The View From 1776

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Mr. Buchanan treats that danger in Christmas in an Anti-Christian Age

Darwinian evolution was enthusiastically endorsed, at the time Origin of the Species was published, by Karl Marx and his followers.  They viewed Darwin’s thesis as “proof” of their doctrine of history “evolving” from capitalism into a revolution of the proletariat that would transform human nature.  Thus liberal-progressive savagery directed against Christianity is intended to destroy spiritual religiosity, which stands athwart the path to “a good socialist society,” called in Orwellian Newspeak “science.”

As I wrote in The Liberal Jihad: The Hundred Year War Against The Constitution,

Chapter Seven excerpt:

Darwin’s hypothesis of biological evolution, when confined to natural selection as a means of modifying species, is just another interesting speculation. When, however, it is employed as Darwin intended— to deny God and morality— Darwinian evolution becomes a piece of heavy artillery for the liberal jihad.

Not only does it deny the truth of the Bible; more destructively it reduces the world of human habitation to a jungle of kill-or-be-kill amorality. Its doctrine provided a rationalization for the liquidations of tens of millions of people in the totalitarian regimes of Soviet Russia, National Socialist Germany, and Red China…

From high schools through college young students are taught that Darwinian evolution is the only scientific truth. Once having accepted that doctrine, students are only a step away from the doctrine that the Judeo-Christian morality underpinning the Constitution is ignorant nonsense…

One of Charles Darwin’s major champions was Thomas Huxley, who asserted that there is no such thing as morality; there is only the struggle for evolutionary survival.  Hence whatever kind of human conduct that enables one person or society to impose its hegemony on others is justified as evolutionary progress.  Enter Hitler and his master race theory…

Huxley’s dismissal of morality and sin echoes Thomas Hobbes’s version of the state of nature described in his 1651 Leviathan; or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil:

... In such condition there is no place for industry, ... and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Though from different starting points, Hobbes, Darwin, and Huxley were arguing, in effect, that the earthly sovereign (intellectual or military), not God-given morality, is the sole source of law and order in political society. Needless to say, this is a potentially totalitarian doctrine.

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America in Need of Revival
By Jeff Lukens

We live in and age of unbelief. We live with America in decline. We are no longer the America of our founders, or even the America that existed twenty years ago. Collectively, we are more secular, with ever-increasing faith in government, and decreasing faith in God. The consequences of which are already showing. The culture must change. We need a spiritual revival. We need a Third Great Awakening.

No education? No problem. The government will take care of you. Having a baby out of wedlock? No problem there either. Forty percent of babies are born that way. Gay marriage? Hey, who cares what the Bibles says. Victimhood trumps success. Nothing is right or wrong, because that might suggest a standard by which right and wrong would be defined. Personal choice is the new standard, which is no standard at all.

Freedom should be an easy sell. So why are conservatives and the people of faith who proclaim freedom the ones who are insulted and mocked? We are seen as the deniers of freedom. What so many are missing is morality, a self-governing limit to behavior. As the left sees it, they do not have to accept responsibility. They call it emancipation and enlightenment. Freedom means no obstacles on the road to what our grandparents called depravity.

Culturally, the nation is already broken. The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut is only the most recent example. We have reached a majority of people who do not think citizens should be personally responsible. In a clear choice of right and wrong in the 2012 elections, the voters chose wrong. With the Debt Clock ticking ever higher by more than a trillion dollars a year, it is a mathematical certainty collapse is coming. The government alone cannot fix it.

What’s needed is profound national revival. May God in his grace and mercy allow the American people to experience a Great Awakening. It is our only hope.

Two revivals were such game-changing events in American history that Christian historians where compelled to call them Great Awakenings. The first occurred in the early to mid 1700s, and the Second Great Awakening in the early to mid 1800s. Ministers proclaimed the Gospel with great care, passion, and conviction. These included Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, John Wesley and Charles Wesley. With their aid, people realized they needed to repent and get right with God.

