In the aftermath of the Uvalde horror and the talking heads scrambling over the bodies of dead children to shriek their talking points, what else is there to say? A lot.
No, we don’t need “commonsense gun control” which in the hands of the Left is always an oxymoron. We don’t need more “gun control legislation.” We need sociopath control.
Ban “assault weapons?” What are they? Can the usual suspects squealing about them even say if they are describing any semi-automatic weapon capable of accepting a magazine of thirty rounds or more, or are other special features necessary, like a black color? While we’re at it, note that handguns were used to murder the majority of Chicago’s 51 victims shot to death last month. Is a so-called “Saturday night special” now an “assault weapon?”
Ban assault weapons, and you will still have Waukeshaw, Wisconsin’s carnage: six people killed and sixty-odd more grievously injured when Darrell Brooks Jr. deliberately ran them down with his SUV at a Christmas parade. You will still have pressure-cooker bombs like those the Tsarnayev brothers used to kill and maim at the Boston Marathon. And much more.
The real question we desperately need to answer is why Uvalde mass murder Salvador Ramos felt it necessary to shoot his grandmother in the face after a reported dispute over a phone bill.
As the anger boiled over and the gun came up, why was there no voice inside his head saying “This is WAY wrong, chief. Put that thing down and talk.” Why, after attempting to murder the woman who apparently took him in after his drug-addicted mother proved unfit, did Ramos decide to arm up and kill as many children and others as he could? Why was there nothing in him standing in the way of his butchery? And why does no one on the Left want that question asked, let alone answered?
Because the same questions apply to Peyton Gendron, Robert Aaron Long, Lyndon MacLeod, Ethan Crumbley, Uk Thang, Brian Riley, Aminadab Gaxiola González, Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa and several other mass murderers. Last year.
We are now, if not awash in people who think that shooting large numbers of strangers is an acceptable way to deal with one’s inner demons, at least well-supplied with them. Why? What is it about life in modern America that makes at least a few of us into homicidal maniacs? And what are we to do about them?
I grew up in a town about the size of Uvalde. In that small-ish social universe everyone knew who the knuckleheads were. Adults and even high school kids knew who to avoid: who was violent, who was a sadist and who was more than a little bit…off. A lot of us had gun racks in our pickups and more than a few of us used firearms to go shopping for meat, according to the season. But there was never a school shooting. Not even the worst of the worst, who boasted of going to the railroad yard to beat up hobos, would do anything like that. Why not?
Because even for a heartless, goon-squad bully there were limits. Things one just didn’t think about doing. Not only because one would be ratted out in a heartbeat by somewhat more morally-aware fellow miscreants, but because, well… it just wasn’t right. Those were better times.
Today we are told by our intellectual superiors that there is no such thing as a moral imperative; nothing is perpetually and fixedly “right” or “wrong.” It’s all in the details, the situation. We are in the position of the parents in Aristophanes’ cloud-land, where “the weaker argument is made the stronger” by application of the proper rhetoric. What that says about the moral arguments of which the Left is fond is a discussion for another time. The more practical question is: what does this loudly-shared view do for a confused and alienated young person who has few friends, many frustrations and has been told repeatedly and with intent that all the problems in our country trace back to the actions of everyone who looks like him?
And if, in his frustration at not getting his “fair share” of anything save abuse and his alienation from his peers, his parents and their worlds, he decides that infamy is the only sort of fame he can have? Who will say him nay, and what persuasions can they use? When there are no friends, when parents are given up, religion never introduced, moral reasoning never taught, social norms disparaged to the point of disappearance – then what stands between that youth and the demons urging him to the most terrible violence?
The awful truth is that we are all responsible for Salvador Ramos and hundreds more like him. When we allow the moral traditions and social obligations that created our society to be scoffed into insignificance, we ease their path. When we belittle religious strictures, we remove barriers to their bad behavior. When we embrace a culture that glorifies mindless violence and other behaviors formerly considered sociopathic, we make them all but inevitable. Then we feign
shock when the monsters we create turn out to be… well, monsters.
The truth is that “assault weapons” did not make Salvador Ramos. That argument is a cheap political stunt. The society we have created and nurtured, and that many embrace vomited him up, as it did others before him. It will continue to make more of the same until those among us who can still remember that even before Aristotle, humans understood that advanced societies are based on morals, ethics and virtue, and insist that our country return to that vision which served it so well for so long.
That return will not redress the wrongs of Mr. Ramos. But it will reduce the chances of another following in his footsteps. And today is not too soon to start.
