Mass Shooting Conundrum for the Mainstream Media

Media Faces the Glen or Glenda dilemma.

Ed Wood, famous low budget schlock film maker, once did a very bad movie in which he dressed up as a woman for half the film and a man for the other half. In the film he posed the eternal question, "Which is it?"

This past weekend there was a shooting in Nashville* targeting a Christian School. The shooter was a 28 year old transgender person whose pronouns the shooter says are he/him. Reporting on this one will be scant I guarantee. This human who is biologically mismatched chosen he/him as the pronouns the shooter preferred. This presents a problem for our progressive news establishment.

The difficulty is that women make up less than 2% of mass shooters. This fact is a big attention getter and puts eyes on stories which generates income for the writers and publishers.  At the same time, the media must boy to the shooter's demand that they use he/him as the correct pronouns. Therefore, the progressive media must classify the mass shooter as male whatever genitalia the shooter might possess or lack. 

But if they don't list the shooter as female, they lose the excitement of having a rare female shooter which novelty, as we said, attracts readers. Not my problem, though. Let the media sort that one out. Whatever the back story, three 9 year-olds and three 60+ year-olds are dead and he/she/whatever is also dead. 

No disrespect meant other than that like all mass murderers, I refuse to support their crime by repeating he/him/her/its name. Removing the instant fame removes part of the incentive to commit such a horrific crime. I mean 9-year olds. Really? God help us that it's come to that.

* https://www.foxnews.com/us/nashville-school-shooting-6-killed-including-3-students-shooter-dead (copy and paste this link in your URL)

Youtube Shooter NOT a Conservative!

No name/no face to help make
this lunatic famous!

Well, it wasn't one of those nasty conservatives that Youtube has "demonetized" lately. It wasn't Prager U, Alonzo Rachel, Bill Whittle, Andrew Klavan, Ben Shapiro, Rush Limbaugh or Steven Crowder that shot the place up today. It was a woman of Eastern extraction who was a militant vegan whose Youtube channel had been demonetized by the social media giant.

 

She was apparently mad as hell and wasn't going to take it anymore. This person whose name I will not mention had been posting videos of animals being skinned alive on her Youtube channel while she made wild accusation against nation states like the U.S. that she claims does this stuff all the time. Youtube reacted to her success (she claims 300,000 hits per month), by cutting off the money and closing down the site. They left her personal site up, though. Long enough for her to say nasty things about Youtube. Police had found her sleeping in her car and called her father, who advised the cops she might be headed for Youtube headquarters.

As usual, the cops dropped the ball and she was able to stroll into the building armed to the teeth. You remember the cops. The ones we should give all our guns to so that we will be safe in gun-free zones like schools and Youtube's HQ. The shooter apparently ended her life standing in the middle of Youtube's courtyard screaming at the cops to come and get her. She got her wish. If she was looking to go out like Butch and Sundance, she definitely got her wish.

It seems that Youtube deems clips showing animal torture and mutilation right up there with videos by prominent politicians, academics and public figures covering such dangerous topics as the ten commandments, the morality of the Israeli Army and the Bill of Rights. Youtube has suppressed both types of videos or at least kept them from the eyes of those under the age of 18 or at the very least kept anyone from making any money producing such videos.

In censoring videos and websites, the Google-Twitter-Youtube-Facebook Digital Complex would do well to be wary of militant vegans.

Just saying.

How to Stop School Shootings Now!

"Why does God allow school shootings?"

Everyone asks that question when we have a school shooting or any mass murder. We want God to stop it now. Since He doesn't appear to want to do that, we look to governments to stop the killing. The question is answered in the Book of Job. Not a lot of people like that answer though. Few take the time to even read Job.

In the meantime, Christians can, however, offer up a way to stop such things from happening. Simply do this

• Love your children better.
• Stop rewarding despair and desperate acts with publicity. 
• Thoughts and prayers should come before school shootings happen, not afterward.

It's not an easy answer. It involves creating no laws or government programs. It involves giving your kids an anchor in the storms of adolescence. It means introducing them to God and encouraging them by example. It means spending time with them when you'd rather be doing something else. It means paying attention so you don't miss the signals when they are in distress.

That can start happening tomorrow. No law need be passed. No billion dollar program need be started. The question is, are we as a nation willing to do what is needed, or would we rather let mother government solve the problem for us so that we don't have to make any effort other than perhaps going to a march or rally to signal our moral superiority?

