of evil as "character flaw" so what are we left with? Psycho-babble and sloganeering. Our media-drenched culture argues that there HAS to be a reason that fits into one of our comfortable paradigms. But the standard bromides such as abuse as a child, anger at the government, a tumor int he brain or a willingness to die for some whack-job cause just doesn't do it. What's the next step? Demand some sort of psychological exam for a gun purchase? There are a ton of psychos out there who can pass your average canned psyche exam with flying colors.
The mature and rational position would be to accept that there are just some thing out there that defy explanation or the comfortable bromides of our therapeutic society. But that doesn't get you votes, ratings, face time on silly late-night talk shows or the chance to show how "deeply affected" you are by whatever happened.
You have a point here, but I believe it to be seriously flawed.
You appear to be saying that the root cause of these events can never be understood so why bother. Just move along, nothing to see here.
I've made other comments on this article so I won't repeat them here, but you can read them if you want further explanation of why I disagree with your post.
At best, your viewpoint seems escapist.
Students are inherently dependent on government, so the Leftist state seeks to expand their numbers just like any other special interest group that requires more government. One difference with education compared to other social services is that education has a certain "artistic" or jewelry-like quality in that the more you pay for it, the better everyone thinks it is. So the whole system is biased towards continuous expansion.
Even if the Second Amendment were to be repealed, Australia's extreme gun laws would fall foul of the Fourth because in Australia the police can enter your premises to inspect your licensed guns and ammunition and their (separate, locked) storages anytime to suit their convenience.
What a joy it must be, to have a Bill of Rights.
I just wish to comment on that final sentence. We seem to be regressing in preparing young people for adult life. In 1966 my wife left school at the age of 16. She decided that school was not for her so she left and got a job. This was not anything of note it was something young people did at the time so I agree with Mark. The people in charge of education policy should be a bit more imaginative in the type of education and training that is on offer
I rarely comment but I cannot resist. I do not own a gun nor do I desire to, but I understand and fully support the right to bear arms especially in this increasingly violent world. In my opinion, though, I think the key misstep in all that transpired before this kid shot up the school was that he was able to walk in to a gun shop and pass an instant online FBI background check and walk out the door with serious weapons and ammo. This is simply too easy. I propose two changes: 1 - That gun shops start requiring in-person, signed and ID checked character references from at least two people that are willing to vouch for the character of the person looking to buy the gun(s). The affidavite would make it clear that if the person uses the weapon illegally, they will have to answer for it. Once they pass the check, they are cleared for future purchases. 2 - The FBI DB that is checked gets expanded to include information from local police and state and mental health systems. How an online FBI check did not include any info about this kid causing 30 or more police visits or that he got expelled from school is beyond me. With today's technology, Law Enforcement and other state and local databases can and must me better shared. The legal gun sellers want and need to know that they are selling to decent, law abiding and mentally fit individuals. Just like a buying a house, we need to make make it as thorough a process as possible and if done right, it would not slow the process down. A minor inconvenience that would have stopped this nut case in his tracks.
Aside from the above, we tend to look at these shooters as people just like you and me who, for whatever reason, made evil, horrible choices and we are shocked and horrified and angry that someone could do such heinous things. I do not see it that way. Based on the historical info we are reading about this guy, his brain chemistry/brain development is obviously majorly screwed up and has been screwed up for many years, probably since birth and he was never ever an average normal person. We as a society, need to do a better job of screening for these types of people that are obviously not mentally normal. So many alarms were set off about this kid so many times, yet it seemed to always end in "it is what it is". Fine, let it be "it is what it is", but at least, when a person starts showing repeated, abnormally violent behavior, put a marker on the person digitally and use these vast government and commercial databases to let certain people(ie. gun sellers) know that he could possibly be a danger to society due to identified mental issues. Yes, it sounds somewhat dystopian, but why not? We certianly cannot force them into mental institutions and give them lombotomies like in days past. How to deal with all these mentally screwed up people in this country is a hard reality that no one wants to deal with because it is a massive pandora's box. So they all just want to blame some inanimate man made object that cannot fight back and does nothing without human control - guns.
But who am I kidding, the hard left does not want common sense approaches, they just want full gun confiscation. Just like they demand open borders. They will deny it, but the shrill wing of the left are controlling the narrative. There is no reasoning with them and besides, even if they will never get what they want, sloganeering for gun control gets votes and makes them feel morally superior. I say we make a grand "save innocent lives" bargain, we will agree to make guns illegal if they agree to make abortion illegal. There will be peace in the middle east before the left ever agrees to that.
Certainly the FBI dropping the ball a bit on this one is quite telling, this man had so many red flags on him he could have marched in a May Day parade and not looked out of place. I am not suggesting a conspiracy but it is certainly illustrative of how you really cannot rely on a giant federal agency to always act in every case, no matter how obvious in hindsight. Of course the FBI will have the usual solution - More money! More resources! More everything! We are just snowed under right now! Standard response for any bureaucracy, never let an event like this go to waste.
As for the issue of gun control, nothing simpler. The constitution has been amended many times, just follow the procedure outlined there. Trying to get a sneaky ban using legislation (either directly, or indirectly by threading together various bits and pieces of seeming disparate laws and regulations) is always going to be thwarted since the trust of the public for their politicians is minimal and rightly so. History has shown clearly that politicians are not to be trusted since they do not know when to stop with such laws. There are also a great deal of them who want to elevate themselves as the one(s) who managed to bypass the constitution and finally get that gun ban in. That hubris takes priority over actually doing their jobs and this is only going to get worse. That pesky constitution! How does one get around it? Watch and see.
There's a good success story in a book called "A Father, A Son, and a Three-Mile Run", which, oddly enough, I saw propped up on a convenience store shelf yesterday. In it, a judge goes beyond his duties to intervene in the lives of people before him. He gets involved in who they are, and what is going on, and is able not just to punish, but to rehabilitate them. He demonstrates that a caring society doesn't ignore warning signs, like the FBI did in Parkland, and the Air Force did in the November case of the Sutherland Springs, Tex. shooter; and determines to try to shape salvageable people, who are going bad, into decent citizens.
The monster in the room in all this is the destructive reality of the out-of-control use of psychiatric drugs on children to control their behaviors - i.e. their completely predictable wriggles due to pent-up energy. In the old days, children came from rural farms - walking miles after doing the morning chores, the city kids were out on the streets doing little jobs for cash, like stacking crates for shopkeepers. They were in good physical shape and could sit quietly in their seats for a shorter school day. Now students come from apartments or houses with no outside activities. They have poor core muscle tone so they don't sit well in desks and their bodies fatigue. The schools demand longer hours with few chances to exercise.
The scandal is the totality of the pediatric medical profession and society completely accepting ignorant diagnosis from unqualified educators that a child needs 'ritalin' for a very broadly and foggily defined Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, originally meant perhaps for rare, extreme cases but generously applied to the general student public. A 'psychiatric condition' everyone gets when they're bored to tears and stuck in a room. It used to be called 'cabin fever' or 'exam week crazy.' The normalization of the drug culture of modern America is appalling - the unquestioning and lazy acceptance that there's a pill to fix everything. The education culture claims it's boys-boys-boys getting in the way of classroom decorum to learn ... nothing, so educators with no more than Bachelors degrees in General Education will sternly call the parents in to cruelly inform them that their boys are defective and need to be medicated or not be welcome in the class. But, parents who doubt and show even a hint of not going with the game are pressured. The parents go to the pediatrician who 9 out of 10 times agrees and writes out a prescription without anything except a mis-spelled note with bad grammar from the educator. Then it's parents against the "experts.' Intimidation.
They will hound the parents - "We know you didn't give your son his medication today." (true story). This is an artificially-induced plague on boys that could be stopped overnight - no more refills for those brain-messing drugs. Help them detox. Back to the healing reality of exercise, good nutrition for the body and solid academics for the brain.
In contrast to the education culture's bias that boys are difficult, somehow, the Army gets bus-loads of young, out of shape, disorganized, chaotic groups of men of various literacy competencies every three months and runs them so hard they fall asleep standing up. Their barracks at lights out are silent - too exhausted to snore. At the end of this short training, they stand straight, are able to dress and conduct themselves so well people applaud appreciatively when they march past, are quiet when told to be, sit up in classes and take notes. Funny that - it's the same boys the schools told everyone they couldn't manage.
Outside the U.S.it's another world of normalcy in schools. If it was true, then these same things should be manifesting elsewhere, but they aren't. Once a child is started on these drugs, the system pressures to keep them on them, at increasing levels of intensity. A horrible underlying situation that can be grotesquely and cruelly manipulated.
Just to add that if we who have been hardly in the U.S. for the past two decades and yet were able to get all this information from many real, and nice, hardworking people affected by it in the short amount of time allotted to us, how bad is it? How bad is people not noticing how bad it has become? Frog in the pot on the increasingly hot stove burner and all that.? We usually have no idea what's going on so we're forced to ask questions from just about everyone, and it's amazing and sobering what one learns.
A brief comment re drugs (as not wanting to further over-extend on this thread). It seems a lot of these excessive and questionable prescriptions of psychotropic medications are a marker (rather than a direct cause) of the behaviour of these messed-up children and young adults. The developing brain is no doubt better off free from the effect of such drugs (though sometimes there might be reasonable indications for treatment), but whether these prescribed medications induce homicidal behaviour (as another commenter suggests) is doubtful.
You made an excellent comment on another thread some weeks back re the abuse of narcotics, hallucinogens and other mind-altering drugs, to the effect that such substances can serve to repress any rudimentary conscience that might otherwise prevent a person from killing another. More generally, the drugs are being used to blunt or distort the perception of reality, which must also wreak havoc with the "function" of morality in many instances.
Why does almost everyone here commenting on this topic ASSUME that teenagers today ARE DIFFERENT than in the past? Human nature, human frailties like anger, vengefulness, resentment is still the same as the dawn of humanity, but our human capacity to help, to understand, has changed - it has improved immensely in the last century due to the irrepressable advancement of science. Today, there are many professionals in the field of psychology, and medications that genuinely help most people, and there are many people with mental health issues across the spectrum; these same mental health issues have ALWAYS EXISTED, they aren't new in my opinion. What makes us think society is deteriorating, is now there is constant MASS MEDIA to exaggerate, alarm, and make vacuous speculations. AND there are 300,000,000 people in America, so it appears more horrific incidents per capita are happening, when there are LESS. What are the statistics for number of shooters per number of schools in America? I don't know, but it's very very low. All this negative psycho-analysis of all the things "wrong" with youth today, society today is off the mark, and driven by the MSM, which puts EVERYTHING OUT OF PERSPECTIVE TO REALITY. Atrocities have always happened through-out human history, but you didn't hear about the vast majority. Ignore the MSM. I don't even watch it anymore. SOCIETY IS INCREMENTALLY IMPROVING, NOT DETERIORATING. THERE IS A LOT OF GOOD, A LOT OF IMPROVEMENTS IN SOCIETY IN THE LAST CENTURY OR TWO; But everyone on this thread seems to be SUCKERED IN by the MSM.
