Violence Archives - Bookworm Room

No. 11 Bookworm Podcast: The Left is returning us to the horrors of tribalism

August 22, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

In their desperate grab for power, the Left is abandoning the unity of America’s ideas in favor of tribalism, with all its attendant violence.

(If you prefer listening to reading, the companion podcast is embedded below, or you can listen to it at Libsyn or at Apple podcasts. I’m trying to make a go of my podcast so, if you like it, please share it with your friends and on social media. Giving it good ratings helps too.)

One of the books I’ve recommended for some time now is Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The title pretty much says it all: We live in a safer, less violent world than at any time in human history. It’s the kind of book people should read if the news is getting them down. While our media operates on the “if it bleeds it leads” principle, the real world operates on an “it’s never been better” principle even in the worst parts of the world.

Pinker wrote the book in 2012, before the world felt the full effect of Obama’s lead from behind policy in Syria, his attack on Libya, and his passivity regarding the Arab Spring, all of which turned large parts of the Middle East and North Africa into blood-soaked hellholes, with Angela Merkel then helping the violence to leak into Europe, which means that his book is based on a less violent time than the one in which we live. Nevertheless, his greater point is still a good one: Over the centuries . . . no, over the millennia, we humans have become less violent. We’ve become less violent in warfare, less violent in daily life, less violent in dealing with criminals, and less violent in entertainment.

Just think that a “mere” 2,000 years ago, the Romans were the apex of civilization, complete with their “Pax Romana” (or Roman Peace). For those who forgot to pay attention in Roman history class, the Pax Romana was a relatively peaceful period from about 27 B.C. to about 140 A.D. when there was minimal strife within Rome itself.

Of course “minimal strife” is a relative term. Rome expanded rapidly during this period, so there was actually constant warfare. Indeed, it was during this time — in 70 A.D. — that the Siege of Jerusalem took place and it proved to be one of the bloodiest wars in which the Romans engaged. Josephus, who wrote the history, believed that over 1.1 million non-combatants died in Jerusalem alone. He was probably exaggerating, but a good guess is still about 350,000 non-combatant deaths.

This was also the time during which Tacitus said of Rome’s conquering tactics, “They make a desert [or desolation] and call it peace.” In other words, it was not “peace” as we think of it. [Read more…]

Progressives are engaged in a “de-civilizing process” that will end badly

November 26, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Everything Progressives do is part of a de-civilizing process that will plunge us back into the cruelty and murder that make up humankind’s natural state.

I am reading Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which is very enjoyable because Pinker is a lucid, interesting writer. Although the book was published in 2011, it’s amazingly pertinent in Trump’s America, because Trump has brought out true Leftism, red of tooth and claw, and it’s becoming increasingly easy to see the direction in which American Leftism is heading.

The book’s basic premise, which is spelled out in the subtitle, is that the world is an exponentially less violent place than it was in the past. Despite the “if it bleeds it leads” media world, which horrifies us with stories about violence, the reality is that, even in the most dangerous parts of the world, life is safer now than it was in the past. Pinker has all sorts of statistics and charts showing that murder rates, assaults, rape, torture, and even war have all declined more dramatically than most people realize. The pre-modern world was a horrific place, not just because of starvation and disease, but because of man’s unending inhumanity to man.

To me, a history major, this is old news. However, I bet for many readers, his vivid descriptions of violence from the ancient world through the mid-19th century is eye-opening. Human history is an endless litany of torture, mass murder, warfare, personal murder, more torture and still more torture. Whether you’re reading the Old Testament, Homer, Josephus’s Jewish Wars, explorers’ and colonists’ eye-witness accounts of savagery amongst indigenous people in the New World, or just the day-to-day history of the Roman or Medieval/Renaissance worlds, what humans did to other humans is completely stomach churning.

Data shows that stone age tribes across the world (including the Native Americans that Lefties always want to present as plaster saints) were ferocious when it came to torturing, murdering, and murderously torturing their foes. (Indeed, that stone age impulse instantly to kill any perceived threats just popped up again in the story of that young man whose missionary urge took him to an isolated tribe on North Sentinel Island, only to have the tribe promptly slaughter him.) Even as people abandoned being stone-age hunter-gatherers and started creating nation-states, these cruel impulses remained, whether in acts of violence individuals committed against each other, in warfare, or in the cruelty of increasingly strong states.