The truth is that waiting for some big authority figure to come along and solve our problems, is exactly why our kids are killing themselves and their classmates at such an appalling rate. And this generation's parents are exactly the ones who taught our kids that someone else is responsible for their problems. We taught them that by running down to the school with lawyers every time our kid got in trouble. We've blamed everyone and everything but ourselves and our unwillingness to pay attention to our kids, to take time with them and to lead by example. We've taught teachers that they are not to hold our children responsible for their actions, but to blame something or someone else for their misbehavior.

Most of all, this generation of parents has provided little opportunity for their offspring to meet God or to study at the feet of Him whose grace can actually make us better men and women. Until we stop looking for a human utopia, made by man and perfected by man, we shall continue to have these unintended consequences. Our kids will continue to give up in despair and blame others for all their woes. 

And they'll continue to shoot, stab, blow up or bludgeon those whom they blame for their misery, hoping the television will vindicate them somehow.  It won't do that for them, but since when have kids ever paid attention to outcomes that didn't suit their fantasies?

© 2018 by Tom King

The Louisiana Theater Shooter is NOT a Tea Partier

Oh, the gun control folk are wetting their pants! Finally, a Tea Partier has murdered some people and therefore since one out of the last 20 or 30 serial shooters was a "Tea Partier", that proves we need gun control to stop them. And they sing it in solidarity like a Hitler Youth chorus line!

Well, they're wrong. The Louisiana theater shooter was NOT a "tea partier". First off nobody parties over tea. It's a "party" in the political sense of that word and the informal sense for that matter since the Tea Party has only a loose organizational structure at best and exists in total disorganization at worst with any nut job, who wants to join, able to claim membership.  To be fair, there is a language barrier at play here. When Democrats use the word "party" they use it (incorrectly) as a verb, i.e. to engage in sex, drugs and rock n' roll in a group setting. Tea Party members don't "party" in that sense. We may host a "party" to talk bad about Democrats, but we don't party in the same sense that liberals do.

The man in question (and I will not use his name for reasons I've explained elsewhere) had once signed up for an online Tea Party website account.  He never used it. An article in RawStory says he hated Obama, but then quotes him as saying he supported Obama's re-election (check this article link to verify).

The man was bipolar (manic-depressive) and obviously mentally ill. Local talk radio hosts, in fact, used to bring him on opposite Democrats because he said such outlandish things that it made the phones light up. In other words these people brought in a mentally ill person and put him on the air lined him up opposite to a Democrat, knowing full well the Democrat would torment him and make him babble incoherently on television and radio and look foolish. They admitted that they did this in order to boost their ratings.

He could hardly be called a Tea Party member (we don't call ourselves Tea Partiers - like I said, that's the Democrat meaning of "party", We don't party. Party is a noun in my part of the country, something you host, not something you do.

Sounds to me like the man was a clinically deranged person that leftists were allowed to torment till he cracked. These people should be ashamed of themselves and recognize that someone should have got this guy into treatment instead of using him to boost ratings for their shows. Shame on them all. Perhaps they will learn not to torment mentally ill people. They are all to blame for his crack up and for the deaths that resulted.

The RawStory article also claimed the guy "loved" Hitler, then I'd say that made him a socialist - Hitler was, after all a socialist and not a Republican. That makes him sound like some variety of lib (Libertarian or Liberal - there's not that much difference between 'em). And, as it turned out, his family had him committed in 2008, but it's very hard to hold a mental patient against his will anymore thanks to a set of laws that Democrats passed back during the Carter administration to "protect" people in mental institutions. The new law was a scattergun attemp to correct abuses brought on by sweetheart deals between government and mental institutions under previous largely Democrat administrations that virtually imprisoned mental patients with no way to get out.  The law was inspired by a Mickey Rooney movie. The resultant government "solution" to the problem simply turned loose hundreds of thousands of severely disturbed individuals onto the streets. Homelessness shot through the roof and the new law made it danged near impossible to commit anyone into care against their will until they had actually shot, stabbed or beaten someone. So despite efforts by his family to intervene, our shooter was able to sign himself out of treatment, after which his mental illness ramped on up to his final act of violence.

Great system you came up with there, guys!  I'm being sarcastic for those of you in San Francisco who missed that.  I know the folk in Lafayette, Louisiana certainly "got" it.


Just sayin'

Tom King © 2015

Why History Makes Leftists Mad

(c) 2013 by Tom King

Dictators are what you get when you replace God.with a man.