It seems, generally, that school shooters are trying to force society to recognize what is missing. We discarded what is indispensable. They are a product of society. Society's failed them, and they're lashing back.
Normal teenagers' brains aren't developed enough to be able to control themselves, which is why they do such daring things. Add that to an abnormal teenager, who may not have grown up in a two-parent family or gotten the love and care they desperately needed. They're desperate, and, despite being loners, can't go it alone. Now they are dead, or in jail and society's taking care of them.
Unless we turn back to faith and the virtues of our heritage, cracked vessels will continue making society pay for what it has become. What will I do? That's the question.
"the reason kids are shooting up high schools is ...high schools."
Well put.
Indoctrination with social engineering isn't without its side effects. When you're of a class that is looked upon with contempt by your education system perhaps contempt for others is what you learn.
Do you suppose more identity politics and cultural Marxism will heal these broken kids?
It's easy to be persuaded by all that, but typically kids drop out in discouragement and self-blame. They actually don't attack. It's typical that they'll blame themselves for their parents' divorce or parent's abusive behavior, so they react that way for many fails that they are not responsible for in any measure.
The problem we are having now reconciling with is that a witness is all over the news interviewed who said that she was talking to the suspect who she actually was familiar with, in one building while shots were ringing out in another. More than one student is on the news saying there was more than one shooter. Uh-oh, awkward. Looks like we all need to demand some more, solid, verified information as to what happened and who was where doing what and when. And that illustrating photo above is from a video that actually shows that 'legal counsel' woman stroking the suspect's back during all that. eewww first reaction,, and then the brain demands, say what??!
One assumes that the school, especially of that size, has video of every hallway. It should be very clear and easily provable to the public what happened and where. The key word is 'transparency.' The more of it = the less to hide (honesty); but the less of it t= he more to hide (dishonest). So, we (the public) have to wait and see. On the other, more grumpy hand, everyone assumed the same of Las Vegas, which as a conventional wisdom opinion is far more more Gollum about what every single person, dog and stray cat does inside the city limits to protect their precioussssss money, yet practically zero video was released to the public. As if all the casino owners are neo-Neanderthals who've never heard of zis ting 'video cameras', unlike the ignorant rubes who keep pestering them.
"It's easy to be persuaded by all that, but typically kids drop out in discouragement and self-blame."
Typically kids don't kill other kids either. My comment above isn't an expert psychological analysis of the suspect. In fact, I haven't really followed this story aside from reading headlines. My comments are more about the increasing frequency with these events are occurring and how that is probably related to dysfunctional psychological development in children, and that that development is a result of what the educators are pushing on them.
Everything you said is very reasonable and appropriate. Not sure however that any of us have been given an honest picture of what happened, and initial statements that can't possibly have had enough time to have been verified have set a certain narrative. That cheats us all as we do want to know what happened to hopefully fix the problem. Numerous students are on film from that day stating multiple shooters. But where are they? Rumor? Witness? If that's the case then it was more complicated than just one disaffected youth. But maybe they're just repeating hearsay from other students also? It'll take time to sort it out - thus the importance of the security video which in theory should show everything. But, we have to know the truth first, otherwise we're all led down a path to a solution that isn't appropriate.
Thanks!
You and I appear to be discussing different things. You're talking about the specific details of this specific case and looking for a specific cause. I'm talking about these events in general and a general cause. The Columbine incident was more than one shooter, and this might be a lone shooter or it might have been multiple shooters. While that will no doubt be significant information in this specific case, in general terms it's more or less irrelevant.
As I mentioned, I haven't followed this incident. But as my comments illustrate, I nonetheless have an opinion as to a likely cause for these incidents in general. There has been widespread firearm ownership in the US and throughout the Western world at different times since the era of the musket. It's only in recent times that these events have become commonplace. With firearms, as with vehicles and pressure cookers, the root cause is not found in the device but in the beliefs of the operator. When it's children doing this sort of thing then it's more about programming than principles as they haven't yet had the experience to develop a world view.
There is absolutely a general problem as you described.
Is it possible to wonder if these events aren't actually commonplace, as the media encourages us all to think? Without the large screen TVs blaring in lurid HD with breathless news anchors and what seem to be more titillating than informative glimpses of pictures, one wouldn't have any sense that anywhere anyplace was amiss. Outside in the towns and cities, it's very mundane, people going to work, kids to school, delivery vehicles driving back and forth. With mass media, an event - no matter what it is - that takes place in literally a space no bigger than a 1/4 of a football field is broadcast so overwhelmingly into everyone's visions and consciousness it seems as if it's right there in front of the viewer, no matter that it's two thousand miles away. This media tight camera focus is used in a very deceiving manner. What comes to mind when people think of Africa? A seething riot in the street? (three street blocks in 400,000 square miles) A starving kid sitting on a mat? (one square foot in a shelter of 20 x 30 feet). What does the media show the public? Never the normal daily hustle and bustle of people going to work, masses of properly-fed kids in school uniforms walking or riding to school. They never show 'parents', just kids. So, just sharing thoughts and lamenting that it's hard to really figure out the state of the current generation in general and in a case like this week's when we can't get good information and data to work with.
Well, things are probably going to be difficult for a long time. The seeds for this cancerous fruit are planted in the University system and that's where you'll find the 'educators' are trained. Ultimately they are now spreading it to almost all of the youth. Never before has it been a good idea to remain 'uneducated'.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/07/left-wing-indoctrination-in-the-schools-its-worse-than-you-think.php?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=sw&utm_campaign=sw
At the risk of being controversial on a subject which (as an "outsider") is none of my business, Mark's very comprehensive explanation as to "why?" provides a depressing prediction of how things are likely to play out as far as future US mass shootings are concerned. With the myriad messed-up factors at play, the epidemic of psychopathic lone wolves will only escalate. In some respects, it is a far more diffuse and insidious problem than the jihadist lone-wolf-collective phenomenon.
Will it be possible to maintain an "acceptable level of violence", assuming there will be many more dangerous "self-confident losers" reaching high school age a decade from now? If there's, say, a mass shooting or two in the US every week, (including the jihadist and non-school variants) will there be sufficient impetus for some sort of gun control (eg semi-automatic firearms)? The Australian statistics— pre vs post 1996 law reform— are pretty compelling, and that's the one variable that could be changed (surely without precipitating civil war?!), if only to a limited extent.
The Boston killers used pressure cookers. That's a pretty compelling case for pressure cooker control. A crock pot is all we really need. Unfortunately, restrictions on law abiding pressure cooker users won't prevent criminal use.
Yes, I'm familiar with the argument— we can't ban commercial aircraft travel either, I agree. But the statistics mentioned are quite compelling, given that there were 13 mass shootings in the two decades before 1996 and there've been zero in the subsequent two-plus decades. Mark seemed to indicate that the Australian experience is irrelevant only because law abiding US gun owners would never accept any change to the status quo.
Knowing nothing about guns myself, I wasn't referring to a blanket ban, but the sort of regulatory change (unforgivable to use the term in this context, I realise) that would prevent the easy acquisition by any member of the public of the rapid-fire type that has the potential to kill/ injure many people in a very short time. People still legally own guns in Australia and there have been gun-related homicides, generally within criminal gangs dealing in drugs etc, and also two terrorist attacks; in one of these cases, a 15 year old psychopathic jihadist used an illegally obtained revolver/ handgun (I'm not familiar with the terminology) to shoot a "random" person on the street who'd just exited a police headquarters building (the victim was a plain-clothed accountant) in the back of the head at point blank range. The still-armed teenager was shot dead just moments later, but presumably he could have killed many more people even in that time with the "right" type of gun, of the sort commonly used is mass shootings— correct?
Re. rocks, pressure cookers etc, though arguably less efficient (assuming a marksman is reasonably competent... surely the knife-attacker in your example could have killed more people in a shorter time if an efficient firearm had been efficiently utilised?), it also appears that it is the mass shooting method that specifically appeals to the homicidal-loser-teen type. I also completely disagree with your assertion that "psychopaths don't consider efficiency". The Las Vegas psycho certainly did, as well as most school shooters. As do most Islamic psychopaths. Even for those who aren't successful, the common objective is almost always to inflict maximal random carnage before being taken out (versus the deliberate targeting of a limited number of victims)— circumstances, method and competence permitting.
If you're not going to ban all guns, those that remain will still be used. If you want to ban them all, you'll need a Constitution change. Ain't gonna happen. Actually, if you want to ban some weapons, you'll need more liberal judges, because recent attempts to ban some in some places have been overturned. So, assuming bans won't work, neither legally nor practically, we need to consider what we want to do about psycho violence. My discussions elsewhere on this page show methods that would work. Those who sincerely want improvements need to move past emotion and fear, and think about solutions that will work.
I am happy to see others were as disappointed as I in the Carlson segment. Pretty poor, in my estimation. For one thing, I think Tucker has been getting caught up in two popular "narratives" of the day -- the "opioid crisis" and the "social media crisis". I think that underlying both of these narratives are two industries making tons of money and people, i.e government and lawyers, who want a piece of those pies through big lawsuits.
However, I'm growing alienated here and I'm going to drop this group and go out and walk around my neighborhood looking for people who want to discuss Mark Steyn.
Don't leave the group Steven. There is a lot of group-think here, despite the great intelligence and knowledge of the commenters. We are human and have biases. Alternative views and opinions are needed, to help us come to more accurate conclusions on many complex topics.
Don't worry, Holly. I was merely poking fun at those who fret about the youth spending their time online with like-minded others. This seems like a pretty ironic place to do that.
Plus, I paid for this durn thing and I'm staying for every penny's worth!
Right on Steven!!:))
'The void is now rewarding and fulfilling'...truer words were never uttered. I live in a decent part of Phoenix and I work in one of the most crime-ridden. Used to be that you'd only see really sorry examples of broken people begging on the street corners by my work. Not now. Young, able bodied people have cardboard signs at intersections even in the upscale parts of town even though just about every grocery store, mini mart and more are hiring. My work is hiring (but I do not tolerate those who don't pull their weight). There is a good chunk of society, much of it drug induced (sure, it's meth on the street corners but SSRI/ADHD prescriptions at the schools) that have just checked out from the societal norms and the most primal human instinct of taking care of oneself. The erosion of regard for life is also a factor, thanks liberals....
Mark's comment about how the internet provides "losers" with a satisfying but reclusive life was compelling. I had noticed before that my use of the internet has been increasingly pulling me away from opportunities for actual human contact although my age and life altering circumstances have also played a large part in shrinking my social calendar entries.For some, the internet fills the unfilled gaps. Without going into the details of a personal sob story about lost loved ones, his comment has been very insightful. I am now more consciously aware--not uncommon after reading a Steyn article.