So, what happened? Pinker explains that there was a civilizing process that started in England and spread outward from there. There was no one thing that led to lessened violence. Instead, it was a collection of things. [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 7/6/2018 — The post D-Day edition and open thread

June 7, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

There are so many interesting things out there (apologies, pardons, STDs, war, etc.) that I had to do a Bookworm Beat to share all of them with you.

Samantha Bee apologizes as only a narcissist can. One of the surest signs that someone is a narcissist is the fact that he or she cannot offer a heartfelt apology. Narcissists only traffic in non-apology apologies.

For example, if a narcissist breaks your vase, the narcissist will not say “I am so sorry I broke your vase.” Instead, the narcissist will say “I’m sorry you’re upset that your vase is broken.” Translated, this means that the narcissist is sorry that you are angry at the narcissist. The narcissist, in his own mind, has done nothing to merit this anger. It was undoubtedly your fault, in some way as yet unknown, that the narcissist was forced to break your vase. And it’s a damn shame for the narcissist’s peace of mind you’re upset about it.

Samantha Bee is a narcissist. The appropriate thing for Bee to have done after calling Ivanka Trump the C-word, would have been to say “I am so sorry I called Ivanka Trump the C-word. It was crude and uncalled for. I did it for effect. I was not thinking and I am ashamed of myself for what I have done.” Instead, Bee, a true narcissist, essentially doubled down.

She first complained that people were mad at her. They should not be mad, she implied, because she is trying to reclaim the C-word. Her mistake was in having momentarily abandoned this reclamation by wasting the word as an insult to Ivanka (who, Bee implies, deserved whatever insults came her way).

Having explained to her own satisfaction that people were too dumb to understand her feminist linguistic goals, Bee was ready to issue Phase 1 of the non-apology apology: “I crossed the line, I regret it, and I do apologize for that.” In other words, she’s not at all sorry that she launched a vile insult against Ivanka. She’s simply sorry that she got caught crossing the line.

It only got worse from there. Phase 2 was for Bee to say she was sorry that people didn’t understand that she was talking about immigration (how stupid of them). She was sorry that stupid people didn’t realize that her mis-use of the C-word (remember, she’s reclaiming it) obscured the fact that everything she did was “for the children.”

Bee ended by once again blaming Ivanka and all the other stupid conservatives for forcing her to issue the non-apology apology: “Civility is just nice words. Maybe we should all worry a little bit more about the niceness of our actions.”

As I said, she’s a narcissist.

Also, if you want to have fun watching a narcissist not apologize, I hope you’ve been following Bill Clinton’s travails as he tries to function in a #MeToo world. You can just see him thinking to himself that nobody was demanding these ridiculous apologies back in the 1990s. Clinton is not sorry he destroyed Monica Lewinsky’s life — although she was complicit in her own seduction, Bill and Hillary went out of their way to destroy her reputation. He’s not sorry about Pedophile Island. He’s not sorry about assaulting and raping women. He’s just really, really sorry people nowadays keep demanding that he apologize. [Read more…]

Sorry, people, but size matters

October 2, 2014 by Bookworm 9 Comments

The phrase “size matters” often has sexual connotations, but not in this post. Instead, I’m talking about the dynamics of violence. In the real world, as opposed to a Leftist utopia, big usual has an advantage over small in matters of violence, with weapons being the great equalizer.

While I know that the bigger combatant doesn’t always win over the small one, it’s certainly the rule, with few exceptions. A lumbering, untrained giant can be brought to heel by an agile, intelligent small person (viz David and Goliath), but the more common situation is that, even if a small, aggressive person starts the fight, the giant, once roused, is likely to finish it:

The big versus small situation plays out most frequently in the battle between the sexes. Ignoring outliers who are, by definition, rare, men are bigger and stronger than women. Our Leftist culture, however, insists that we ignore this biological reality in favor of a political construct insisting that we cannot impose equal standards that may result in different outcomes. Instead, to ensure “justice,” we must have different standards to ensure equal outcomes.

The result of this PC policy from the self-identified “reality-based” community emerged in a small, buried detail regarding Omar Gonzalez’s terrifying assault on the White House, one that put the president and his family at real risk: The Secret Service agent who couldn’t bar Gonzalez at the door was a woman:

The female agent assigned to the front door of the White House when Omar Gonzalez gained entry and “overpowered” her, was required to meet far lower standards of physical strength than her male colleagues. John McCormack writes in the Weekly Standard:

According to the Secret Service, male recruits in their twenties need to perform 11 chin-ups to receive an “excellent” rating; performing four chin-ups or fewer would disqualify him from serving as a Secret Service agent.