I was going to write a piece this morning on the top ten nasty mass murderers of the past century.  In researching it, I found a nicely researched piece called the "Top Ten Most Evil Dictators of All Time". While the article covers more like the top ten of the past 100 years, it was nicely researched.  What I particularly loved was the comments section.

These kinds of historical laundry lists always bring out all kinds of garbled nonsense from all the wonderful leftist trolls that inhabit cyberspace. You have to know that when you list the sins of truly evil people, you are going to catch hell from the left. These lists of mass murderers, especially if you include facts to back your list up, they inevitably highlight the preponderance of socialists that make your top ten. 

Inevitably when socialism goes off the rails, the only way the socialist leaders can preserve their power is to kill anyone who objects to them continuing to wreck the country.  There are no US presidents on this list because every single one stood down willingly at the end of their terms.  None had a strong enough need to hold on to power, so none had to kill to keep it. Every American president has understood that power is only lent to him for a time.  So far every president has accepted the office as a privilege to serve, granted for a short time only. Each president does his best to execute his duties well and then stands down when his time is done.

America's system of minimal government, balanced between legislative, administrative and judicial branches has proved a powerful stabilizer in the United States. It has created a nation that, while it has risen to be the most powerful nation-state in the world, has felt no need to establish an empire.  As much as you may disagree with the wars America has fought in the past century, we left every country we have fought with in the hands of its own people when it was over and paid for its rebuilding to boot.  You may hate the gulf wars, but we are gone from Iraq and extricating ourselves from Afghanistan as quickly as possible. That is not the act of despots or empire builders. 

In the end we're businessmen. What America wants is what's good for business.  When we can establish open trade between our nations, we all make a little money and the people of our nations are a little better off for it. Is there corruption?  Sure.  But isn't it better for the government to be in the business of rooting out corruption in business than it is for all of us to try and root out corruption in a too-powerful government.  Power corrupts and, as the saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. 

Centrally planned, centrally controlled socialist nations seldom last long.  Once all the wealth is taken from the rich and distributed to the "people" through the government, then the government has to turn back to the people and take back from them.  The only problem is that the people have by then used up what was redistributed from the wealthy and nothing was produced as a result (except maybe some votes for the people in power). 

There is nothing more ravenous and destructive than a powerful central government that can't get its hands on enough wealth to keep it strong.  Soon it beginst to either cannabalize its own economy or it attacks its neighbors.  Placing the record of history where socialists and others can see it always makes the socialist true-believers incoherent with anger. You can read it in some of the comments on the article linked above. The sociology ideology must be right whatever history reveals and if the facts don't quite support the ideology, they become downright frantic.  One commentator screams, "STOP SAYING STALIN WAS A “COMMUNIST”!! He wasn’t a communist at all."  The last resort of socialists, when confronted with the massive failures of socialism, is to simply claim whatever dictator we're talking about wasn't a "real" socialist.  They are always certain that someone more pure could have done it right.

And there's the fallacy. Only God could pull off socialism. The almost absolute power, inevitably given to the leadership of socialist movements, corrupts absolutely. Humans have not the capacity to engineer something as complex as an economy or a culture.  Nobody's smart enough. It's a mistake to try.  It's not an accident that atheism almost always comes hand-in-hand with socialist movements.  It's because socialism is little more than an attempt to build a political Tower of Babel.

The Tower of Babel was meant to create a place for man above the level of the flood so that God could no longer interfere with man's behavior.  Socialism is nothing more than an attempt by man to create Heaven here on Earth.  If we can do that, men reason, then we have no need for God.

If we can just eliminate God, the atheist/socialist reasons, then I no longer have to feel guilty about my naughty behavior and if I no longer feel guilty, I can do anything I want to and.................it begins.  The long slide toward misery, war and mass murder.  It happens time and time again and we can see it in history.

But we don't want to see the evidence of history, because, if we can't create Heaven on Earth, then our only hope is God and if we serve Him, we cannot serve ourselves and we cannot be naughty without guilt. So, in order to support the illusion of socialism, we simply ignore the actual results and stick to the ideology.

And it gives us delightful characters like Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Fidel Castro. 




I'm just saying,


Tom King

You may now continue foaming and ranting.....

Let's Write Some MORE Laws - That's the Ticket!