In time, this national yearning for spiritual expression and moral leadership led to the desire for the nation to rid itself from the tyranny of King George III. While not every Founding Father was a devout Christian, many of them were, and they sought to establish a free society based on Judeo-Christian principles.

The First Great Awakening that created the moral climate for the Declaration of Independence and the founding of a new country, conceived in liberty, which would truly become a light to the nations. No country in human history has done more to liberate other people economically, politically, or spiritually than the United States.

The Second Great Awakening was even more powerful in the mid-19th century then the First Great Awakening had been in the 18th century. In his book, Implosion, Joel Rosenberg explains:

One piece of observable evidence in this regard is the explosive growth in the number of church congregations that were established in the wake of both Great Awakenings. At the same time, Christians during this period sought to put their faith into action to improve their neighborhoods and communities and the nation as a whole. They persuaded millions of children to enroll in Sunday school programs to learn about the Bible and pray for their nation. They opened orphanages and soup kitchens to care for the poor and needy. They started clinics and hospitals to care for the sick, elderly and infirm. They founded elementary and secondary schools for girls as well as boys. They established colleges and universities dedicated to teaching both the Scriptures and the sciences. They led social campaigns to persuade Americans to stop drinking so much alcohol and to abolish the evil of slavery. These Christians didn’t expect the government to take care of them. They believed it was the Church’s job to show the love of Christ to their neighbors in real and practical ways. They were right, and they made America a better place as a result – not perfect, but better.

This was not about collective salvation. One by one, people must accept Christ into their heart to receive salvation. But the people believed the church’s job was to show the love of Christ and to care for their fellow man. The Second Great Awakening culminated with Abraham Lincoln and the abolition of slavery.

Should people give up and say America, as passed down to us by previous generations, is no more? That was President Obama’s goal when he promised to fundamentally transform America. He’s been doing as he promised, and now a majority of people are happy to let him do it for another term.

Both government programs and charities can feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Government welfare, nevertheless, cannot reach people’s hearts. Christian charities can. Serving the needy in a loving Christian way serves the ultimate purpose of reaching the heart where the will for change takes place. Christ can only enter the heart of the humble. And we know enough changed hearts lead to a changed culture.

Abiding faith is unfashionable, and is considered an oddity. If you are going to exercise your faith with authenticity and courage, you will receive mockery, ridicule, and rejection. For patriots, it is the price that must be paid to save the nation.

The Bible says, “If My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” (2 Chronicles 7:14) Only a Third Great Awakening can save us now.

Jeff Lukens

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This op-ed article from the December 17, 2012, internet edition of the Wall Street Journal does a good job covering the issue.

Guns, Mental Illness and Newtown
There were 18 random mass shootings in the 1980s, 54 in the 1990s, and 87 in the 2000s.

By DAVID KOPEL

Has the rate of random mass shootings in the United States increased? Over the past 30 years, the answer is definitely yes. It is also true that the total U.S. homicide rate has fallen by over half since 1980, and the gun homicide rate has fallen along with it. Today, Americans are safer from violent crime, including gun homicide, than they have been at any time since the mid-1960s.

Mass shootings, defined as four or more fatalities, fluctuate from year to year, but over the past 30 years there has been no long-term increase or decrease. But “random” mass shootings, such as the horrific crimes last Friday in Newtown, Conn., have increased.

Alan Lankford of the University of Alabama analyzed data from a recent New York Police Department study of “active shooters”—criminals who attempted to murder people in a confined area, where there are lots of people, and who chose at least some victims randomly. Counting only the incidents with at least two casualties, there were 179 such crimes between 1966 and 2010. In the 1980s, there were 18. In the 1990s, there were 54. In the 2000s, there were 87.

If you count only such crimes in which five or more victims were killed, there were six in the 1980s and 19 in the 2000s.

Why the increase? It cannot be because gun-control laws have become more lax. Before the 1968 Gun Control Act, there were almost no federal gun-control laws. The exception was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which set up an extremely severe registration and tax system for automatic weapons and has remained in force for 78 years.