But for a female recruit in her twenties, four chin-ups would earn her an “excellent” rating; just one chin-up is enough for her to avoid the disqualifying “very poor” rating.

This is not the first time we’ve seen a disaster unfold because a woman was on duty in a position in which strength mattered. In March 2005, Brian Nichols, a violent ex-con was awaiting trial on yet another offense when he overpowered and killed a sheriff’s deputy at the courthouse, raced into the courtroom to kill the judge and court reporter, killed a federal agent when he was on the run, and eventually took hostage a woman who talked him down by sharing her meth and introducing him to Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life.

The first link in the chain of events that saw Nichols kill four people was the fact that the sheriff’s deputy could not restrain him. It’s entirely possible that Nichols could have shown such strength and cunning that he quickly overpowered a 6’4″ deputy who was once a linebacker. But that’s not what happened. What happened was that the sheriff’s deputy escorting this huge, violent man to the court room was a 51-year-old, 5’2″ woman. I am here to tell you, as a fairly experienced martial artist, that even the most fit 51-year-old 5’2″ woman has no chance against a young, determined, tall, well-muscled man. His mass wins against her fitness every time. (And that’s true even if the man goes to great effort to create the external impression that he’s a she.)

There’s only one exception to the truism that a big man beats a small woman every time: if the small woman is armed, suddenly she’s equal. (In the Nichols case, the sheriff’s deputy was changing her uniform in some way, so she had apparently put her gun out of her own reach.)

Rather than expounding on this point myself, I’ll pass the baton to my friend Mike McDaniel, who has addressed just this issue with his usual lyricism at The Truth About Guns blog. Please check it out, because it’s a lovely encomium to football, a rumination about physical size disparities, and a tongue-lashing against the Left’s pernicious habit of denying reality, all wrapped up in a package that states some hard truths about guns and size, written from the perspective of someone who knows guns.

Hollywood couldn’t make an honest “Noah” without indicting itself

March 28, 2014 by Bookworm 9 Comments

Ben Shapiro doesn’t like Noah, the newest Hollywood wannabe blockbuster, this one based loosely on the Bible. At his own website, Truth Now, and at Breitbart, he vigorously attacks the movie for turning the Bible on its head. As you read here some months ago, Hollywood has taken one of the Bible’s pivotal narratives, which focuses closely on the wages of man’s immorality, and turned it into a Gaia-focused extravaganza, with a steroid-pumped, ninja-esque Noah cheerfully watching humans die because they pillaged the animal world. In his Breitbart critique, Shapiro, perhaps accidentally, hones in on why it was ridiculous ever to expect Hollywood to be true to the Biblical source:

In this litany of great sins [eating meat, mining for energy sources, making weapons], you may be missing the traditional Biblical explanations of sin: idolatry, sexual immorality, violence. Rape and murder make brief appearances, but those sins are purely secondary to the true sin: destruction of the environment and the purty animals.

“Idolatry, sexual immortality, violence” — the big sins in the Bible . . . .and the big money-makers in Hollywood:

Idolatry

Sexual Immorality

Violence

Without the staples of idolatry, sexual immorality, and violence, Hollywood would go broke. It was therefore always impossible to expect Hollywood to make a movie attacking its holy trinity.

There’s a greater difference between arms and abortion than a “reasonable” NYT editor will acknowledge

January 12, 2013 by Bookworm 2 Comments

A friend pointed me in the direction of a New York Times article that argues that both Second Amendment supporters and Abortion supporters are too quick to panic whenever the topics come up for debate, thereby precluding all rational discussion. After describing the way VP Biden’s mention of Obama and executive orders regarding guns got reported on the conservative side of the blogosphere as a putsch that would see Obama effectively overriding the Second Amendment, the editorial goes on:

The distance between what Mr. Biden said and what The Examiner reported gets at why it’s so difficult to conduct a national conversation on the regulation of firearms. If the gun-control camp mentions restrictions the anti-gun-control camp hears bans. If the former mentions a ban on certain kinds of guns, the latter hears all guns, plus confiscation.

Many gun-rights activists, moreover, seem to suspect that the other side argues in bad faith. In public, gun-control advocates may sound reasonable, proposing only limited regulations, but what they really want is to repeal the Second Amendment, or to overturn Heller, and force the complete disarmament of the civilian population. First they’ll come for our Bushmasters, then they’ll come for our hunting rifles.

The fear that restrictions are a Trojan horse, the prelude to outright prohibition, similarly animates the staunch defenders of another controversial right: Abortion.