I'm sure Steyn wasn't impugning everybody that lives an isolated or secluded life as a loser because it is often beyond an elderly person's ability (not referring to me) or somebody that has lost their spouse etc to do much about it without a family support group etc. Mark also said (paraphrased) "all that a loser in the past could do before social media was kick a can in the backyard alone." TV has been around for decades and that is where many "loners" often spent their time. Everything from Hopalong Cassidy, Gunsmoke to Gomer Pyle... "Gump, how can you watch this s...," said his fellow patient. Good Question!
Also that sulking "loser" in the backyard kicking the can might have been the kindest and smartest kid in his class who was chosen by the local bully mob as their convenient whipping boy or girl. My temper kept me from being bullied but many kids have committed suicide from the brutal experience.
Internet use has become a "normal" compulsive behaviour, almost universally.
Kate, it's not "compulsive behaviour". It's the new normal. Societies change as technology changes. Don't condemn it because the young generation use it and understand it a lot more than our "older" generation. Society will adapt, and find an equilibrium with social media. There have always been "losers" , social misfits, whatever you want to call them. What makes you think there are more per capita present day? I would counter there are less. The internet connects misfits to a world they feel rejected from or uneasy in, when in social situations. It can CONNECT them too, to other people, and give them a voice. My adult sons use the internet a great deal: video games, social media like Reddit. I used to think it was bad for them, and I told them all the time; I was worried. This isn't normal I said. They patiently said they were fine, and continued despite my nagging that they were spending too much time in front of a computer. I finally wised up. I was insisting their life experience be like mine - anything different was not normal. Then I realized who am I to tell them what they should be spending their time doing? I watched tv for hours every day when I was young. Some people read all the time. I finally learned to trust them; that they know best how to adapt to the new technologies of their generation. I don't.
Hi Holly. It was an acknowledgement, not a condemnation, in response to Delibero. By "almost universally", I include myself. It's addictive for most people, adults included (constantly checking our phones, including last thing at night and first thing in the morning... and in between). Quite a bit written about it re psychology of addiction and impulse control.
Sorry Kate. True. The Internet brings the World to our finger-tips, and its a very interesting place. I don't know if i'd call it an addiction or lack of impulse control, but spending too much time doing one thing, is not a good thing.
And you can identify those who are addicted by their lengthy protestations. Same thing with crank addicts.
Cruz was a prototypical sociopath with black pools for eyes and a childhood of torturing animals to get him ready for the big game. He wasn't shaped by society but used the riches of society to fulfill his dreams. The prisons are full of these monsters who were once called criminally insane.
The other descriptor used, very appropriately, before "psychopathy" entered the lexicon was "moral insanity".
I see family breakdown as the main concern. Requiring both partners to work full time just to earn a basic household income leads to an endless list of problems. The concentration of wealth in fewer hands must be addressed. The Ford Motor Company employs 202,000 people at the moment. (I don't know how many Henry Ford employed when he was one of the richest men in the world). Compare that to Mark Zuckerburg. He employs just 25,000 people and produces nothing of worth yet he's worth an obscene amount of money.
Both partners working is a choice, not a requirement. When I grew up the majority of moms didn't work. And the typical family had maybe a 1,200 square foot house, 1.5 baths, one car, no cable tv/computer/smart phone, etc. If people were willing to have that standard of living a lot of families wouldn't need two incomes. I'm not saying it's the right choice but it is a choice.
Average wage in Australia for a non-government worker is about $60,000. Average price for an average house in a nice suburb is about a million dollars*. If you want to own that house as, say, an investment to fund your old age, you can't do it on one wage any more. (*Cruelly, house prices are being blown through the roof by overpaid public servants who can pay almost any price knowing they have a job for life, That's another wealth inequality that needs to be addressed).
Housing prices in the West are inflated because of mass immigration and that's a fact.
The politicians have various reasons for continuing immigration at these high rates, but one of them is to keep the construction industry humming along as that pushes the economic numbers up, cultural effects be damned. Mr. Steyn mentioned the economic effect of immigration just the other day in a segment with Tucker and raised the point that the cultural negatives outweigh the economic positives.
If out modern culture wasn't so anti family then there would be more families and they would also be larger. Our societies could generate the population growth they're seeking while at the same time the nuclear family would provide the stability that would produce a more cohesive society.
The modern education system is anti family, anti male, anti white, and anti anything of classical Western values. Expect further blowback from the continued destruction of children's lives and the foundations of Western civilization.
I haven't followed the recent incident but I'd guess there isn't much new in it. My comments are concerning these incidents in general.
In 2008, a significant day loomed for schoolchildren in the UK, but especially in England: those about to reach the legal school-leaving age of sixteen would have spent all of their school years under Labour governments. ** Tony Blair had promised to focus on "education, education, education", but, although his minions had regularly churned out "eye-catching initiatives" (Blair's own phrase, in another context), the achievement levels in basic subjects had not seriously improved. In other words, a large number of teenagers were about to leave school with nothing to show for a significant chunk of their lives.
Obviously, this could not continue. The press was starting to talk about "NEETs": young persons (always "young persons") Not in Education, Employment, or Training. These were the teenagers who had no aptitude for prolonged schooling, but had no potential or acquired skills to offer employers. Having supplanted Blair in Number 10, Gordon Brown decided to obviate the problem by legislating the NEETs out of existence. In future (from 2013), any "young person" had by law to be in school, in a job, in an apprenticeship, or in other training, up to the age of eighteen.
Self-evidently, this idea did nothing whatever to address the problem of failing schooling. Somebody who can't read by sixteen, after eleven years of school, is unlikely to be devouring Tolstoy, or Haynes Manuals, for that matter, two years later. Around the same time that this became law, left-wing parties throughout the United Kingdom started to float another notion: lowering the voting age to sixteen (from eighteen). Teenagers who were figuratively handcuffed to schooldesks by law could henceforth be a captive hustings.
When this idea arose again in parliamentary questions, just recently, the Deputy Prime Minister pointed out that his opponent would give the vote to people not trusted, in English law, to operate a sun-bed. It was a reasonable strike, but the minister couldn't state the more significant truth, i.e. that rather a lot of potential voters would be unable to read the ballot sheet, because they couldn't actually read anything at all (since that sorry statistic had barely shifted).
There must, by now, be a large body of potential UK voters whose reading skills are non-existent and, by definition, whose ability to comprehend proceedings at election time is also absent. That's all right, though, because the easy availability of postal votes relieves many voters of the burden of even having to tick the form.
Happy days in Tower Hamlets.
** The first writer to point that out may have been M. Steyn.
So disappointing to hear Tucker Carlson and Mark playing the "mental illness" card along with virtually everyone else in the media on both sides now. He must be mentally ill is the go-to response now to describe every violent act that falls far outside the realm of "normal behavior". Follow the twisted logic here. This nonsense then would cover murderous Jihadists, serial killers, husbands who murder their wives for insurance or to save money from a divorce and so on. The list is endless. These are all behavioral issues run amok and there is nothing organically wrong upstairs other than twisted thinking along with anti-social attitudes or pathological selfishness. The only exception I can come up with was Charles Whitman (if memory serves) whom after committing mass murder from a clock tower in Austin, TX years ago left a note requesting to have his brain examined because he couldn't understand this sudden murderous impulse. Turned out he had a large aggressive tumor affecting the impulse control area of his brain. That is a real mental illness and he's the only mass murderer I know of deserving sympathy and forgiveness. If you feel sorry for Nickolas Cruz because he's ill and needs treatment that's your business but then you should also feel sorry for Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Speck, Mohammed Atta - need I go on?
I can't overstate my admiration for Mark Steyn but to hear him spouting this idiocy along with Tucker, another hero of mine, is so disheartening. This kind of group-think is beneath these two brilliant conservatives, to my mind at least.
Roy:
I understand what you mean but IMO, Mark was referring to "the usual mentally-ill misfit" etc. I don't think either of them was making a legalistic clinical diagnosis of insanity that would mitigate Cruz's legal culpability.
Anyone that massacres school children or teenagers is mentally ill. I suspect most people come to a crossroads sometime in their lives after a death of a loved one, being bullied or other life altering situation where they are forced to choose between the dark-side path or the one that keeps you in the kinder and more stable world of the living. The world has changed forever and a new direction has to be chosen one way or the other.
A police officer was recently shot and the killer had recently lost his wife. People on the news were claiming "He was not the same after she died." Some in the media were excusing his actions on that basis but I agree with you in cases like that. Most rational and aware people certainly choose not to kill others because of a personal tragedy or hardship. A person has to be "mentally ill" and not necessarily insane to massacre innocents. How much of a choice Cruz had in going down the dark path is not known but according to his classmates etc, he went down that dark road long before he was 18 and 14 innocents paid for it with their lives..
Agree 100% Roy.
I cannot see any evidence that Mark "played the mental illness card"; a psychopath is generally understood to be "bad" rather than "ill".
Sorry, I'm the contrarian again. I always analyze things from another perspective. I'm not buying some of Mark's arguments. The narrative that is always promulgated here when it comes to societal topics is Groupthink. The opinion that society is going to hell in a hand-basket, for all the reasons Mark listed, is off target, and over-thinking. Families are falling apart? Most are doing fine. A society doesn't need to be religious to have good human values, as the Constitutions of Western countries, human rights, and the existence of more help for struggling people than there ever has been in history has demonstrated. Society is moving in the right direction, not the wrong direction. I hear the same, tired, historical lamenting of the older generation here, denouncing the younger generation and what they see as the deterioration of society. Every older generation has done it - how things were better when THEY were young, there are so many things wrong with young people today! The future looks dark!!! No they weren't better , they were worse. Just because atrocities occur doesn't mean society is deteriorating, it isn't. Many things are better in society than they were 50 years ago. There has always been, world-wide, the existence of Angry Young Men. America has 300 million people. I agree with Mark that the MSM has fueled these shootings, as they are after some sort of celebrity, or trying to justify their hatred, and their horrific actions. It's hard to stop these shootings when semi-automnatic weapons are so easily attainable and the "popular" tool, because the hateful young men ( women are absent, due to gender differences in aggression perhaps) see others doing it on the MSM; it is a way to finally vent their extreme feelings of vengefulness. The reason that these school shootings didn't happen before this, is because nobody thought of using semi-automatic weapons before Columbine. They just used a pistol, or a knife; only a couple people were killed or injured, and it didn't become main-stream news to 300 million people. People aren't changing in society for the worse, they are changing for the better. America usually leads the World in the good changes, by holding the Constitution ( and the Bible for many) up like a mirror. America has equalized Black Americans, and racism in America is MUCH less prevalent. It is better not worse. Women's and minority rights have seen important gains; the wealth of most Americans has greatly increased, and help for the needy and the those with mental health issues has greatly improved over the previous decades. Think how many young men got help before they hurt someone - many more than have been murdered with semi-automatic weapons in schools. Some people here are over-thinking what is happening with shootings. They will eventually pass. When the MSM stops reporting on them beyond the local area, they will dwindle. It's not a perfect world;, you see young men world-wide acting out their particular choice for venting anger, whether it's jihad or mass shootings, or wars, or racism, or hatred of women or a minority. Societies will always have problems crop up, it is human nature. America is particularly free, and particularly good at solving societal problems before the rest of the world does. Have Faith.