Nor are magazines holding more than 10 rounds something new. They were invented decades ago and have long been standard for many handguns. Police officers carry them for the same reason that civilians do: Especially if a person is attacked by multiple assailants, there is no guarantee that a 10-round magazine will end the assault.

The 1980s were much worse than today in terms of overall violent crime, including gun homicide, but they were much better than today in terms of mass random shootings. The difference wasn’t that the 1980s had tougher controls on so-called “assault weapons.” No assault weapons law existed in the U.S. until California passed a ban in 1989.

Connecticut followed in 1993. None of the guns that the Newtown murderer used was an assault weapon under Connecticut law. This illustrates the uselessness of bans on so-called assault weapons, since those bans concentrate on guns’ cosmetics, such as whether the gun has a bayonet lug, rather than their function.

What some people call “assault weapons” function like every other normal firearm—they fire only one bullet each time the trigger is pressed. Unlike automatics (machine guns), they do not fire continuously as long as the trigger is held. They are “semi-automatic” because they eject the empty shell case and load the next round into the firing chamber.

Today in America, most handguns are semi-automatics, as are many long guns, including the best-selling rifle today, the AR-15, the model used in the Newtown shooting. Some of these guns look like machine guns, but they do not function like machine guns.

Back in the mid-1960s, in most states, an adult could walk into a store and buy an AR-15 rifle, no questions asked. Today, firearms are the most heavily regulated consumer product in the United States. If someone wants to purchase an AR-15 or any other firearm, the store must first get permission for the sale from the FBI or its state counterpart. Permission is denied if the buyer is in one of nine categories of “prohibited persons,” including felons, domestic-violence misdemeanants, and persons who have been adjudicated mentally ill or alcoholic.

Since gun controls today are far stricter than at the time when “active shooters” were rare, what can account for the increase in these shootings? One plausible answer is the media. Cable TV in the 1990s, and the Internet today, greatly magnify the instant celebrity that a mass killer can achieve. We know that many would-be mass killers obsessively study their predecessors.

Loren Coleman’s 2004 book “The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines” shows that the copycat effect is as old as the media itself. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 classic “The Sorrows of Young Werther” triggered a spate of copycat suicides all over Europe. But today the velocity and pervasiveness of the media make the problem much worse.

A second explanation is the deinstitutionalization of the violently mentally ill. A 2000 New York Times study of 100 rampage murderers found that 47 were mentally ill. In the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law (2008), Jason C. Matejkowski and his co-authors reported that 16% of state prisoners who had perpetrated murders were mentally ill.

In the mid-1960s, many of the killings would have been prevented because the severely mentally ill would have been confined and cared for in a state institution. But today, while government at most every level has bloated over the past half-century, mental-health treatment has been decimated. According to a study released in July by the Treatment Advocacy Center, the number of state hospital beds in America per capita has plummeted to 1850 levels, or 14.1 beds per 100,000 people.

Moreover, a 2011 paper by Steven P. Segal at the University of California, Berkeley, “Civil Commitment Law, Mental Health Services, and U.S. Homicide Rates,” found that a third of the state-to-state variation in homicide rates was attributable to the strength or weakness of involuntary civil-commitment laws.

Finally, it must be acknowledged that many of these attacks today unfortunately take place in pretend “gun-free zones,” such as schools, movie theaters and shopping malls. According to Ron Borsch’s study for the Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato, active shooters are different from the gangsters and other street toughs whom a police officer might engage in a gunfight. They are predominantly weaklings and cowards who crumble easily as soon as an armed person shows up.

The problem is that by the time the police arrive, lots of people are already dead. So when armed citizens are on the scene, many lives are saved. The media rarely mention the mass murders that were thwarted by armed citizens at the Shoney’s Restaurant in Anniston, Ala. (1991), the high school in Pearl, Miss. (1997), the middle-school dance in Edinboro, Penn. (1998), and the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo. (2007), among others.