Writing in Slate in 2006, during Samuel Alito’s confirmation hearings, the legal academic Dawn Johnsen argued that Senators asking whether he would overturn Roe were missing the point. He would more likely “hollow it out.” Ms. Johnsen suggested that Roe opponents have taken an “incremental” approach to eviscerating abortion rights. They’ve pushed for restrictions such as waiting periods and “informed consent” laws; restrictions “designed to sound reasonable while also limiting the number of abortions performed, ultimately as completely as would a criminal ban.”

Last December, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed an abortion bill requiring doctors to screen women for coercion (among other measures). Supporters claimed the bill was necessary to safeguard women’s health; opponents said it was a paternalistic assault on women’s rights. The same argument played out in Kansas in 2011, when the state set compulsory standards for abortion clinics. Supporters claimed the regulations were an effort to protect women from unsafe conditions; opponents said they were a ruse to curb reproductive freedom.

The editorial is certainly correct that the debate on both sides tends to be argued most loudly at the extremes, rather than in the middle. It errs, though, insofar as it presumes a legal equivalence between the two issues. The primary difference between the two issues is gun ownership is an explicitly and affirmative stated Constitutional right, while abortion is an emanation of a penumbra — or, in other words, a judicially created right.

Moreover, for those who actually bother to read Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court made very clear that the state has a continuing interest in the fetus. As the fetus develops towards recognizable person-hood (meaning that it can survive outside the womb), the state’s interest increases dramatically. Although recent(ish) Supreme Court decisions have expanded a woman’s rights over the state’s/fetus’s rights, the Court has never erased that state interest entirely.

The Second Amendment, of course, vests all interests in the citizen. What this means is that, in theory, the State has no rights whatsoever when it comes to arms. That’s the theory. In fact, though, the Supreme Court has long allowed local and federal jurisdictions to place some limitations on arms in order to maintain the peace. Significantly, however, by imposing these limitations, the State is intruding on a citizen’s absolute constitutional right. In the case of abortion, the citizen seeking an abortion is intruding upon the State’s interest in nascent citizens.

Why does this distinction matter? Because while Roe gives the state the right, power, and duty to protect the smallest citizens, so that state interference is the appropriate way to approach the issue, the Constitution doesn’t grant the government the authority to interfere with the People’s right to keep and bear arms. Moreover, Obama, as the nation’s chief executive, has only a subset of the powers granted to the Federal government as a whole, and this subset is limited to those executive orders necessary to carry out Congress’s dictates. It therefore becomes a matter of supreme citizen interest when Obama’s minions announce that he intends to bypass Congress entirely and act in a way that diminishes an expressly stated Constitutional right vested in citizens, not government.

Rational discourse is a great idea. But it’s less of a great idea when it operates off the premise that, with regard to both abortion and guns, the State holds all the power cards. More than that, Second Amendment advocates would be fools to engage in a “gun control” debate, because framing the discussion that way automatically cedes to the government the right to control guns. Rather, we should be talking about the government’s actual responsibility in a civilized nation, which is exert some authority over violence. As I’ve noted before, statistical data indicates that framing the issue in such a way militates in favor of more arms, rather than fewer.

Remind me again how much what we see on TV affects us?

January 7, 2013 by Bookworm 9 Comments

From my email:

It’s the culture

December 16, 2012 by Danny Lemieux 18 Comments

Nobody seems to want to admit it, but it’s our culture!

School shootings aren’t new. But, Americans have owned guns aplenty for more-than 200 years of nationhood and it seems that we’ve never had school shootings as we have experienced in the past few years. Neither has the rest of the modern world, but school, church and shopping mall attacks have been occurring even in countries with the strictest gun controls (e.g., Scotland, Germany, Norway, Japan). What has changed?

How about “that which must not be named”?

The old-guard leftists of the Frankfurter and Antonio Gramsci (you can “wiki” those names) school knew that to fundamentally remake society, you first had to destroy the church, society and the family. I would say Gramsci and Frankfurter school alumnae have had a pretty good success record.

Ever since LBJ’s 1960s “War on Poverty”, families have been disintegrating. It started with the most vulnerable (inner city blacks, where now 70% of children have no fathers) and has now spread to white, non-Hispanic families (close-to 30% of children born out of wedlock). Often, children in such families are left largely unsupervised, grow up without good male role models and enjoy ready access to the most depraved pornography, graphic violence, weapons, drugs and other vices through the internet and their peers, starting at a very young and formative age. One can try to prevent their kids’ access to this at home, but how does one prevent them from going down the street to a friends’ house?