I can't agree with your suggestion that society is tending towards the better. Technology is allowing us to mask the societal rot for the moment. And that is what it is, like re-painting a rotting piece of wood so it looks better and concealing the rot. We are fatter than ever before, but can take Lipitor and other drugs to stave off the heart attack. And with our iPhone we can snap, delete and retake our selfie until our second chin is better hidden, rather than one shot on the Polaroid. We are more ignorant than ever before, but we can Google things and retrieve facts from the Internet rather than the recesses of our mind. And then get a Master's Degree in Fluff Studies to make us appear educated even though we rely upon Spellcheck.
As for the other societal progress you refer to, marriage and divorce rates are still higher than prior eras, as are the segments of our population that are on antidepressants. Our language is more vulgar. Our manners are declining. Our attention spans are nonexistent. Aside from perhaps people smoking less, I don't see anything that has moved in a positive direction since the 80s, if even that late.
Change is constant in Society, and it causes worry. We will adapt to all the changes as we have in the past. The internet is a huge change, yes. So wasTelevision, and I'm sure there were many of the older generation proclaiming that it was going "to rot" societal values. It didn't. We adapted. The Internet is new and transforming, as were automobiles, sky-scrapers, Wall Street, cell-phones, medicine, TV as afore-mentioned and a zillion other large and small advances in technology and Science. We'll adapt. You seem to think everyone is lazy or stupid. If that were the case, we wouldn't have all the above-mentioned technologocal advances, which are continuing today. Old norms are gradually being replaced by new ones. 99% of them are improvements; Yes equality for women has increased divorce rates, but it is worthwhile. People make most of their mistakes in their youth, because they are young, including marrying the wrong person. It is impossible to live with a person you are incompatable with for a lifetime, and hard to know if you are compatable when you are young. We have the freedom to make those mistakes. But people don't throw away their relationships on a whim; they do their best. Parents want their kids to be individuals; happy, free, able to choose their own career and life partners. Well, that applies to the parents as well. They should not be expected to sacrifice their happiness, at the same time telling their kids they are free to choose what they want in life. People do their best, but life is complicated. Society is generally kind, with help for those struggling with a myriad of problems. I'm glad we have anti-depressants, they are a huge help for some people, our language has always been vulgar, particularly at a certain age; the manners, kindness, attention spans and work ethic of the young people I know give me faith in the future of humanity. Do you form your opinions from watching the twisted perspective of society portrayed on the main-stream media? If so, you should get out and meet some young people in your community.
Excellent points, Holly! You are a deep thinker. I don't know that I totally agree with you on all points, but still you said a lot that needs to be said.
You and I seem to be on the same page sometimes Steven, but we seem to be the minority on some topics. That's ok. People disagree. The important thing is that we listen to each other. I find myself sometimes shifting my position a bit after listening (reading) other commenters well-thought-out and knowledgable comments. I tend to like to analyze things from the opposite angle; group-think is not a good thing. I look to Mark for insightful explanations on MANY topics, but I don't always agree with him. I've been criticized for that, but I don't believe any one person knows everything. Thanks for your support and encouragement.
You are welcome, Holly. You often make good points even if I don't agree with you. But, you want to know a little secret? Sometimes I don't even agree with myself.
If you mean you are open to changing your viewpoint once in a while, that's a virtue Steven:))
The absence of meaning appears to have been in Nikolas Cruz's life. The information coming out suggests foetal alcohol syndrome, which reveals the situation of his biological mother, among his other mental problems. I have come across such cases in my work and can understand why the public defender put her arm around him in Court.
There was no coordination among the services available. There are reports of at least two notifications to the FBI; the Police had been called to his home up to 39 times; the school must have noticed his behaviour - they expelled him for it. He enjoyed killing animals - one of the earliest signs of psychopathic tendencies. The foster mother seems to have been left to deal with the situation - and then she died. The old-fashioned thing to do might have been to lock him up in a mental asylum, which is now frowned upon, but something needs to be done with such damaged individuals to help them and protect others.
As for the gun issue, as an Australian I do find it hard to fathom why guns are still such an intrinsic part of American identity in the 21st century. Surely it is not the only aspect of American identity, so shedding it is not the end of the world. The gun control system, such as it is, appears to have also failed. He had had mental health treatment yet was still able to buy a gun.
To borrow from Lionel Shriver's great novel, we need to talk about Nikolas.
Elizabeth, guns are an intrinsic part of American life; they see it as their right to defend themselves from intruders. 99.9999% do not carry guns, just have them at home. There is a trade-off: accidents happen - children get hold of them, crimes of revenge against a spouse, or enemy. There are 300,000,000 guns in America and 300,000,000 people. What is the percentage of accidents or spousal killings in the population? I don't know exactly, but I'm guessing very low, maybe 0.0001%. School shootings are horrific, and a phase America is suffering through, but the MSM puts the issue completely out of perspective. Out of millions of schools in America, how many have suffered shootings? I'm guessing since Columbine about 100? I'm not sure, but the percentage is low. As you rightly say, background checks need to be very very thorough, and semi-automatic guns should not be sold, period. That would help. But its impossible to stop everyone bent on inflicting as much damage as possible.
Interesting figures, Holly. Where do they come from?
I'm sorry, but your posts only confirm what we in the rest of the civilised world - where such events are few and far between if at all - always say: that trying to have a sensible discussion with an American about guns is usually impossible.
I'm Canadian.
Hi, Elizabeth! I'm an American. Let's see if we can have that reasonable conversation about guns.
I have traveled to the UK and many of the so-called "Commonwealth" countries, particularly Canada, Oz, and NZ. When it comes to guns and the ownership thereof, people in the UK are far more deferential to the central authority, while in the former colonial possessions, their experience in attaining autonomy and independence from the "mother country" is radically different from how the US gained its independence.
In Oz, for example, you gained autonomy, then independence, gradually, as the UK declined in power and became unable to enforce its will on its possessions across the globe. Your political independence was an evolution, mostly based on the inability of the colonial overlord to project power to the other side of the planet.
The United States, on the other hand, won its political independence under arms against a colonial master that was at or near the apex of its power. Indeed, it could arguably be said that Americans won their freedom by force of arms against the world's first truly superpower. Americans of the time chafed under what they perceived as British tyranny, and they designed a government of checks and balances to protect citizens against the emergence of a homegrown tyrannical regime. An armed citizenry is one of those protections, presumably because a government that becomes so unbearable to Americans that millions of armed citizens rise up in organized rebellion, is a government that would be overthrown in due course.
The difference between an American and an Australian, when it comes to guns, is that guns are an intrinsic part of our culture - to protect our liberty, our families, our persons. Australians, for whatever reason, seem to think that those protections should belong primarily to the central authority. A significant number of Americans believe in the prevailing Aussie point of view, though.
Elizabeth in Sydney: Happy to help
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/12/foghorn/guns-violence-united-states-numbers/
Every year, between FBI stats and CDC stats, there are approximately 10,000 gun-involved homicides in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States#Homicides
In a population of 325 million people of every race, creed and political stripe, that is not an epidemic. It's actually something to boast about.
Over half of these homicides occur in only 2% of the counties in the US., and tend to be gang-related. These counties also happen to be longtime Democratic strongholds with strict gun control laws:
https://crimeresearch.org/2017/04/number-murders-county-54-us-counties-2014-zero-murders-69-1-murder/
Meta-Studies via the Centre for Disease Control and Harvard both find that there is no correlation between gun ownership and violent crime:
https://www.investors.com/cdc-gun-violence-study-goes-against-media-narrative/
https://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/28/harvard-gun-study-concludes-gun-bans-dont-reduce-the-murder-rate/
You're welcome!
It's a good point about the distinction between individual vs central authority; in Australia and elsewhere, there are likely to be measures taken by citizens to privatise and de-centralise law enforcement as politically correct policing becomes increasingly impotent; this is already happening in local communities in the UK (TM EYE).
That said, in the US situation, regular mass shootings by their fellow citizens of persons going about their business isn't a good advertisement for liberty! Are more guns the solution, as suggested by some? Maybe. But the factors that Mark outlines, leading to the creation of these monsters, are very amorphous (perhaps more so when compared to "radicalised" jihadist psychopaths). The root cause is a big problem, but as for more guns versus fewer, it seems obvious which is more likely to curtail the carnage.
By the way, re Kathy Shaidle's stats: mass shootings are presumably a very small number of the total gun-related homicides, but they are by far the "least acceptable", compared to say gang/ drug related crime and even domestic homicides, which are generally targeted, and where victims have often knowingly put themselves in harm's way.
Articulately and accurately explained Clark, thank you. Your comment that checks and balances in the Constitution to protect against tyranny, like an armed populace, is indeed a HUGE deterrent to governmental tyranny. I hadn't realized that until you said it. Countries like Elizababeth's ( and mine, Canada) would be begging the Americans for help if they were threatened. In the real world, the best defence is a good offense, because it is a deterrent to war (or home intruders). Hence, I don't think N. Korea will ever attack US soil, because Kim Jong Un isn't crazy, and doesn't want to die. Trump is right to stand up to his threats.
Thanks Kathy, for backing up my comments. The more guns in a society, the more gun-related deaths. One can't deny that. But if individually-owned guns, as Clark explained to Elizabeth above, help deter tyranny in government, that means they maintain the long-term peace and stability in America. It is a trade-off, but worthwhile in my opinion.
Yes, we often look through the wrong end of the telescope on issues. Obviously, horrible crimes like this one are going to be in the news. Unfortunately, the media puts its anti-gun spin on them at the same time (while making it clear they don't know much about either firearms or statistics.)
However, as cruel as it may sound to put it in sheer numbers, the very fact that such a TINY percentage our of the HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of Americans (in a diverse and divided nation) are shot to death every year, given the high rate of gun ownership, is frankly a kind of...
miracle...
If liberals were really interested in preventing deaths, they would try to ban CARS, not GUNS. And while they seem to be taking that cause up in major cities, they aren't doing it with the sheer fury they express over gun ownership.
PS: Next time a liberal tells you the government should confiscate your guns, remind them that right now, that government is lead by Donald Trump, whom they believe at the same time is "literally Hitler."
Ask them why they are so eager to give "Hitler" MORE guns and watch their faces! :-)
Except, Kathy, unless you're referring to vehicular jihad, banning cars has no equivalence to banning (or restricting) firearms in terms of the impact on deaths; the former contribute to "accidents" (including, needless to say, those caused by negligence... driver intoxication etc), and the latter are invariably homicides (although there are some accidental deaths in this category).
