My correspondent, Steve F., wrote regarding the mass school killing in Virginia: " I still have to wonder if the moron would even have considered taking his chosen course of action, if he realized the strong possibility that he would be facing return fire"
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I replied:
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Indeed. The more "shoot me freely" zones that are legislated by well meaning busybodies, the more our burgeoning mass-culture sociopaths will gravitate to them. We haven't even seen the surface but scratched, so far as mass "hands on" killing.
Whether it's "Instant Jihadi" as in the Mall shootings, or a crazed significant other who decides that killing everyone in sight is a feel-good operation, or the intentional and well planned massacre of an entire social unit of citizens -- the lowest common denominator will be that the intended victims are helpless and unarmed.
Otherwise, the ginks wouldn't even bother. Why chance getting killed before one can get all the thrills of the kill properly rolling? Instead of screaming and running and twitching bodies as a rewarding environment, the mass killer's last view would be the floor rushing up to meet him, beyond which is the black tunnel to oblivion or hell. Hell, preferably.
The way I see it, we have passed the tipping point of the cultural restraints with which us graybeard Boomers were raised. Ironically, we had a significant role of destruction and demise of such restraints. All for a good cause, yes? No? Instant gratification, pop culture music, violent video games, and indeed, the whole entertainment industry that developed to serve our spending power, have run us all right on into a living "Clockwork Orange". Good ol' 'ultra-violence' is the word, now.
In fact, in poor ol' England, while they are currently more disarmed than Soviet citizens in the latter days of the Evil Empire, the violence is at an all time high -- from youthful and remorseless young thugs. For fun and profit, nothing beats a good group mugging of victims unable to fight back. Besides, fighting back is illegal in Britain. However, even the pacifist Brit newspapers are complaining about the police inability to control the fun. Such enforcement of behavior by uniforms is far too little and too late, when the matrix itself has been run asunder.
T. S. Elliot's beast, slouching into our new century, has found that the center indeed, will not hold. As well, that morally collapsed rubble is a now a darkness, in which it can nest and spawn. In our search for personal freedom, we have abdicated the very responsibilities that enable a civil society to continue. Included in that abdication is a rejection of personal physical courage, of placing oneself in the front line of active defense against the terrorists: criminal or political.
Listen to the huge media outcry that this savage butchery will produce. Will ONE of the talking heads question why not ONE civilian adult on that campus was properly armed as the laws of Virginia allow? Nor will they ask why not ONE person was willing to "go to the sound of the guns" and stop the shooting. Ask yourself why that is? Because answering the call to arms, is what being a citizen in a community has always meant. YOU go to where the trouble is happening, and with your fellow citizens, YOU help make it stop -- even if some of you die in the effort to remove that threat.
That philosophy, that we as citizens are responsible for each other "in extremis" and under mortal danger, has been destroyed by the university intellectuals, the artistic media class, the entertainers, the talking head dispensers of wisdom, the religious civil pacifists, and politicians afraid of their own people. Therefore the scumbags, crazoids, jihadis, the bloodthirsty, the mass murderers, and other life-taking thrill seekers of the world understand perfectly well where to operate, and against whom to operate.
I have little faith that any politician or television blabbermouth will stand up and say, "It is your obligation under the historical meaning and covenant of the Second amendment, to have in your possession the means of personal and community defense, and to step forward so armed and so ready to lay down your life should that be needful, in the defense of said community."
One well placed shot from a simple .22 rifle, or a .22 target pistol, or even a flint-tipped arrow from a plain stick bow would have settled that killer's hash. All those things were commonly found in the possession of a student of the 1950s or early 60's at a college. Heck, they are still found in rural America's educational institutions, tho Federally not legal. Those kids go hunting after school, y'know? And, BTW, school shootings not only weren't done, I doubt that the idea ever entered anyone's mind.
Well, the heck with the whole mess. Whatever my support of the right and means to morally justified self-defense, there is every good chance that the 'Aunties' will eventually have us in all in 'jamies with feet, in a cute little yellow duck print. The public lies and deceptions and blames and evasions of responsibility will continue, until we live in some horrid sci-fi future where, as predicted long ago, the Morlocks will at last feast upon our enlightened descendants.
Yeah, like the Morlocks aren't here already, hunh?
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