I couldn’t help but notice that the first media reports of the shooter (whom I refuse to name and help make more famous) mentioned a mother but didn’t mention a father. Sure enough, the latest reports by a British news outlet, The Daily Mail, are of a boy traumatized by a three-year old divorce. Why did he single out his mother as the first victim? We may never know, but I suspect that the divorce may have had something to do with it. We are also learning that (surprise!) the shooter was a compulsive violent-video gamer.

Youth and adolescence are a time when kids should be learning communication skills and how to interact with adults and peers. Instead, too many kids appear to be devolving into lonely social outcasts and losers (a non-PC term I use for emphasis only). Throw in mental illness, they can become dangerous (the source of much of this mental illness is a worthy topic in and of itself…but think about what hours and hours of sitting in front of a screen does to the developing brain of a young child?). These are the years when their neuro linkages are being formed.

The mass media and punditry immediately started talking about this shooter’s “obvious” mental problems, thereby anointing him a member of “victim” class and providing absolution for his sins. I don’t buy any of it. I can understand someone crazed with rage shooting their mother in the heat of the moment, but the premeditation and time the shooter needed took to travel to a school after killing his own mother and destroying young kids’ lives in psychopathic cold blood point not mental illness but a willing pact made with evil. It is evil, pure and simple, nothing less. At one point, this shooter was confronted with a choice and he chose evil. Why did he make that choice? Here’s a thought:

What are the cultural messages that get hammered into young kids’ brains today? There is no reward in elevation, but there is reward in depravity. Our mass media hammers into their developing brains, over and over again, that to be depraved is to be “famous”, a powerful siren’s song for lonely outcast kids. These kids know that the quickest way to fame and even fortune is to act depraved and to be guaranteed that their depravity will be broadcast widely over the internet and throughout the global media. Some of them grow into mega stars (I’m thinking of Rapper culture, Madonna, Lady Gaga and Jerry Springers as just a few examples), further amplifying the siren’s song. The mass media, vigilantly on the lookout for breaking news 24/7, is complicit in this, for it is the internet and mass media that provide monsters their 15 minutes of fame. Remember that the next time you look at how our TV screens extol depravity. Btw, if you doubt me about just how depraved our culture has become, then Google [game kindergarten killer].

Sorry to have to use the word “depraved” of course. In our Gramsci-Frankfurter culture, such terms are soooooo judgmental and we don’t dare to be judgmental, do we? Why, other people might not like us, a sentence worse than death for too many adults that never outgrew their adolescence.

So what do we do about it? We can start by focusing on our own kids, knowing that our obligation as parents is not just to love them but to build them spiritually into good citizens and to armor them against the bad influences in our imperfect world. We can extend support to single parents, especially those trying to work jobs simply to survive, and we help provide guidance to their kids. These are the days when wolves stalk a land in which too many people have forgotten how to recognize wolves for what they are. And, if you decide to have children, get married and stay married, so that you can nurture, protect and educate your children into solid citizens together. My very brilliant spouse, a middle-school teacher, tells me that she can tell right away when her students’ families are trouble by the way that the kids lash-out in school. She has already lost too many of her former students to drugs and suicide.

Rely on our churches? Maybe, but so many have become such weak tea. My own Episcopal church…part of the Anglican Communion that produced such great theological thinkers and moral stalwarts as C.S. Lewis (our patron saint, in my view)…has been complicit in this. It is so terrified of being perceived as “uncool” that it doesn’t dare attack popular culture or elevate its members above the culture…unless, of course, it is a soft target, such as those really uncool, nagging, square conservatives (a minority group of which I count myself a proud member). The sad fact is that my church, sadly dominated at the top by Frankfurter-Gramsci disciples, spends far too much of its time and effort huffing and puffing to keep up with the latest social trends in its frantic effort to appear cool and contemporary while pushing its “social justice” agenda. I don’t recall my church’s leadership ever raising a peep of protest against the depravity of contemporary culture. Excuses, yes. Protests, no. Quite the opposite.

One of my FB friends just shared an electronic ad from our church’s head bishop that includes scatological epiphets to get the message across. Soooo, soooo cool! So with it! Some churches are great builders of spiritual armor. Not this one. It prefers to be complicit with a depraved culture. It follows, it does not have the courage to lead. You may ask, of course, why I don’t leave this church, so I will answer that: because it is precisely there that I am needed. There are many good people there. I and others do speak out and try to nurture and strengthen our children with spiritual armor.