The same type of car-banning argument is often used against "Islamophobes", ie deaths related to terrorist attacks are statistically insignificant as a cause of total deaths, and people should be more worried about deaths due to falls from ladders etc. And car accidents. Which is true (statistically), but ignores the issue at hand.
Well said Kathy. The MSM these days, is really doing society a dis-service. They should never be gagged or censored however. What we need is a new MSM, that always does their background homework, and seeks out various viewpoints, so that we can move humanity forward again. I think at some point, this will happen. When chaos and anarchy start to become regular events, like Antifa riots, and anarchists protesting on university campuses, perhaps the Snowflakes will let Realists (Conservatives/Republicans) rescue them from their own stupidity.
Sorry Kathy! Should have said sorry Kathy, not sorry Kate!
Good point Kate.
So true! There's a lot of meaningless in this.
Despite raking in billions of dollars of funding every year from every conceivable source (taxes/lotteries/bonds/all sorts of parent/child fundraisers/grants/soup & cereal labels, sports income, alumni giving, research patents, begging freebies from local businesses and smooth salesmanship begging for 'leave your estate to us' plus % donations of product sales even including household propane gas/tax-free status etc etc, modern American education can't afford to pay 'educators' and can't succeed in teaching any subject, is void of meaning - so it appears.
With schools being the apparently No. 1 target-rich environment, why aren't schools required to have armed security at the entrances? They can't afford the cost? Add up the massive funding (noted above) and ask, where's the money? So what if it's one school every few years, given the high loss risk of the one event, isn't requiring say the police department to assign permanent posts to schools worth it? Or have they done the calculations and know very well that schools are actually quite safe? Meaningless? Maybe there's more that isn't being offered to the public to be able to consider this in a well-informed manner?
Exactly correct with the 8th grade reference! With schools graduating students with High School diplomas no more than a mediocre 8th grade level (lower than that) why is that? They say they need more money. What did they do with the ginormous % of GNP they consume every year? Are the outcomes without meaning or instead are they discernible - the money is being used for something else and they'd rather not discuss any of that?
Sorry this will be long, but it's terrible to see so many U.S. parents at their wits end and how unnecessarily bored and miserable their High School age students are, so here's a tip: As for the correct comparison of U.S. education to the European standards, for example, the French National Brevet administered at age 15-16 (end of U.S. grade 9) to all students worldwide is the equivalent in academic level to the U.S. High school diploma given at the age of 18-19. That's a three-year delay and gap in academics.
Arguably at this point, the Brevet diploma is superior because the Brevet is a fully hand-written in cursive exam with all math calculations required in their entirety done by hand. Thanks to U.S. multiple-choice exams and schools abandoning cursive (fast and efficient writing), almost zero U.S. graduating High School students at not just age 16, but at age 18-19 have that training and would not physically be able to write out a two-day, timed exam in math, essay and history as required by the Brevet. Further, few U.S. students have achieved the mathematics level that validates that Brevet-passing students at age 16 are well-prepared to start pre-calculus and possess what the U.S. measures as 'honors' writing skills. This is 'standard' expectations for all students, not just 'advanced' students.
Like the U.S. High School diploma age 18/19, after the Brevet, typically at age 16 the French education system has no further schooling responsibly for the general public. Thus, at age 16, students can leave school to work, go to trade schools or continue on in the next level called Lycee, three years of general academic and major studies to prepare for the Baccalaureate diploma (BAC). There are numerous BACs - Science, Literature, Economics, and the BAC Pro, such as in Accounting.
The BAC is a week-long exam in general studies plus the major subject, completely hand-written in ink and graded by teacher teams. Do not know of a single U.S. student out of any public or private U.S. school that is equipped to pass this exam, starting with being physically clumsy in holding a pen, unable to compose without the crutch of a computer, with correct spelling, sentence structure and organization of thoughts.
Today, the U.S. only arrives at discharging students out of public education at age 18, in many cases age 19 since so many children (notice mostly boys are arbitrarily blocked) are held back from starting the earliest entry grade for a year. This causes a problem later on - keeping legally adult 18/19 year-old, usually boys - by then young men, in schools packed with 14-17 year-old classmates. A very awkward forced mashing of children and adults for long hours every day. In the past, the U.S. education was in line with earlier graduations and avoided this sort of troublesome mix, but not now and they seem incapable of dealing with fixing it in an intelligent manner.
In contrast, the Brevet-holding students at age 16 have the pre-requisite qualification to then enter Lycee for a three-year program to prepare for the BAC exams. The BAC is university-level general education with a declared major. All teachers at the Baccalaureate levels have their Masters in their subjects. Looking at the age of Lycee students and that it's three years, it is a faux ami - a false friend. It is wrongly assumed to be equivalent to U.S. High School.
It is not understood at all in the U.S. but the U.S. academic equivalent to the Baccalaureate is the general education with a major Associates Diploma which is typically offered by community colleges. With that diploma and level of education, the student can then transfer and continue for a Bachelors as a Junior year university level of degree study - two years more - to a Bachelors diploma. This is why European students are typically graduating with their university Bachelors at age 20, while U.S. students at that same age are only at best at the sophomore level.
Like the BAC professors in the Lycee, the U.S. Associates level professors are required to have their Masters in the academic subjects. Instead of fighting with the inadequate High Schools or overloading students with dual diploma programs, parents can take their 16-17 year old students to the community college nearby and have them test for entry into an Associates degree program. Not only are there general education diplomas, but many degrees include hands-on trade certificates in practical skills, such as robotics and machining. Guys love those courses and they can get the mathematics instruction necessary to go with them. After that sort of education, the student can sit for the GED, rather than being forced to endure three years of dual programs with children in a High School. The environment is very immature and holds young people back.
When asked, U.S. High schools will only suggest a JT hybrid with the community college because they still get the cash for the student only if they are still enrolled in the High School. Ignore that and enroll full-time in the Associates program. It moves fast: instead of a full year of Algebra I, it is one semester. It keeps the student very busy. The atmosphere is mature, with a lot more men, especially in the technical courses. They have many tutors to help students. It is self-selecting - everyone there needs that degree or certificate for work - no childish disruptions. We have confirmed that a Brevet student in a two-year pre-engineering Associates study is indeed keeping academic pace with the student's classmates in the Lycee BAC-S (science and math). This student will be graduating at age 17 with an Associates diploma at the university level of Calculus II mathematics, Physics II.
Hope this clarifies and helps parents. Walk the student through the degree progams and watch their eyes light up.
The "Bac" system in France was quite well understood in the US by many educators with whom I associated -- about 20-25 years ago, throughout a wide spectrum (East Coast university trustees; 2 county district superintendents in northern Calif. home-schooling program administrator/educrats). And all that you say is quite true.
The problem with even approaching such a system in the US is the end game of the Individual. In France, the highest honor for a citizen is to become a government employee, to work for L'État. The various lycées are breeding grounds for future diplomats, politicians, fonctionnaires, and now the plethora of EU officials.
In the US there used to be a nexus between what was once "business" and schools. In the regional high school that I attended, at least half of the students left the place by noon during junior & senior years to attend work-study programs. They got credits to work in local businesses. I felt a bit miffed that I was on the "college prep" track and not learning job skills. So I hybrid-ed myself and took Business and even Industrial Arts classes.
Students in the US have very few choices anymore in public school. They get their roster of classes chosen for them to meet "standards" that have become nationalized, textbooks are mandated almost on a nationwide basis (the Textbook Industry is, in itself, a scandal). The sense of academic bulimia is pervasive.
I honestly think that Donald Trump's experience with his tv show, "The Apprentice", was a factor in his running for President. The dearth of qualified employees in the USA has reached crisis levels. High school is day-care and college is extended day-care for way too many teens.
Good advice P. Gao.
As an addendum, I would like to say that the trend, or fixed pattern, in the American public school system during the past 30 years or so has been to chop up the age groups into ever smaller categories while, at the same time, spreading the geography of the student body wider and wider. The local Charter School here has the cars lined up from my house out to the freeway entrance, 1-1/2 miles in distance. I have to gauge my trips outside the home to work around peak line-times. Or as one battle-ax neighbor calls them: The Mothers.
So instead of the K-8 grammar school that I attended, there is now elementary school, middle school, high school, alternate schools, magnet schools, Charter Schools, with kids (like goats) being bussed across county lines, all in search of The Right School!
The mere attempt to create an online Classics Curriculum 15 years ago within the confines of the County Home-schooling Office got 2 teachers bounced out of the program. I was helping with the venture because, as one of the "resource teachers" said when she recruited me: "You're into change."
"That may prove to be your undoing," I forewarned.
There's a book somewhere here for you to write, Mr. Steyn: Fascists I Have Known.
Agree with everything you said Debra, 100%. We have the same problems here in Canada.
Yes. Slow-walking US High School produce under-educated graduates, ill-equipped for work, trades or university. By the way, the U.S. elite favorite only for 'high-performing' students, the IBS, at an additional cost for course and exam, requires two years of commitment plus 150 hours of 'community service' (which is actually from prison and sentencing terminology) achieves no higher academically than the first year of the French BAC (2nde) and because of that, the U.S. IBS is not accepted by French universities as comparable to the French public school BAC. Funny how that isn't mentioned to parents when they're handed the bill.
Is it a good time to mention that the French system accomplishes this all in 4 and 1/2 days a week, without homework plus two weeks off every 8 weeks plus two months summer break? The U.S.has perpetuated this peculiar idea that a good school program must have hours and hours of homework and no good breaks. That means schools control children's lives long into the nights even after leaving the school. It just wears children out and they shut off. It is a mystery that parent adults accept this. They would freak out and sue and strike if their jobs demanded them to work at home until midnight every night, but their more vulnerable kids, they shrug. :(
Yes, well, the French school system ain't what it used to be either. French Ebonics is now rampant. The French will never admit a problem publicly. The Americans not only admit a problem quite publicly, they brag about it, march on DC to fund a solution for it, find the $$$$$ have increased the problem, and the cycle begins again.
Lather rinse repeat.
:))
The French system is a good approximation of current global standards - European and Asian, so it's still useful for comparison to judge reliably how far out of line the U.S. education is. Yes, the French system is under heavy pressure from in fact U.S. education to conform to that disaster, so there is a lot of debate among French parents and teachers about the wisdom of it. They don't like what's going on.
But rather than bemoaning this, what was offered to concerned and engaged parents seeking alternatives for their frustrated students is a workable ground-game plan that can be put into action by next semester with a bit of hustle, creativity and commitment to going it alone, figuring out how to do it logistically. It'll be worth the effort to see a disaffected and frustrated student suddenly become engaged, enthusiastic and accomplished.
