By DEXTER DUGGAN
Commenting after the gunman’s attack that left 17 victims dead at a Parkland, Fla., high school on February 14 — both Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day this year — opinion writer Victor Joecks paused to make this brief observation before ending his column posted on February 17:
“The only time mass murder isn’t universally mourned in the United States is when abortionists kill millions of preborn babies.”
Joecks works for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nevada’s largest daily, so he’s not unacquainted with mass shootings after the October 1 massacre on the Strip in his own city.
Three days later, posting on February 20 about shootings, Joecks noted that a survivor of the Florida Valentine’s Day massacre had just sharply criticized politicians “taking money from child murderers.” However, Joecks pointed out, the student “wasn’t talking about Planned Parenthood” but “the left’s favorite bogeyman, the National Rifle Association.”
Although the propagandists of dominant — and pro-abortion — media wanted to talk about just one topic, Joecks reminded readers that tunnel vision limits people’s thinking in more ways than just looking through a gunsight.
What has happened in society over the last few decades that makes gunfire attacks, both on schools and other locations, agonizingly familiar these days?
After the Newtown, Conn., school massacre killing 26 victims shortly before Christmas 2012, a Washington Post opinion writer noted that back in the Wild West, when everyone was armed and there were no mental-health regimens, the little red schoolhouses weren’t being shot apart.
In some ways life was more fragile back then. Physicians’ shallow knowledge generally didn’t even understand that bacteria caused illness. Childbirth routinely could be truly perilous. But in other ways, life may have been more secure. Aside from organized warfare or banditry, a young man of that era typically wasn’t so casual about ending lives by the dozens.
Now, it’s often young men who do these assaults.
The University of Texas tower shooting on August 1, 1966, probably can be regarded as the beginning of this modern tragedy, but the frequency didn’t accelerate until the latter 1990s. In that Texas attack, an armed 25-year-old student began firing from the school tower and killed 14 people — “including one unborn child,” according to Wikipedia — before police killed him.
An autopsy revealed he had a brain tumor.
“Going postal” became part of the vocabulary, too, referring to killings at post offices by their own employees, but that didn’t seem to be a reflection of the wider culture, unlike school shootings. I heard that backroom postal doors were installed for fleeing carriers to shove wide open fast to get outside.
The family was battered a lot since the 1960s. It wasn’t perfect before, but there had been the concept of the ideal to strive for. Since then, though, any aberration began to be defended as just an alternative lifestyle. Drug-taking, promiscuity, abandonment, abortion, complete irresponsibility, revolving sex roles and even sex identities. Doing your own thing was just what you gotta do.
The early radical feminists beginning in the 1960s often truly were man-haters. Maybe some had lousy boyfriends or brutal husbands, but their hostility seemed to extend to much if not all of the opposite sex. Permissive abortion was one way to reject this connection with the male. Even though millions of the babies killed were females, “women’s empowerment” ignored this.
Radical feminists loved the aphorism, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” They smirked over cutesy posters with a fish cyclist trying to balance on a high-wheeler. (The notion apparently was birthed from the earlier, and even more contemptuous, “Man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle.”)
Unfortunately, women who wanted family should have learned that a man isn’t a silly option when trying to raise children. But some still wouldn’t learn. As seems likelier on the left side of the political spectrum, alluring theory is preferred to solid facts, no matter how great the damage, both to self and society.
Girls and boys need moms and dads whenever possible. High-charged, roughhousing boys need some male discipline to shape and guide them.
And a nation whose legal system and dominant media shriek decade after decade that abortion must be entirely unrestricted isn’t encouraging compassion or even respect for the innocently helpless in society generally. Reading the monstrously callous pro-abortion New York Times feels like having maggots crawl onto your face.
Meanwhile, social media deeply have influenced about everyone in recent years, sometimes positively, sometimes not.
James Daley, president of the traditionalist Focus on the Family, wrote his organization’s February newsletter before the Valentine’s Day shooting, but he knew what parents have to cope with today.
“When you were raising your children,” he wrote, “you could pretty much count on occupying center stage in your children’s experience for the first 12 years or so.” But no longer.
“Today’s kids are dazzled with the bright lights and glitter of pop culture almost from the moment they emerge from the womb,” Daley wrote. “The mere pace of life is enough to keep their curious and growing minds confused, distracted, and spinning most of the time,” assaulted by “some of the cleverest marketing strategies ever devised by the mind of man.” Or woman. Or Supreme Court justice.