Is the solution to force honest citizens to surrender their weapons? That is thinking with the heart rather than the head. I am so, so totally against this. The solution to an outbreak of wolves is not to defang the guard dogs. In this age of the wolf, we need more guard dogs, not less.

The Connecticut school shooting could have been stopped right away had there been one or more people on premise with guns, a circumstance that today would land any would-be guard dog in jail without passing “go”. Chances are that, had the shooter known that the school was protected, he would never have dared go there. The only real defense against a gun…is a gun. Mass murderers tend to be cowards that seek out soft, undefended targets like schools and churches. Guns, like drugs, will always be available to psychopaths, criminals and terrorists. If not guns, there are always knives, automobiles, poison gas, molotov cocktails or fertilizer bombs. Taking guns away from civilians only creates a larger pool of defenseless sheep available for slaughter. One of my FB friends also suggested that only government and police should have weapons. Scary thought. Look around the world today: now, that is one very scary thought. Government and law enforcement magnets for wolves. But, then, this is how people who have never had to confront wolves perceive the world. Like the Hobbits of the Shire, content to eat, drink and be merry, free of cares. But, reality eventually intrudes and we cannot magically “wish” wolves away into oblivion.

Finally, there is one particular aspect of this that really, really bothers me: young kids for decades have been getting gunned down, knifed, beaten to death, suffocated and raped in our inner cities. But, other than perfunctory hand-wringing, we never saw an outcry against this compared to what occurred after this most recent shooting in a well-to-do middle class community. Gee, what could the reason for this be? Yup, you’re right.

We won’t change what appears to be happening with increasing frequency to our society until we decide that we will stand up and dare to speak out against the increased depravity of our culture. Definitely “uncool”, but we must do it…for all families, for the kids and for our future. Otherwise, it can only continue to get much, much worse. It is the age of the wolf.

My deepest condolences to the people of Newtown, Connecticut — but don’t let this make you give up your guns UPDATED

December 14, 2012 by Bookworm 18 Comments

Despite being fairly decent at both sympathy and empathy, I truly cannot imagine what the survivors of the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, are experiencing, and that’s true whether I think of the ones in the line of fire or the family and friends whose loved ones were at the school.

Shooting children like fish in a barrel goes beyond crime. It is, instead, an act of profound evil. John Podhoretz latched onto this intrinsic evil when he likened the situation in Connecticut to the horrors of Gehenna:

Gehenna, a synonym for Hell, is a real place, or so the Bible tells us. You can see it today. It is a valley outside Jerusalem, the valley of the son of Hinnom, and it was where worshippers of the idol Moloch sacrificed children to sate their god’s hungers.

Gehenna was revived today in Newton, Connecticut, where as many as 20 children at last report were slaughtered in an elementary school this morning.

[snip]

The connection between the protection of children and the practice of monotheism dates back to the beginning. After Abraham becomes the first Jew, the first monotheist, he is tasked by God to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, the miracle child of his and his wife Sarah’s old age, and he takes up the task without complaint until God stays his hand. The story of Isaac’s binding, the akedah, is one of the most challenging of the Bible and is often taken to mean God was testing Abraham’s faith with the ultimate demand. But one might also say that at the very dawn of the worship of the One God, the Bible was placing the sacrifice of children outside the realm of the thinkable for the first time.

The idea that civilization is dedicated to the protection and preservation the weak and the innocent, and not about fulfilling evil impulses to defile and destroy innocence, is the root and core of the West. One cannot conceive of anything more monstrous than a person or persons who could look small children in the eye and systematically shoot them dead. Which is why this crime, among the worst crimes in American history, is not just an assault on the children, or their families, or the town of Newtown—though it is all those things.

Podhoretz says that today’s shooting turned the killer into one who sacrifices to Moloch, thereby creating a Hell on earth and fundamentally violating a just people’s covenant with a just and loving God. Incidents such as this one are jagged rips in the fabric of a stable and civilized universe.

My deepest condolences go to the Newtown community. Time will never remove the grief, but I hope that it softens it, enabling them to continue living the fulfilling lives their loved ones would have wished for them.

If you want, you can tune out now, because I’m about to go political.

You and I both know that, in the wake of this slaughter, the gun control crowd will begin agitating loudly and strongly for increased limitations on weapons. This agitation is predicated on two false beliefs: (1) that everyone with a gun is ipso facto a bad guy; and (2) that gun control will actually remove all the guns from all the bad guys. In my liberal days, I used to believe this myself. I foolishly thought that Washington, D.C. could wave a magic wand and make all guns disappear, thereby making all violence disappear.