Students are the same as they always have been, a normal curve of personalities and talents. It's the circumstances that have changed - for the worse. The behemoth education system is not going to budge, but double-down. Who 'educated' the students, who 'educated' the 'educators' and who 'educated' doctors of today who blithely prescribe inappropriate drugs to the students? The road to destruction is wide, many will follow it. The road to salvation is narrow, few go that way. It is what it is. Take care of one's own. As Jordan Peterson reaffirmed the ancient admonition, "One must fix one's own house first."
America faces it's problems, hence it solves them in due time. America isn't afraid to hold the mirror up to itself. How many other countries do that? Not many.
Good points Debra. One needs some National standards in Education though? What would you suggest as a solution to the situation in America's highschools? How would you reform it?
The French students days are longer though I think, start about 8, finish about 5 I think?
Mark:
I agree with all the comments about cultural degradation, video games, leftist voter factories, etc, etc. But the elephant stinking up the room that no one seems to want to discuss, the common theme in ALL these school shootings, every one, since Columbine to now, is the shooter drugs. Psychoactive medications are found in every case. Read the package insert, or just look them up online: over and over, they specify in the warnings: "may cause homicidal ideation, ...may cause suicidal ideation...". It's hard to know in some cases due to hipaa laws, but in every case, the shooters were "undergoing therapy", which as we all know means taking meds. The pharmaceutical companies don't put these warnings there willy-nilly; they do so because these effects actually happen! Why don't we take them at their word, and deal with the match that lights off these incendiary personalities: shooter drugs.
If you are either unwise or unfortunate enough to peek at social media today, you will be treated to a cascade of meme-ish pictures comparing US shootings to the figures in Japan and other Western societies, pointing out that these other countries have fewer shootings or incidences of "gun violence" than the USA.
However, to suggest that we direct our immigration preferences to citizens from these demonstrably more peaceful societies would be ridiculed, as would the suggestion that we perhaps adopt the immigration policies of Japan before its gun policies.
Mike, I speak not to the immigration policies of Japan but to the education problems there. The policies and abysmal results have been presented to me by a friend whose wife works teaching art in an international (Canadian) school in Tokyo. We've discussed at length our comparative educational systems.
In Japan, education is euphemistically called "soft education". The teachers are told to pass along the students, regardless of their failing grades, and his wife was told to do so. How precisely does a teenager fail art? It's become one of the most subjective of "disciplines", if you witness, even with one eye open, the portraits of the Obamas.
The effect on many of the teachers in Japan is demoralizing to say the least. The effort to teach is becoming more difficult with each passing school year. I get the feeling that Japan is about 10 years behind the US in terms of following educational trends that lead to cultural bankruptcy. Given the enormous challenges that Japan has had to overcome, post WWII, the future looks ominous there. Peace is kept there at an untold price.
A little over 20 years ago, articles in conservative publications about the coming "crime wave of the 2000s" predicted inner city troubled youths attacking the outlying Gated Communities that were springing up at the time.
It appears that the Gated Communities and Park-like Suburbia have failed to recognize their own insider threat, the home-grown psychopath, because of the luxury of their own well-fed denial.
The secular godlessness of affluent Suburbia in the 1990s was adequately alienating to me that I fled to the foothills. This nihilistic mindset is especially predominant in the states of the US that are transient in nature, such as Florida, which I think of as a large peninsula with highways running through it. (The panhandle is a completely different state, more of the South.) In California, the flux of citizens and non-citizens, treated like social atoms, has led to a different type of transiency.
There is a large part of your social breakdown.
After 9/11 commercial airlines in the US made a couple of subtle changes. They reinforced the doors to the cockpit and to a large degree many pilots started to arm themselves and go through extensive small arms training. No one had to do it, to my knowledge, but those pilots who chose to had this option.
This I think, far more than the security theater we have at check-in, protects everyone on the plane. Comparable changes, can and should be made at schools. I'm all for having some armed guards/security, but I think more effective would be having voluntary armed, but concealed, carry by those teachers and school administrators that felt comfortable with going through extensive training and background checks to be competent to help protect the school. I think relying solely on professional law enforcement is a mistake.
The teachers I know make me rethink the second amendment. Few should be trusted to defend anyone in combat. Professionals are more effective. The reason we see shootings in schools is (a) kids are morons (else they wouldn't need schooling) and (b) we advertise schools as "no gun zones" which makes them prime soft targets. The basic problem is we indoctrinate kids their self esteem is paramount and affronts justify extreme response. Shooting is just a matter of degree over more conventional bully tactics. You can't defend against that with safe spaces and restrictive laws. Lock down the school buildings and they'll move their assaults to the school yard. Outlaw semi automatic rifles and they'll use semi auto pistols, or explosives, or rocks. The only solution is teaching and demonstrating that selfish demands won't work. If they want to "be somebody" they have to earn it.
"... their self esteem is paramount, and affronts justify extreme response." Indeed. The cult-of-self phenomenon is inextricably tied up with the infantilisation that Mark often discusses; the precious snowflake is the flipside of the aggressor in the same way that toddlers show both fragility and rage at a time when "primary narcissism" is a normal stage of character development (age 2-3 years). Now we have grown up toddlers whose basic instincts regress to "the self", expressed pathologically as both heightened sensitivity and extreme hostility. And if modern media provides exposure for celebrity and notoriety alike, why not chose the latter?
PS. From an operational efficiency perspective, an individual cannot inflict a high number of casualties rapidly if the weapons used are rocks, knives, even cars— versus semi-automatic firearms.
"Few [teachers] should be trusted to defend anyone in combat."
How about self defense? Teachers are getting shot too.
"Professionals are more effective."
I assume that Mr. Watson considers himself a 'professional'.
Then he seems to contradict himself:
"You can't defend against [shooting] with safe spaces and restrictive laws."
So what does he want? Just get used to it? Sounds like leftist thinking.
PPS - you're thinking like a normal person. Psychopaths don't usually consider efficiency. A rock would be very effective on a bunch of kids trapped in a building. Actually, I'm surprised the Florida nut only got 17. A more rational marksman with a rifle could have gotten a lot more. But a rational marksman wouldn't have been there in the first place. The danger is the psycho carrying the weapon, not the weapon. Japan had a knife attack in 2016 that killed 19. I wonder if they demanded knife control. Boston bomber used a pressure cooker. Magically eliminate every gun on the planet and psychos will find a way. Best solution is to cage the psychos before they crack, and teach all others to defend themselves. Worrying about particular weapons isn't helpful.
Robert, I doubt there are many lefties here, though I wouldn't be surprised to see some infiltrators as the election approaches. I'm not a professional school guard, though I've seen the benefits of training in self defense and combat tactics. Highly recommended for all. Even if never confronted with lethal threats the skills are useful in many situations you might not expect it. One would guess that the increasingly restrictive laws and "no gun zones" would have eliminated, or at least diminished wack attacks, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They say doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Lots of that around here these days. Getting used to something often means acceptance. That's dangerous. It also means preparation. That could save you.
I read a remarkable story about two kids in ROTC at the school, who used their training to defend 60 classmates from the shooter. A few more like them and we'd have seen a better outcome.
"Best solution is to cage the psychos before they crack...." Easy! Also, in many instances (not this one), that's probably bordering on "pre-crime", as mentioned elsewhere in the comments, which is rather anti-libertarian.
The resistance to any sort of gun control measures suggests that as far as mass shootings are concerned, there currently exists an "acceptable level of violence" (to borrow the term that Mark said Margaret Thatcher used in the context of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland).
Well-said David.
Kate, the fictional "pre crime" detection required a group of "pre cogs" to predict the threat. If we find some of those, it might be worth considering. None yet. However, in most cases, certainly in the Florida case, there were numerous crimes that were forgiven, numerous reasons ("probable cause") to consider sequestering obvious dangers. We're awfully quick to incarcerate pot heads, but shy away from judging dangerous people. Our priorities are wrong, and 17 kids in Florida paid for our generosity.
Our society does tolerate some violence. We're much safer than past generations. But we still tolerate 35,000 traffic deaths, several thousand homicides, hundreds of dead soldiers, NFL and MMA, and enormous carnage in movies and games. Accepting some outbursts of human nature doesn't mean ignoring it, just analyzing it correctly. The first rule of dealing with violence is don't panic. Life is full of dangers. The best defense is preparation.
David, as a final reply, I completely agree, and as I said in my comment, "not this one", meaning that it was very clear in Florida that this individual was intent on killing people, and should have been prevented from doing so by the authorities, who were well aware. It's shocking. The fact that the lives of ordinary citizens are so casually imperilled by inaction- a combination of incompetence and political correctness- in the case of "known wolf" types (including jihadists) is completely unacceptable.
However, my impression is that many school shooters in the US haven't had anywhere near the number of indicators that this individual had, and though thought to be "self-confident losers", they often weren't known to be dangerous, at least as far as the authorities were concerned. These misfits are often unobtrusively in the shadows before suddenly showing up to school brandishing firearms. The causes of being messed up are hugely complex, and so amorphous that they're not easy to address, even in "high risk" individuals.
What I don't understand (as an outsider) is why it's not enough for regular people to have a gun for self protection that only fires a few rounds at a time. Why the need to arm oneself with more serious weaponry, bordering on military grade? I'm aware I'm overstepping the mark here (as I said, it's not my business), that it's a firmly-held constitutional right with a well-founded historical basis, but with so many people being regularly murdered en masse in this way in the 21st century, I don't understand the steadfast refusal of gun owners to make some concessions. Would they be prepared to relinquish just a fraction of their liberties if it meant deaths from shooting massacres were reduced in number? I read today that there have been 30 mass shootings in the US in 2018... in 7 weeks!! Sounds like a major problem. In any case- we'll have to agree to disagree on that aspect.
If someone attacks me with a more capable weapon than I'm allowed to have, I'll probably lose. I want as much power as any who might attack me. When the crooks make concessions, I will too. But they won't, because they're crooks. Unilateral disarmament is equivalent to surrender. Some of us prefer to not surrender.
By the way, the reports of 30 "mass shootings" are false. Some people, including most of the media, want it to sound like a major problem. It's not. Mass shootings are a fraction of all gun deaths, and those are a fraction of traffic deaths, for example, and almost all are with handguns. The fixation on semi auto rifles is emotional, and won't solve anything.
Wow-- I feel as though I'm from another planet (not another country) reading your first paragraph. That's not a criticism, just an observation. I guess it's a reflection of the fact that when everyone is armed, including crazies, you need to be too. I realise the position is completely "standard" in the US; it just shows how different the mind-set and circumstances are. See my comment to Kathy Shaidle re "traffic deaths'. See you on a future thread.
Kathy Shaidle got this one 100% right. Ban the schools not the guns. Relevant quote:
"Abolishing the public-education system has no downside. A few million obese, incompetent, corrupt, vicious teachers and parasitical bureaucrats will finally be fired.
The conservative establishment's dream of abolishing the Department of Education will come true.
Homeschooling is superior anyhow. Mothers will be able to do it because the taxes skimmed off the top of their salaries will no longer be needed to prop up said department.
