Erickson: Why the Left Always Talks Gun Control

Why The Left Always Talks Gun Control

By Erick Erickson, July 8, 2016, Resurgent.com

A terrorist goes into a nightclub in Orlando and kills dozens. The President rushes out to make sure everyone knows it is a hate crime and we must have gun control. In Dallas, a man guns down police officers and the President rushes out and will not call it a hate crime, but declares we must have gun control. In addition to admitting he classifies hate crimes based on the victim’s class, not the intent of the killer, the President admits he has no ideas but gun control.

Like the solution always being the same whether the left believes we are in global cooling or global warming, the solution to every terrible act in America is gun control.

There are more than 300 million guns in private hands in the United States and more than 2 trillion rounds of ammunition in private hands. What we are seeing is not an out of control gun problem. In fact, mass shootings in the United States have fallen so much in the past century that the political left has insisted we redefine what a mass shooting is. It is all in the name of gun control.

The left will not talk about mental illness. The left will not talk about radical jihadism. The left only wants to talk about gun control. There is a very easy to understand explanation for this phenomenon.

For the left to talk about mental illness or radical jihadism or black on black crime or any other topic directly related to these episodes of mass violence, the left would have to explore the nature of morality and human depravity. But in the last century, the left has grown so secular that it no longer recognizes a shared morality and rejects the idea of human depravity.

Conservatives look on these acts, whether it be Baton Rouge or Ferguson or Orlando or Dallas and they see a world in moral collapse and struggles between good and evil. Black families have crumbled. Black fathers are in jail while the mothers struggle to keep the family together. Unemployment among black youth is high and people of faith understand that there is something soul nourishing about work. Even in the Garden of Eden there was work.

But we cannot even talk about the Garden of Eden because the left laughs it off. Morality, faith, prayer, and concepts of good and evil are all rejected by the left. So they grasp for something on which they can make a principled stand and it is gun control and the erosion of a right the left refuses to recognize in the second amendment.

Secular reporters lament that there are too many guns in America, but they will not admit there is too much moral decay. In fact, they not only revel in the moral decay and defining deviancy as normal and normal as deviant, but they expect the rest of us to do the same. If you uphold natural law or moral law, you are a bigot.

Because they cannot talk about a morality they no longer recognize or the need for a God they long ago rejected, they are forced to insist more laws will solve problems. It is the metaphysical equivalent of the religious believing more prayer will solve problems. When God is traded in for government, prayer gets traded in for law. The more laws there are, the better off we will be because government is our god now.

The left is incapable of solving the problems of racism and mass violence in this country because the only solution they have is more government. And more government just means more sinners in charge and more sinners is never the answer to any problem. But a left that rejects the notion of sin and human depravity is incapable of understanding that and instead lives in a self-created fantasy land where we are born gay or straight, but can decide to become boys or girls, and when straight boy marries straight girl then straight boy decides to become a girl, his born straight wife is a transphobic bigot. People who believe such nonsense will never be able to substantively deal with the horrors of our age.

So gun control is the only solution they will offer.

Stupid Beyond Comprehension. The New Progressive Liberalism.

The following interview, conducted by Ami Horowitz, is with Matthew Guevara, a first generation Mexi-American, whose parents came legally to the US for a better life. Matthew is a student leader at the University of California – Irvine.
Lest you believe this is unique to California, think again – this is progressive liberalism as promulgated, encouraged and taught by universities in both the US and Canada.

HotAir: DOJ report totally vindicates Darren Wilson in Michael Brown shooting

Must read: DOJ report totally vindicates Darren Wilson in Michael Brown shooting by “Allahpundit”, March 4, 2015 I barely glanced at this in posting it to Headlines because I thought I already knew what it would say. Holder’s whining last … Continue reading →

Goldberg: The Undoing of Storybook Man [with commentary]

[Editorial comment: Goldberg’s article following touches on what finally became blatantly obvious at the debate. Obama is, and always was, a front man for the Democratic National Committee. For a party (and for Liberals everywhere, apparently) that espouses equity and … Continue reading →

Steyn: Dog-whistling past the graveyard.

Ed. note:  It’s hard to keep up with the liberal penchant for coining pseudo-intellectual jargon to frame  political dialogue (“astro-turfing” and “swift-boating” come to mind, as well the left’s recent infatuation with “Post-Normal [insert just about any noun here]”,  But … Continue reading →

Cooke: British freedom of speech endangered

 

British Freedom of Speech Endangered
John Stuart Mill, where art thou?

By Charles C. W. Cooke      March 29, 2012 4:00 A.M.

 In Britain, the trend toward the curbing of free expression picked up speed on Monday, when British student Liam Stacey was sentenced to 56 days in prison for posting racist comments on Twitter. When Premier League footballer Fabrice Muamba had a heart attack during a soccer game and was rushed to hospital, a drunk Stacey took to the microblogging site and spewed a series of racially abhorrent tweets into the ether. Other Twitter users — including sports pundit and former top-flight footballer Stan Collymore — quickly noticed his words and reported Stacey to the police, who arrested him and charged him with incitement to racial hatred a few days later.

When Muamba collapsed, said the judge at Stacey’s trial, “not just the footballer’s family, not just the footballing world but the whole world were literally praying for his life. Your comments aggravated this situation.” In fact, it is hard to see how Stacey’s words aggravated anything much at all. What he wrote, utterly appalling and unprintable as it was, had bearing neither on the efficacy of Muamba’s life-saving treatment nor on the likelihood of his survival. It prevented nobody from praying for his life or exercising any of their own rights. And it encouraged nobody to do anything illegal. Sure, what Stacey wrote may have — should have — upset many people. But in a free country, that cannot be a crime.

Explaining his decision to imprison Stacey, the judge noted that he had “no choice but to impose an immediate custodial sentence to reflect the public outrage at what [Stacey had] done.” “To reflect the public outrage”? Translation: British speech law is determined by the sentiments of the mob. That this is the case would constitute a tragedy anywhere that free men live, but it is especially egregious in the land of John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty, Mill averred that “if all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” His words carried no small print, nor did his associated contention that “there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it might be considered.”

It is hard to fathom why exactly Stacey was singled out. It is a sad fact of modern life that people say racist and abhorrent things on social networks and public message boards all the time — YouTube’s comments section, particularly, is a sewer — and yet most go untouched. Given that a popular Twitter reaction to Stacey’s imprisonment on Monday was “I hope he gets raped by a black man in prison” — and there were other, even less charming, variants — one can but ask why such subsequent comments do not constitute as much of an incitement to racial hatred — to violence, perhaps — as the original, and why they are not worthy of the same punishment. If an eye for an eye makes the world blind, an insult for an insult would have seen thousands locked up in British jails this week if the law had been applied consistently.