Certainly Islamist radicalism is one factor that intensifies violence in the homeland these days, from an Orlando nightclub to a San Bernardino government office. But dominant media hate to explore motivations of Islamists, and this factor usually isn’t the reason for school tragedies. Although it was, to take one instance, in the attack by a young male student with knife and car at Ohio State University in late November 2016.
Of course dominant media are roasting Donald Trump over gun control now to a sizzling degree they never did to beloved Barack Obama, even though Obama had Democratic control of Congress for the first two of his eight years and presumably could have dictated legislation as he pleased when there already had been more than enough school attacks.
Some young voices in Florida who don’t favor more gun control currently say media ignore them while highlighting the other side. Indeed, it’d be hard to recall journalist squads joyfully marching alongside student pro-lifers on their way to see legislators, as they were doing with gun foes who matched media agendas.
Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass more than once has noted the liberal contrast on abortion control and gun control. Back in 2015, when a Christian-hating gunman attacked Umpqua Community College in Oregon — when Obama was president — Kass wrote:
“Oddly, the political left, which demands more federal gun control in the hope of protecting life, adamantly supports abortion. Over the past four decades or so, some 53 million abortions have taken place in the U.S. Whatever your position on abortion, whether you believe that which is taken is life or just tissue, there is a collective psychic cost to it all.”
In that Oregon college shooting, a 26-year-old student killed nine and injured eight more before he died by shooting himself in the head.
Being a Chicago journalist, Kass noted something else in 2015, considering that the U.S. president of that day was from Chicago.
“A madman kills nine people in Oregon and the world seems to stop and gun control is demanded,” Kass wrote. “But in Chicago, the killings are marginalized, as barbarians mow people down, with thousands shot in a town with strict gun laws, and the politicians do little if anything. . . .
“Even the president isn’t engaged much. There is silence. What the president certainly understands, what politicians don’t tell the people, is that Chicago political corruption has a cost,” Kass wrote.
Yes, speaking of scandal, Obama’s launch pad of Chicago, with its tight gun laws, has plenty of black deaths due to gunfire all the time, and dominant national media avert their googly eyes from this refutation of all their pretty theories. They prefer their theories to the facts, no matter the deadly tragedies.
Noting Chicago’s routine weekend death toll by firearms, another columnist at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Wayne Allyn Root, asked on February 17:
“Why aren’t 17 deaths in a weekend more important than 17 deaths in one incident? Why doesn’t gun control work in Chicago (or anywhere else)? Why is this assault on African-Americans happening in a city controlled 100 percent by Democrats? Doesn’t that concern black Democrats? These are questions rarely asked by the liberal mainstream media after a mass shooting.”
Most Americans know that when laws get passed against gun ownership, the law-abiding owners are the ones whose guns get confiscated. After all, they obey the law. And the lawbreakers with guns continue to be lawbreakers with guns that they, as lawbreakers, know how to obtain. So the liberals have disarmed innocent people for killers to prey on more easily.
Sort of like exposing preborn babies to abortionists.
A Working Combination
I’m no gun collector or gun-lover, but I bought a shotgun a few years ago after a police officer on patrol stopped at my house to ask about our neighborhood. I live life with prayers, but I also drive an 11-year-old car and buy groceries as the ordinary means of daily survival instead of praying for the miraculous arrival of transportation and food.
I have a St. Jude statue and a gun-club sticker in my front window. A working combination. “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, and we’ll all stay free,” folks sang in WW II.
The Wanderer asked northern California conservative commentator Barbara Simpson, an experienced gun user, for her thoughts. Simpson pointed to her weekly column posted at World Net Daily (WND) on February 18, noting that the Parkland gunman reportedly was on medication.
She wondered: What kind? And was he taking it at the time? Simpson wrote:
“Consider that almost all mass murders over the last years have involved the killers being on prescribed SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) antidepressants — drugs we know can cause murderous violence in the patient. Drug companies pay out millions in lawsuits from such instances.”
Thanking WND’s David Kupelian for the information, Simpson went down a list of 11 killers, from Columbine’s Eric Harris to Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassin, John Hinckley, all on some drug or drugs.
“These are just a few of the horrors caused by ‘medicine’ that kills and destroys lives, yet we allow and encourage it,” Simpson wrote. “Yet, to hear the media: Trash the Constitution, get rid of guns, and all will be fine.”
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