Something Has Happened to Americans and It Is Being Blamed on Guns

My generation grew up with guns.  We never shot anyone or any farmer’s cow or mule. We focused on cottonmouth moccasins to keep the creeks clear for swimming holes, and we tried crows until we learned they were too smart and organized for us.  

If memory serves, the first American mass shooting was the Clock Tower shooting at the University of Texas in 1966 by an ex-Marine suffering from a brain tumor which apparently unbalanced him.  Since that time mass shootings have increased in occurrence.  Instead of investigating what has happened to the culture or the pills people pop that results in mass shootings, guns get blamed.  

By passing the buck from cultural collapse to guns, a suspicion has been created that authorities are producing deranged individuals from CIA mind control experiments for the purpose of repealing the Second Amendment or reinterpreting it to mean than only militias can have guns. As the shootings are immediately and always used to attack the Second Amendment, never the real problem, suspicion is not without justification.

Another suspicious aspect of the response to mass shootings is that the liberals get as upset about the death of strangers, as long as it was “gun violence,” as they would if it were their own children or best friends.  Yet, these same liberals are OK with the US blowing up weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games in the Middle East and Israel gunning down Palestinians. Credibility is lacking when it is only deaths that are blamed on the Second Amendment that receive sympathy. It is difficult not to conclude that liberals look forward to mass shootings as they are used to build pressure against the Second Amendment.   

“Gun violence” assumes that a gun is an independent actor.  The gun chooses to engage in violence.  This is nonsense.  Violence originates in the person, but many weapons are used to commit violence.  The problem resides in the person, not in the weapon chosen.  The question is what has happened to the culture that it turns out people without moral awareness and self-control. 

Ask yourself who removed moral restraint from our lives and you will know the guilty party.

The Best of Paul Craig Roberts