By DEXTER DUGGAN
When I first heard on a telephone call that shots reportedly were fired not far from where President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade was as he visited Dallas on November 22, 1963, I thought that someone was just shooting off firecrackers.
Five years later, in 1968, as I watched California Gov. Ronald Reagan on television routinely descend an airliner boarding ramp, I thought “Get down!” because of the intangible possibility that he might be shot from a distance.
In five years, the social environment had changed drastically, from when personal safety for a political personality had been taken for granted to when simply being out in the open seemed risky.
Kennedy was riding in an open convertible in Texas when he was killed. Today presidents ride about in closed, fortified devices akin to small tanks.
After the president’s assassination, both his brother, U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and black leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were fatally shot in public in 1968.
When guns for recreation for the entire family could be considered part of ordinary life, not long after the United States triumphed in WW II, mass shootings were rare in this land. Advertisements showed Dad, Mom, and the kids all holding firearms. Rural high-school students drove to class with gun racks visible in the rear windows of their pickup trucks.
However, personal responsibility began to be swept away in favor of personal culpability, guilt, and the alleged need to make reparation for other people’s wrongs, even if they were long dead.
After decades of “decide your own personal morality” began to be imposed on the legal system with leftists’ social revolution of the 1960s, those same leftists viewed with horror the firearms that could provide personal protection in a chaotic age.
The left’s tearing down guardrails for personal conduct had results that their prideful meddling with standards of behavior hadn’t foreseen.
Because of the left-wing social revolts that the future Pope Benedict XVI witnessed up close, he changed his thinking while serving as a progressive university professor in his German homeland in the latter 1960s
Upon his surprise retirement from the papacy in 2013, a BBC article recalled that “when student revolutions convulsed Western Europe and the United States” shortly after Vatican II, “he was a first-hand witness…Prof. Ratzinger, as a German who had grown up in the 1930s, understood all too well what a totalitarian regime could do. He saw a new left-wing totalitarianism at work in the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s.”
The drugs-and-sex milieu that the left launched against a middle-class society beginning in the 1960s shortly radicalized the system, with powerful politicians, commentators, and judges declaring unknown new rights to impose on a population who had lived in exactly the opposite way.
Permissive “abortion on demand” went from being an unthinkable crime to an amazing new constitutional right. Marriage became merely a matter of convenience to be ended upon personal wishes, then not even necessary at all. Children were transformed from the treasures of the future to an unbearable burden on workplace women being punished by the kids’ very existence.
People weren’t even expected to rein in their impulses — unless, of course, they offended left-wing strictures. But the uncontrollable wicked genie was loosed from the bottle. Mass shootings exploded from a few in an entire decade to more than that every single year. They occurred in states with strict gun laws and states with loose gun laws.
In what seemed unusual at the time — and of course really should be unusual — a mentally disturbed man in August 1966 killed his own wife and mother then went on a shooting rampage at the University of Texas, Austin, where he fatally shot and killed 15 people and wounded 31 others before he was killed.
Wikipedia says: “At the time, the University of Texas tower shooting was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history, being surpassed 18 years later by the San Ysidro [Calif.] McDonald’s massacre.”
There always was some violence in U.S. society, but it picked up speed and power like an avalanche. Wikipedia isn’t the last word for accuracy, but its listing of mass shootings in the U.S. is instructive.
In the entire decade of the 1940s Wikipedia lists four mass shootings in the U.S. In the 1950s, five. In the 1960s, seven. In the 1970s, twenty-six. In the 1980s, thirty-one. In the 1990s, fifty-three. In the 2000s, fifty-six.
After that, Wikipedia lists the shootings by individual year: 2010, six; 2011, six; 2012, thirteen; 2013, six; 2014, five; 2015, thirteen; 2016, twelve; 2017, eighteen; 2018, eighteen; 2019, twenty; 2020, nine; 2021, thirteen; 2022, twenty-three; 2023 as of May 6, thirteen.
This doesn’t include events such as the November 2021 Waukesha, Wis., Christmas parade attack, where a man intentionally drove an SUV at reportedly about 40 mph through the parade route, killing six people and injuring 62.