Back in the day, when I heard the NRA slogan that “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns,” I shouted it down. “When guns are outlawed,” I shrilled, “no one will have guns.”

In the past ten years, I have had a reality check. First, I’ve realized that there is no government on earth powerful enough to get rid of all guns, and that’s true even if the anti-gun crowd as able to revoke the entire Second Amendment. Guns from the moment of their invention, instantly escaped from Pandora’s box. They are part of the world.

Second, I realized that the NRA was right: If we accept, as we must, that the guns ye will always have with you, you also accept that laws controlling guns only control those guns in the hands of good people — meaning people who are not violently inclined, but who have guns for defensive purposes and for sport. The good people, because they are good, will yield to the law and give up their self-defensive and sports guns. Bad people, however, by definition will not obey the laws. They will continue to have guns. The rest of us will be fish in a barrel, nicely gathered together for the coming massacre.

The best way to think about guns is to accept that, in America, we thankfully still have vastly more good people than bad people. Good people view guns as a means of self-defense and for sport (hunting or target shooting). Bad believe view guns as a useful weapon to enable them to eliminate opponents, overwhelm victims, or play out their paranoid delusions. The best way to keep the bad people from doing bad things is for them to be overwhelmed by good people who also have guns.

Having a gun does not make you bad. However, being bad and having a gun makes you powerful. Likewise, being unarmed does not make you good, but being unarmed in the presence of an armed bad guy makes you dead.

If several teachers at the Newtown school had owned concealed-carry weapons, there is a substantial likelihood that at least one of those teachers could have killed or disabled the shooter. There’s no doubt that many people would still have died, but it’s much more likely that, with the shooter instantly in someone’s cross hairs, many more would have lived. As it was, the shooter was able to go on a spree until the cops came and we all know that, when seconds count, even the best cops are minutes away.

I know this sounds peculiar, but the best thing you can do now to prevent future tragedies such as that which occurred today in Connecticut is to send money to the NRA. If the Leftists leave us with a society that has only armed bad guys, we’ll all be potential Newtown, Connecticuts. Our salvation lies in making sure that there are more of us (armed good guys) than there are of them (armed bad guys) and the NRA is the way to make that happen.

UPDATE: If you want to go deeper into the data, here’s a Harvard Law Review debunking the connection between gun control and crime reduction. Or just look at the statistics coming out of incredibly violent, gun-controlled England.

Also for a more look at God’s ways and consolation, the Anchoress has posted.

An armed society is a civil society; a knifed and booted society is a dangerous one

December 5, 2012 by Bookworm 35 Comments

I grew up deathly afraid of guns. This wasn’t like my fear of snakes and spiders, which seems to be pretty atavistic. Instead, this was a learned fear: Guns kill people. Guns also kill innocent animals that should, instead, die nice clean deaths in factory farms, before being sliced up and packaged in cellophane. I knew the truth: guns are bad, very, very bad.

Then I went to England and learned that guns aren’t the only bad things. My sojourn in England coincided with the explosive rise of soccer hooligans, louts who traveled the length and breadth of England, and periodically spilled over into the rest of Europe, bringing jack-booted violence with them wherever they went. (Among the Thugs is a horrifying account of these louts and the carnage in which they delighted.) Up in the north of England, where I lived, I could always tell when the local soccer team was having a home game because all the businesses near the soccer stadium boarded up their windows. England may not have had mass shootings, but it had death by a thousands cuts and boot stomps.

When I returned to America, I still hated guns (I had, after all, been carefully taught to do so), but I began to wonder — Are guns really the only bad thing out there? Will doing away with guns turn America into an Eden that sees that loutish lion and the helpless lamb lie down together? England, which was a less armed country than America, wasn’t necessarily a safer one. People still got victimized; it was just that guns weren’t the weapons doing the victimizing.

Upon my return to the states, Second Amendment supporters to whom I spoke told me that, while bullets have the advantage of distance, in the close quarters of a bar fight, knives or broken bottles are much more dangerous. They made the logical argument, then, that no one ever suggests outlawing knives or bottles. Likewise, the fact that more people die from car accidents than gunshot wounds doesn’t mean we’re about to outlaw cars. (Although, I must say, the climate change people are making a good stab at outlawing cars.)