Real and imaginary social problems such as chickenhawk teachers, anti-gay "bullying," pro-gay sex education, the drugging of "hyperactive" boys, busing, high-school football concussions, and girls dressing like prostitutes for the prom will vanish.
Decades hence, our offspring will listen in disbelief when we tell them we used to pay billions of dollars to warehouse children in "gun-free zones" overseen by morons; that 21st-century kids were groomed for 19th-century jobs and came out functionally illiterate but experts nonetheless on the subjects of Kwanzaa, "safe" sex, and something called global warming."
Kathy's right, but we should be careful not to throw out the babies with the bathwater. The public education system has many flaws, but most of us turn out okay, although many are not ready for decent college or understanding the real world. The flaws can be fixed, The basic problem is how do we educate the poor kids, which was the justification for ACA and other welfare programs, all with similar results. We need to discourage the poor decision making that causes most poverty by phasing out public subsidies to support incompetents. There will be some discomfort but most will adapt. We'll always need to support a few, but it's always a mistake to assume we must provide welfare to all because a few can't care for themselves.
Adam, As much as I would like to agree with you, home-schooling is not for everyone and even the parents who do it (as I did), have an uphill battle with the ones devoted to maintaining the status quo of the Government School. I was viciously verbally attacked in the suburbs for puling my children out of the tax-funded school -- depriving Their Beloved School -- of tax dollars. Actually, the school still got the tax dollars of my husband and myself. One two-fer insult was that I would be turning my children into social misfits like myself.
The ignorance of the parents is appalling in these suburban blobs. A change in the bus schedule brought PROTESTS, but any thought given to curriculum was zilch. The absence of God and fundamental learning in many of these government schools (which form a monopoly in the USA) is WITH the consent of the governed.
Mark is 110% accurate in proposing to "telescope education and enable those of non-academic inclination to leave with a meaningful qualification at, say, sixteen." Technical schools, trade schools, art schools, welding (if it's not a lost craft/art): there is a huge answer. And President Trump is onto that one too.
Heck, I was college-bound and by the age of seventeen I was on Independent Study in my regional high school, sitting in the cafeteria, studying Blaise Pascal (my own assignment), along with the juvenile delinquents who were about to drop out of the public school system. When the A students and the F students are treated with the same attitude, there's a problem. "Teach to the middle" was the mantra back there. That middle has gotten lower with each passing decade.
Thanks Adam!
In order to understand why things like students and others committing mass murder were not happening 50 years ago and before, but are now, one must look to fundamentals. Government is fundamentally an instrument of force to protect individual rights, e.g. police, military, etc. Force being the antithesis of reason, government must be restricted to explicit, limited actions, e.g., with a constitution. The US constitution has no article directing education because force is not a rational instrument of persuasion. It is logically inevitable that an irrational intuition will act irrationally, e.g., racially segregated schools, forced prayer, etc.; therefore, corrections like integration and restricting prayer deal with symptoms and not the disease. Education requires freedom of thought and speech. It was logical that eventually our fundamentally irrational government education produced the exact opposite in our institutions of higher learning where they teach that speech should be restricted and they've created safe spaces. Irrational intuitions inherently foment irrationality. Is it any wonder that eventually it's precipitated mass murdering sociopaths?
Sorry, but your premise is wrong, Bradford. Mass killings were happening 50 years ago and before. Worst mass killing in a U.S. school was in 1927 in Michigan with 44 killed.
Right. Change 50 to 75 and the premise stands. Moreover, it was suspected that Kehoe acted because it was a government school that robbed him for funding in the name of taxes.
Just in case no one has already taken this cheap shot: perhaps the FBI could not spare resources from manning the Trump fake "Russian collusion" wiretaps to follow up on the tipoff re this known wolf school shooter.
Mark,
In response to your as-ever accurate observation about the alternate reality being "true reality" for these mentally disturbed people, this situation has been encouraged by the social media makers. I was just discussing this sordid situation with my husband, gulp, the day before these shootings. He said that many of the social media users still interact with real people. But I countered that it's not the same "reality" for those social misfits. They prefer the Internet world. It is possible for people to live this split-existence and not be detected, and if they are, what is done?
The Great Recession and pharmacopeia drug use just escalated this trend that has always been there to some extent in the world throughout history. So, yes, I agree, these horrific acts are going to continue, to some degree unwittingly aided-and-abetted by the 24/7 news cycle that now serves to teach/train future killers.
Hmm, Debra goes online to share her thoughts with a group of "friends".... is she a social misfit living in a different reality?
I will presume that surely you jest! Honestly, though, the female-mob mentality that I pulled out of has only gotten worse -- if you read the Florida Teacher of the Year Facebook message content.
She may get her Award taken away from her!!
What she says is SO true. I have worked in private and public schools and the parents pitched a fit that I dared to correct incorrect English on a 4th grader, complained about a child in a spasm in his chair cause he was overdue for his Ritalin, and I verbally questioned the rich kids getting away with "acting out." The double-standard was about the only standard in force!
I am in total agreement with Mark's brilliant assessment and I will never forget him saying years ago that culture trumps politics. (no pun intended). I also couldn't agree more with Ms. Shaidle's comments about schools, and in this regard I have a question for Mark about something that has happened in my own life and I'm sure in many of contemporary Baby Boomers' as well.
I am a woman of a certain age who was born in the 1950s. I have adult children as well as grandchildren. Very early on I was something of a hippy and what would now be considered a liberal. As I got older, wiser and more experienced, things changed drastically. I got married, became a property owner and taxpayer. I got involved in local politics including the county, town and school district. In short order, I became a conservative, libertarian Republican and still am today. I support President Trump, free speech and other conservative causes. I guess they would call me a rabid right winger.
Here's the problem I have and what is my biggest disappointment: my three adult children are all liberal Dems! How the hell did that happen?? Not because of anything that they learned in my house, that's for sure. No, they were turned into godless liberals because they were brainwashed by the public schools for their whole lives. Don't get me wrong- they are the best people you would ever want to meet in every respect. But when it comes to politics, they are out there in left field about as far as they can go. Hell, they support Hillary and Bernie!
So how are supposed to deal with this? I have come to believe that the public schools have become nothing more than a vast left wing propaganda machine that is turning out good little liberal Dem voters. Not only that, but a big part of the brainwashing consists of drugging and encouraging computer screen addiction. The kids are not being taught how to think, they are being taught WHAT to think. They are also not allowed to learn about religion, God, a Higher Power, faith or even morals. Anything goes.
And let us not forget that the schools that cost us the biggest chunk of our tax dollars, have these children from the time they are babies in "pre-school" and kindergarten up till they get out of college. Plenty of time to do the damage.
I don't know what the answer is to this monumental problem. I hate seeing my grandchildren being forced into the same pattern. It seems so hopeless.
If Mark or anyone else has any ideas, I would love to hear them. I'm sure there are other grandparents out there in the same boat.
Thanks as always for all that you do.
Give them books. You don't say how old your grandchildren are, but try to find books that are appropriate to their age and reading level. And books that are a pleasure to read. If you can find them, I would highly recommend humor anthologies from inter-war-period writers like Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, SJ Perelman, and Frank Sullivan. Classic science fiction from Bradbury, Azimov or Ursula LeGuin. Really, anything that will attract them to the pastime of reading - and written sufficiently long ago that moral precepts are simply assumed. Then, when their parents aren't looking, you can slip them the complete works of Mark Steyn in a few years. The more they read, the greater your grandchildren's intellectual curiosity and capacity of complex nuanced reasoning will become.
The more responsibility people cede to government, the more irresponsible more people will become.
The root cause might be welfare. It's too easy to be a self centered slacker. Phase back welfare, more will have to make a living, so more will demand learning useful skills. Welfare programs are the great enabler for many of our problems.
Patty, you said you were a bit of a hippie when you were young, with a liberal world-view. Then you got older and wiser, and changed your views, based on the reality of living life.
You say your kids have leftist, liberal views like you did - they are liberal dems, for similar reasons you were as a youth.
They will also grow up and wise-up like you did, when reality teaches them to.
Stop worrying, you sound like a Mom:))
"The decline of organized religion, the rise of ersatz substitutes, the collapse of the family, the spread of mass media, the expansion of education, its descent into social engineering, the epidemic of over-medication, the absence of men, the metastasization of narcissism and the worship of the self."
Nicely summarized, but it can be summarized even further: The society the so-called liberals have built.
In the USA gun ownership is viewed as a critical element of self protection. There is also an element of "sporting" purpose for guns but almost all hand guns and semi automatic weapons are bought for self protection. Elsewhere in the western world, the concept of "self protection" is in fact against the law. If you applied for a gun license in Canada, and listed self protection as the reason, you would be denied a license. Maybe even flagged as a "nutter".
The recent shooting of Clayton Boushie in Saskatchewan really highlights the difference in attitude towards guns, US vs Canada. The farmer who shot him was found not guilty due to accidental discharge. His defense was careful not to even suggest self defense as a motive for the shooting.
Even Democrats in the US own guns for self defense, and therein lies the difficulty they have in mounting a sincere campaign against gun ownership.
It is worthwhile to ask ourselves, can our laws and law enforcement protect us against those who might wish to harm us. Clearly the answer is no they cannot. Is it therefore reasonable for us to seek to protect ourselves? The answer is yes in my opinion.
Government buildings in Canada and the Us are protected by a combination of controlled access and armed security officers. Why not schools where in fact most incidents seem to occur.
If the answer to whether law enforcement can protect us is "yes." we'll need a lot more cops. Ain't gonna happen, so the answer will always be "no," The objective of shooters is not to hurt people who happen to be inside a building, but to hurt people. Protect the building and they'll hurt people outside the building. Or come in the back door. Or use attacks the building scanners aren't looking for. Protecting schools because of a school shooting is what the military calls fighting the last war - convenient but ineffective. The threat always changes, so we need to be more creative than the perps. You can't protect everywhere. Israel solved their hijacking and bomber problems with better surveillance. They are good at spotting the bad guys. The Florida shooter wandered into a school with a rifle and nobody noticed? That's pretty easy to fix.
I've received a lot of moral clarity since the carnage in Florida on Valentine's Day. I started home-schooling 1 year before the Columbine shootings, and was being roundly mocked for pulling my children out of the Suburban parklike school settings where every kindergartner had a kitchen and everything looked so clean and nice.
Not really. The principal at the middle school would show up 2 hours early to work to remove graffiti. The teachers were from the lower 1/3 of the academic scale — and this is not to disparage schoolteachers, of whom my daughter is now one and trying to survive a profession that has been utterly demolished/trashed by liberals and their unionized mafioso think-group practices — believe me, I've got experiences going back to New Jersey.