(c) Tom King

License  Some rights reserved by jurvetson


After a week like this one, we're sure to see a string of teary-eyed politicians telling us we've got to do something to prevent these kinds of tragedies from ever happening again - as if politicians have the power to stop anything bad from ever happening or causing anything good to happen for that matter.  Politicians live to make laws.  It's the politician's raison d'être. A politician does not feel like he or she is a politician if there's not a law passed with that politician's name on it.  The media encourages that by remarking sagely as to the number of laws named after a politician when the pundits and political hacks are evaluating said politician's career (usually after the former senator, congressman, mayor, etc. is safely dead).  Passing law is the mark of political success.  I've never heard of a politician being praised on the six o'clock news for getting rid of laws, have you?

It makes sense then that in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut school shootings that politicians would feel and overwhelming urge to pass a law. And you can bet it will be a gun control law.  The thinking is that if you get guns out of the hands of these people, then they can no longer go on shooting rampages. Only they won't go that far because the NRA is too powerful.  They'll just reduce the legal size of magazines, figuring criminals won't be able to kill as many people if they can't shoot so many without reloading.

Problem is, these guys aren't criminals that shoot up schools and shopping malls. They're people who should be in a mental hospital.  Virtually every one, from the guy who shot Gabbie Gifford to the autistic kid who felt no pain in Connecticut, virtually every one was identified as mentally ill at some time prior to their shooting rampages.

Making the gun harder to get is not going to stop them.  Making magazines smaller or doing away with semi-automatics isn't going to help.  Charles Whitman killed 13 people, an unborn child and wounded 32 others. He seemed normal enough, even exemplary in his behavior. He was an Eagle Scout and ex-Marine.  He used only bolt-action rifles, a shotgun and some pistols. He had no automatic weapons. 

A gentleman with a handgun stopped a man this past week who attacked people with a knife and was set to start a mass slaughter. He didn't have a gun.  An off-duty cop working as a movie theater security guard at a San Antonio mall stopped a man who was planning to shoot up the place.  The people who do this kind of thing are not generally working with both oars in the water.  Sweden has the most restrictive gun laws in the Western world and a terrorist managed to kill 70 unarmed people at an island resort there.

Even though these things are horrific, they aren't really getting more frequent.  We just hear about them more often because we have 24 hour news and, as political commentator Armstrong Williams aptly noted, "If it bleeds it leads." Still, when we hear about this stuff, all of us are seized with a desire to make it stop.

The problem is, you can't stop it. Evil and lunacy exist in this world and will, on occasion, strike.  We decided almost three decades ago that putting people willy nilly in insane asylums was a bad thing to do.  Government-run asylums, we discovered, were terrible places.  So we turned them all loose - or at least most of them.  That's how the government solves a problem. If there are people locked up unjustly and you demand they stop doing it, the government just lets everybody go. Big government is not subtle We had an explosion of homelessness after the great release experiment in the 80s when all those who had been in institutions hit the streets with no place to go.

The problem with the folks at the government being the ones to stop school massacres is that the government always takes a sledge hammer approach to any problem it tries to solve.  You don't get a lot of nuance in decision-making when it comes to laws being written in Washington and designed to provide a one-size-fits-all solution for 350 million people.

So, they jump on gun control as the easy fix for what is actually a mental health problem. People can't get help for mentally ill loved ones who need it.  I know. In my own family I've had to watch loved ones with mental illness deteriorate to the point that they attempted suicide quite spectacularly. I've got a loved one living in a storage building 3000 miles away and I'm too broke to help him.  The system tries to do as little as possible and only helps when they absolutely have no other choice. Any kind of even temporary committment is next to impossible because they fixed that in Washington back in the 80s after a Mickey Rooney movie about the subject of unjust mental incarceration.  It was widely viewed and in true Washington fashion, laws were passed to "make it stop".

Our mental health system is a wreck. In working with therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists, I've experienced first hand what they go through in trying to help patients. I spent two years in a graduate rehab psych program and worked in mental health programs for 25 years.  The average mental health practitioner walks among his patients like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs (occupied by lawyers).  They are so hemmed in by regulations and potential lawsuits that people who should be taken off the streets for their own good as well as the safety of the community can't be.  Sometimes a mentally ill person volunteers for a stint in the hospital, but if they volunteer, they can check themselves out whenever they want to, like when the killin' urge comes over them.