At the Clackamas Mall in Oregon last week, an active shooter murdered two people and then saw that a shopper, who had a handgun carry permit, had drawn a gun and was aiming at him. The murderer’s next shot was to kill himself.

Real gun-free zones are a wonderful idea, but they are only real if they are created by metal detectors backed up by armed guards. Pretend gun-free zones, where law-abiding adults (who pass a fingerprint-based background check and a safety training class) are still disarmed, are magnets for evildoers who know they will be able to murder at will with little threat of being fired upon.

People who are serious about preventing the next Newtown should embrace much greater funding for mental health, strong laws for civil commitment of the violently mentally ill—and stop kidding themselves that pretend gun-free zones will stop killers.

Mr. Kopel is research director of the Independence Institute and co-author of the law school textbook, “Firearms Law and the Second Amendment” (Aspen, 2012).

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Liberal-progressives’ voices are usually the loudest clamoring for tighter procedural regulations over purchase and possession of guns.  Liberal-progressives’ approach is always top-down.  Regimentation by collectivized government is presumed to be the only source of betterment for people’s lives, as well as the only way to channel human behavior in desired directions. 

Welfare-state programs were supposed to eliminate poverty thereby diminishing the incentive for crime.  Government’s thousands of regulatory agencies, in liberal-progressive presumption, were to restructure society and alter human nature, as Karl Mark predicted.  The grandest example of this misguided and savagely destructive theory was Lenin’s expectation that socialistic revolution and police-state brutality would alter human nature to create New Soviet Man, who would submerge his individuality in the goals of the political state, taking only what he needed, and giving to his maximum ability.

Today’s faith in the efficacy of sociologists and bureaucratic regulation also leads liberal-progressives to advocate ever increasing leniency toward criminal behavior.  Social justice theory, emanating from Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1750s, postulates that humans are naturally good unless corrupted by a society that supports private property rights.  Hence criminals are the victims of society.  Criminals deserve rehabilitation, not punishment.

The corollary presumption seems to be that availability of guns corrupts human nature and leads irresistibly to an urge to kill.

The older theory of justice, before the advent of liberal-progressive social justice, viewed crimes as actions harming both the victims, and society as a whole.  The perpetrator had to pay his dues to both.  In Judeo-Christian morality, which in the past constituted the substance of Western civilization, spiritual religion appealed to every individual to do the right thing, to assess actions against moral precepts inculcated by religion.  As John Adams said, our Constitution was made for a people self-restrained by religion and morality.

Today secular government, permeated by liberal-progressive multiculturalism, tells us that the only sin is intolerance, which means applying any standard to measure acceptability of conduct.  Hedonism is welcomed by legislators and glorified in the media.  This, it seems to me, is the spirit that erupts in nihilistic barbarity in schools, shopping malls, and theaters.  Such mass killing was unknown before violent student activism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Harvard Study: Gun Control Is Counterproductive

The study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence.” Contrary to conventional wisdom, and the sniffs of our more sophisticated and generally anti-gun counterparts across the pond, the answer is “no.” And not just no, as in there is no correlation between gun ownership and violent crime, but an emphatic no, showing a negative correlation: as gun ownership increases, murder and suicide decreases.

The findings of two criminologists - Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser - in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:
Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).

For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland’s murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns. As the study’s authors write in the report:

If the mantra “more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death” were true, broad cross-national comparisons should show that nations with higher gun ownership per capita consistently have more death. Nations with higher gun ownership rates, however, do not have higher murder or suicide rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many high gun ownership nations have much lower murder rates. (p. 661)

Crime rates in Chicago and DC drop after gun control laws are struck down

Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down gun control laws in Chicago and Washington, D.C. …In the first six months of this year, there were 14% fewer murders in Chicago compared to the first six months of last year – back when owning handguns was illegal. It was the largest drop in Chicago’s murder rate since the handgun ban went into effect in 1982.

Gun Laws and Crime: A Complex Relationship
By ADAM LIPTAK   New York Times

Gun Control: Myths and Realities
by David Lampo -  Cato Institute

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