Although we hear condemnation from the left against gun culture, they ignore the habitual firearms slaughter of young black men by other young blacks in urban areas like Chicago because of the breakdown of the home.
This doesn’t fit the narrative of the left and so, poof, it might as well not exist. Can’t cook up headlines about “white supremacist” Trump supporters killing minorities, so this doesn’t count. And, after all, broken homes are part of “freedom, liberation,” and a powerful government-inspired welfare culture that the left fervently favors.
Some black lives don’t matter to them after all. (Just like all the black lives ended at the constitutional temple of abortion clinics. To protect these innocent black lives would be an assault against the “reproductive rights and health care” of all women, or so the phony narrative says.)
Then there’s the over-medicalization and psychotherapeutics of modern society, including antidepressants. What role might these play in twisting people’s thinking? Also, the pressures to feminize men leave growing males with interior conflicts against their own biology — which, in the left-wing workbook of gender malleability, mustn’t matter at all.
Not Inevitable
Think, too, of the deinstitutionalization of vulnerable people who turn up aimless on the streets and thence perhaps into homeless camps. Hey, deinstitutionalization sounded fine in theory, but mental illness is a reality. Although, as with so much else the left touches, the reality was bludgeoned to fit a political mold.
In addition to the discovery of psychiatric drugs in the mid-20th century, says Wikipedia, “[a]nother major impetus [for deinstitutionalization] was a series of sociopolitical movements that campaigned for patient freedom. Lastly, there were financial imperatives, with many governments also viewing it as a way to save costs.”
Coincidentally, urban commentator, professor, and author Fred Siegel, who died May 7, had written that America’s cities had declined in the 1970s with the rise of “riot ideology,” which, said an article posted May 9 at The Wall Street Journal, “rested on the assumption that ‘the sins of racism’ justified violence and criminality — and that only federal spending could solve those problems.
“As a New Yorker,” the article by Steven Malanga continued, “Siegel had witnessed the city’s rapid deterioration under Mayor John Lindsay, whose ‘faith in a free market of morals’ led to a vast expansion of crime and social disorder. Siegel and other conservative intellectuals at the Manhattan Institute argued that the sharp rise in urban chaos wasn’t inevitable or irreversible.”
Indeed, not inevitable. New York City voters finally turned away from this chaos — until their habitual liberalism put them back on the same destructive political path.
John Vliet Lindsay is mostly forgotten now, but as a liberal Republican politician more than a half-century ago, he was dominant media’s dream of what a Republican should be.
Oh, if only all Republicans would see the light like Lindsay, these media proclaimed. Then he became a Democrat. Then he got old and — surprise! — died, like everyone must, although some of them, like very bad elderly Catholic Joe Biden, seem intent on sowing as much hellish disaster and catastrophe as they can while they still have an ounce of breath.
Gender Ideology Is Demonic
The Wanderer asked Catholic blogger Mary Ann Kreitzer for her observations on the growth in shooting rampages.
Kreitzer, who runs the Virginia-based Les Femmes — The Truth blog, said on May 8: “The largest satanic convention in history took place in Boston in April. We know Satan was a liar and murderer from the beginning, so why should these mass murders surprise us when many give him power? He uses deluded souls as his foot soldiers.
“Exorcists have been reporting for years on the rise in demonic activity,” Kreitzer said. “Our response needn’t be terror and it certainly should not be to focus on the devil, but to pray and trust in the protection of God, especially through our guardian angels and patron saints.
“The demons are terrified of Our Lady,” she said. “Consecrating our homes to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary as well as praying the rosary, using holy water, wearing the brown scapular and the miraculous medal, and practicing other pious devotions protect us.
“As Jesus said, we should not fear those who can kill the body, but the One who can cast us into Gehenna. I suspect most of these mass murderers are possessed,” Kreitzer said. “Gender ideology is demonic and increasing because of targeting the young. As we see the rising violence among these poor deluded souls and others, we need to pray for them to be freed.
“I think of the poor man in Scripture possessed by Legion and want to help rescue souls by my prayers and sacrifices,” she said. “We should desire their salvation, not their destruction.”
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