The gun-hating Parkland schoolteacher who survived the atrocity to then up on Shep (Sheep) Smith's show to moan about the Founding Fathers made the case for the opposing side! The US Founding Fathers (whose identities are so unknown to so many US adolescents now!) did not envision a school where a "child" like the murderer (the alleged murderer) would exist. Or violent video games that are used as baby-sitters and teach fatherless (or motherless) (or both) children how to become killers. Or violent Hollywood anything (even their Twitters are written hate crimes.
The Bible was used a primer back in those days of the Founding Fathers, and a gun was a safety measure, and the basics of education were taught, and people did not live in a dream world of nonsensical denial that a vengeful punk kid won't come and take out the kids who made fun of him.
My husband lost his father during adolescence and his mother proceeded to coddle his younger brother into drug use that then split that family even further apart. I found out from the middle brother who bravely came and told my husband and me that our toddler son had been left in the care of the druggie-Adorable-Teen during a weekend when I'd thought that he was in the care of this incredibly co-dependent "Grandma" who was clinging to her juvenile delinquent like her life depended on it. Maybe it did.
All I know is that was the end of her seeing my son, unless she came to him, and that was rare because she was enslaved to her 20-year-old drug addict. And I was called harsh and cruel and severe — and overly protective of MY child, you know, the 18-month old!
Fast-forward 25 years or so, and now the basic rules of normalcy are treated like attacks upon the whack jobs running rampant through what now appears to be affluent neighborhoods.
I am going to have to shield myself from the Orphan Defense here for this kid. My father died from his final heart attack when I was ten years old, and when I came back to my grammar school after the 3 days off for the funeral, and my homework wasn't done yet, the teacher said, "Don't think you can use your father's death as an excuse."
Harsh. Yes. But it was the best piece of advice I ever got during that wretched week. No counselors, not much of a mother, and, frankly, I was the one taking care of other siblings.
Pardon the fury in this comment. But when 17 souls get blown away to Heaven, and the Public Defender is now saying we have to save this lost chid who fell through the cracks, at least 36 cracks of visits from the cops, I kinda react.
"Instead of promising to send every child to college, we should be thinking of ways to telescope education and enable those of non-academic inclination to leave with a meaningful qualification at, say, sixteen."
There used to be Vocational Schools for guys who weren't into academics, they learned many varied construction and industrial skills that allowed them to not only be productive and stay out of trouble, but in many cases they wound up out earning their college counterparts.
Unfortunately today, we have pretty much done away with industry and skilled labor in this country, so the demand for those Vo-tech students has all but disappeared.
Small additional comment... Many of our best documents such as the Constitution deal with human nature and the understood checks and balances required. The Bill of Rights still applies because we haven't changed at all through recorded history. Whether on c!ay tablets or passed down by bards, we can read about the ancient past and understand what they meant, how they felt and why they failed or succeeded.
Exactly right Robert.
As always, Mark gets to the root of the matter.
What we humans need to consider is not gun control but meaning control, that every life matters, and is holy, that life has meaning and is not purposeless, even when we suffer and even when we have been dealt a bad hand.
The narrative of nihilism needs to be countered from infancy, humans need meaning in their life and be inculcated at every turn about the sanctity of human life. In the absence of meaning the human soul rots and then wants to bring down others with it.
As Mark points out an occupation is just one of the pieces. Humans need to be occupied with G-d, family, community, and work. And even without being a believer, with a belief in the sanctity of human life. Without those things there is dangerous emptiness, an emptiness that is not only a void in the individual heart but it in fact becomes a black hole that sucks others into it at varying degrees of force, from seemingly benign to lethal and on various different levels: spiritual, intellectual, religious and philosophical.
Agreed, Laura. Children need to hear that it's wrong to hurt or kill anyone, except in self-defense. I wonder how many children now are never told that by their secular parents? The popularity of violence in entertainment must result in desensitization by some people and a desire to copy the behavior they're shown. A large number of people now think there's no difference between being famous or infamous, since the only thing that really matters is that your name is known. Maajid Nawaz says that two of the four elements in a person becoming a terrorist are a real or perceived grievance and an identity crisis. With the emptiness of pop culture, who wouldn't have an identity crisis?
Laura, I am not religious. My life is rich with meaning. Everyone I've known throughout my life, whether religious or atheist, have lives rich with meaning, good human values, love for their families, love for their countries and fellow man or woman, they all believe in the sanctity of human life. You seem to think only Believers believe in the sanctity of human life. There will always be troubled people, there were just as many per capita in the Founding Fathers era. They harmed others then, same as they do now. Now, they have access to semi-automatics so they do a lot more damage. At least today people who are troubled or struggling are accepted, understood and have access to various agencies and medications, unlike in the past. Many thousands are helped in a myriad of ways. Many are helped before they harm anyone, and tragedies are prevented. Society is getting better. The MSM takes everything out of perspective, and wallows in the alarmism they create to attract people to watch their "reports"; thereby increasing the likelihood of other troubled young men to copy school shootings now seen as "nothing unusual anymore" according to the MSM. Nothing could be further from reality. If you get your information from the MSM these days, I understand why you think society is going to hell in a hand-basket. But it isn't.
Mark, you came as close as possible to explain these murders. It is a function of the abandonment of a culture that has sustained the West for centuries. It is the ultimate act of unrestrainment which describes the direction of our culture. We put up with the ridiculous, but senseless murder does give us pause, (for a short while). Then right back to being offended by a right-wing gnat. A shift in our culture back to the things you stated would be the answer but everyone of those things is under attack. I guess that's called progress now. I am 78 and grew up in Norman Rockwell's 50's. Am I so unenlightened to think that those values which are so hated now were as civilized as our culture can ever get.
Funny you should mention allowing students to graduate at sixteen. I have in my possession a family heirloom, which is a gold watch my grandfather received in 1923 on his graduation from...10th grade at the age of sixteen. He didn't go on to occupy a corner office, but seems to have done well enough to get married, have a family and buy a house in what was the suburbs in the late 1940's.
I am a gun owner, and am nervous about the cry to "do something NOW" about the availability of firearms. However I am much more nervous about the almost universal (among the political class) suggestion that we need to intervene in the lives of citizens who some teacher/doctor/policeman/clergyman/psychic medium or talk show host suppose might SOME DAY harm someone. It is Phillip K Dick's "Pre Crime" enforcement in "Minority Report". The job of law enforcement is to arrest people who are alleged to have committed crimes. The job of the justice system is to determine the guilt or innocence of such people and the job of the penal system is to punish those who have been determined to be guilty. The notion that any misbehaving or maladjusted child is a potential mass murder is a dangerous one.
The guys with the eight grade education won wars because in those 8 years of real education (3R's) and their community's ethos adulthood was not only expected but required. Those core values have been discarded for perpetual childhood, lives to be without real consequences and governmental "parents" doling out non-judgemental pablum. Today technology trumps wisdom. The Magna Carta and Declaration of Independence were formulated by candle light and with quill pen. What? Not texted with spell check? Cut loose from the time tested moorings humanity is coming adrift...again.
There is a bank of seven TV's suspended from the ceiling at various vantage points in the gym where I work out - muted but close captioned - and there are always a couple of them set to MSNBC and a couple set to CNN. So yesterday I was able to read an MSNBC commentator, an Afro-American fellow, talking about the gun culture and "toxic masculinity" - leaving me to ponder why and how masculinity became toxic, when it used to be considered a virtue. All the usual answers, of course - educational and cultural systems that encourage self-expression and self-esteem over self-control and self-respect; the casual violence and amorality in movies, videos, video games and music lyrics; the absence of reliable fathers and positive role models. Fifty years of progressive control over politics, education and culture have given us "Lord of the Flies" - a world full of feral, abandoned boys who never attain true manhood.
Calvert, while I agree with many of your comments, Lord of the Flies was a book of fiction, the Real World is not,
the world is not full of feral abandoned boys. There are a lot of good young men, despite all the challenges you outline in your remarks. How easily people think their own lifetimes' are the only history humanity's had. The majority of people are good, and sensible. Young people can distinguish between fantasy and reality. What is truly surprising, and a credit to human beings, is how few boys and young men who played violent video games, ever commit crimes or violence. They can distinguish between fantasy and reality.
As I sadly ask after each school shooting: why weren't there more guns? A gun-free zone is meaningless, to the shooter most of all. Education once gave us the tools to think, by way of the three Rs; now it tells us WHAT to think, the three Rs be damned. Sending our children to defenseless pens to be brainwashed is to treat them like sheep. Or lambs. To the slaughter.
"unless Democrats want to provoke a civil war."
We have been in a cold civil war since 1968. The John Kerry Heinz generation has had 50 years in power, dismantling America so that they can build Jerusalem. Sadly, they picked the Caracas blueprint.
We have a lot of hot, local civil wars - Baltimore, Chicago, for example.
Every day, we get closer to "They won't take the ballot as valid - if they want war, let's give them war"
I quite agree on education. Massive processing factories designed to employ "educators" as Thought Controlers. Free The Children!
Nonny Mouse, there is a great deal of truth to what you are saying. I believe however, that the dems and their snowflake followers will back down when push comes to shove. Most are practised at virtue signalling, not real sacrifice. They don't understand the ideology they profess to believe in, and when they realize the sacrifices they will have to make in their standard of living, they'll abandon it.
Calling out a kid, (or anyone), for being "weird", or "scary", i.e., not normal, was once, I think, a means of enforcing generally agreed-to social norms. Now one runs the risk of being accused of "bullying" by doing just that. A disturbed individual can avoid the judgment that once might have helped, and can retreat into an internet fantasy world which will supply an ersatz approval or acceptance of his/her behavior. Not that long ago, being really weird came with a cost...not so much now.
That well known conservative beacon Chris Rock agrees: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456472/chris-rock-tamborine-we-need-bullies-marital-fidelity-no-pornography
As a pragmatic response to these shootings, there is also the total vulnerability of schools, allowing a self-appointed shooter to dominate over thousands, however briefly. We used to take self-defense and community defense more seriously and completely. I cannot stop thinking that if I happened to be a teacher, or assistant coach, at a school where a shooter entered, and I was allowed to have my 9mm with me, any such shooting would terminate a lot more quickly, and the thought of some insecure gun nut facing off with a few unidentified, present, committed responders might change their calculation a bit also. Most of these shootings occurred in "gun-free" zones, where we law-abiding people are asked to surrender to the unlawful, with occasional predictably dire consequences.
Well said James.
Thanks so much for the shout out!
In 1999, I watched the news helicopters circle Heritage High School in Conyers from my back deck. Very little has changed. @thomaswictor has stated on twitter that it is the fame that the school shooter seeks. This one announced he was going to be a professional school shooter.
Our local NBC affiliate ran a package on the timeline of the Florida shooter. He took an Uber to the school with the gun in a soft case. Did it occur to the driver something was amiss? He went into several classrooms. Why were the others not immediately locked after the first shot?
So many questions. And the Sheriff last night went political stating that legislators who didn't support more gun laws would be voted out of office.