I worked at a treatment center for kids and watched severely disturbed kids turn 18 and be turned out into the world with virtually no supports. That's how the law worked. Some places tried to provide them help - usually faith-based facilities with church partnerships to help the kids integrate into the community. Most such programs operated without public support and under the disapproving eye of state mental health authorities.
In the past 30 years, we've learned more about the human brain and how to treat it and what to expect of various types of brain diseases.  Yet with all this knowledge, we find ourselves prevented from doing the very kinds of things that would prevent people from going berserk and shooting up an elementary school.

But that's what happens when you get politicians doing hip shot law-making. You want to prevent mass murders in our country?  Two things:

1. Protect likely targets.  If a movie theater can hire a sharp-eyed security guard, a school can.  Off duty cops have the training and are always looking for extra work. Ex-military guys can be trained for the work and lots of them come home looking for jobs. Protecting kids is a job they were trained for.
2. Get those with violent mental illnesses off the street.  Yes it will cost money, but not nearly as much as the massive bureaucracy needed to manage the highly restrictive gun control laws that are being proposed right now.  And hospitalization is not a life sentence. Proper treatment and medications can help unstable people cope and learn ways to avoid going out of their minds and committing these heinous acts.

Charles Whitman, the University of Texas Sniper, left a note. In it he said if his life insurance was any good, to pay off his debts and give the rest to mental health research so they could find out why he was compelled to kill all those people. 

Everyone asks why this happens every time it does. Some blame it on the devil. Others blame it on God.  Some, like the president in his memorial speech in Newtown, do both. Obama remarked that evil exists in the world and then qualified that by saying "God called them home". So we've assigned blame to both God and the Devil.  Throw in Republicans and the NRA and that should spread the blame around even more.

We look for a reason for the unreasonable, when these things happen. There is no reason other than the obvious one.  When you ask God to leave you be; when you tell Him you want nothing to do with Him, He goes away and leaves you alone.  We've no excuse for asking where God was.  We've asked Him to stay out of our schools.  We've left the crazy people out on the streets, uncared for till they lost their minds altogether.  And worse, when the angels left along with God, we didn't replace them with security guards.

If we're not willing to open our schools to God's protection and if we insist on trying to solve this problem in Washington instead of in our communities, homes and churches, where things like this happen, then the carnage will continue unabated. We cannot keep waiting for the government to do for us what can only be done by us.  We do not have to wait for permission to fix our own communities; to make them safer.

God will make things right in the end, despite our best efforts to muck it all up. While I don't believe He chose how those kids would die - that He "called those children home" as the President suggested - I do believe He will take them home one day when He comes back to clean up our mess. 

God help us all when He sees what we've done to this place.

Tom

 

How's That Gun Control Working Out for You?

Restrictive Gun Laws in Mexico Make It Open Season on Women and Children
(c) 2012 by Tom King

This past weekend, a large band of armed men (some of them law enforcement officers) descended on a church youth campout near Mexico City, raping 5 women and girls and sexually abusing and brutalizing an unknown number of youth in a lengthy rampaging attack on the camp. Seventeen of the attackers have been rounded up so far - cold comfort for the traumatized kids and their sponsors. 

Mexico's constitution, like ours guarantees its citizens the right to bear arms, but no one at the camp had any means to defend themselves. Despite its constitution, Mexico has already done what progressives want to do in the US.  They have piled on such heap of restrictive gun ordinances that owning anything larger than a 22 caliber popgun is nearly impossible - unless you're a gang member or drug cartel member of course.

Mexican citizens who obey the laws are sitting ducks for the heavily armed and increasingly brazen gangs of thugs that roam the countryside raping, robbing and murdering ordinary Mexican civilians. The death toll has been horrific. It's little wonder so many Mexicans are willing to risk swimming the river to escape.

With recent rash of mass shooting in the US, there has come the predictable calls for new, more restrictive gun laws ostensibly to prevent such events. As groups like the NRA continually point out, taking guns from the innocent leaves only the authorities and criminals armed.  A liberal friend of mine pointed out it only takes minutes for police to get to you if you call 911 for help.  Unfortunately, most shootings are over in just seconds.  The Colorado theater shooting was over in less than two minutes including time for the perp to reload.  While it's nice to catch the bad guy, catching a mass murder as he attempts to run away doesn't help the dead much.

If advocates of restrictive gun laws would like to see the consequences of a government legislating disarmament of its citizenry, one need look no further than Mexico. I don't know about your church, but when mine takes its kids camping, we take along our men and many of them go well-armed - just in case there are bears, you know.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King