When I was still in my liberal phase, I always had the right answer at hand when I heard these logical arguments: knives and bottles and cars all have a primary utility separate from their secondary, dangerous uses. Guns, however, exist only to kill.

With age, thankfully, I’ve gained wisdom. I’ve figured out that guns are extremely useful: you can get your own food if you’re nowhere near a market with tidy cellophane packages; you can have the sheer pleasure of target practice; you can discourage looters in the wake of a disaster; if you’re a woman and a large man is threatening you, guns are the great equalizer; if you’re alone and a crazy man is at your door, you don’t have to die like the screaming teen in a slasher movie; and guns are the only defense against the single largest and most deadly entity known to man — a totalitarian government that has turned on its citizens.

As I know from my gun hating years, even though all of the above are good reasons to cheer the Second Amendment, these facts make no headway with the anti-gun crowd. Instead, they just keep pulling out this tired old poster:

Well, I think we’ve finally got a new poster in our Second Amendment arsenal:

Here’s an interesting point about those numbers. In 1997, Britain’s Labour government worked overtime to remove guns from the hands of law-abiding citizens:

After Hungerford [a massacre in 1987], the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988 criminalised most semi-automatic long-barrelled weapons; it was generally supported by the Labour opposition although some Labour backbenchers thought it inadequate.After the second incident, the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 criminalised private possession of most handguns having a calibre over .22; the Snowdrop Campaign continued to press for a wider ban, and in 1997 the incoming Labour government introduced the Firearms (Amendment) (No. 2) Act, which extended this to most handguns with a calibre of .22 (there are exceptions for some antique handguns and black-powder revolvers.)

And not coincidentally, since 1997, the year law-abiding Brits were denied arms, violent crime in England has skyrocketed:

The Tories said Labour had presided over a decade of spiralling violence.

In the decade following the party’s election in 1997, the number of recorded violent attacks soared by 77 per cent to 1.158million – or more than two every minute.

The figures, compiled from reports released by the European Commission and United Nations, also show:

The UK has the second highest overall crime rate in the EU.

It has a higher homicide rate than most of our western European neighbours, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

The UK has the fifth highest robbery rate in the EU.

It has the fourth highest burglary rate and the highest absolute number of burglaries in the EU, with double the number of offences than recorded in Germany and France.

But it is the naming of Britain as the most violent country in the EU that is most shocking. The analysis is based on the number of crimes per 100,000 residents.

In the UK, there are 2,034 offences per 100,000 people, way ahead of second-placed Austria with a rate of 1,677.

The U.S. has a violence rate of 466 crimes per 100,000 residents, Canada 935, Australia 92 and South Africa 1,609.

Britain used to be famed as a polite society. It is no longer. It is also a society that full lives up to the saying that “when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”

People will kill. They always have, and they always will. Culture matters, in that cultural norms can encourage or discourage violent crime. But only guns will be there when you’re small and alone, and that’s true whether you’re facing a home invader, a street thug, or a modern-day Hitler, Pol Pot, or Stalin.

The Leftist sales pitch: illogical, strident, obscene, and selfish

May 6, 2012 by Bookworm 15 Comments

A gazillion of my liberal facebook friends have posted this little bit of wit and wisdom:

After seeing this post once too often, I cracked. The last person amongst my friends who posted it got a message from me asking precisely how compelling an argument can be when it compares a human moral code to unreasoning animal behavior. Even if one thinks the human moral position is wrong, it still makes no sense to compare a human’s view homosexuality, a view based on reason, faith, logic, hate, or whatever, to a cow’s or penguin’s approach, which is purely unreasoning and instinctive. It’s a cute aphorism, but a lousy argument.

Clever aphorisms that are actually lousy arguments are the Left’s stock in trade. One of the oldies but goodies is “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Hah! Hah! Hah! Men are useless! Except for pesky little things like making babies possible and, under ordinary, non government welfare circumstances, providing both the woman and their child with love, shelter, food, and stability.

Another cute, meaningless Leftism is “War is not the answer.” Whenever I see that stupid bumper sticker, I always mumble to myself, “It depends what the question is.” War is not the answer if your neighbor asks to borrow a cup of sugar. War is a useful answer if a hostile power uses high impact explosives to kill thousands of your citizens — and threatens to repeat the performance until you are entirely subjugated.

Oh, and about this one?

Isn’t that a great idea? Who cares that the Islamic religion does not acknowledge the possibility of coexistence? Islam isn’t shy about touting the fact that it is predicated on absolute conquest and subjugation. So the coexistence is kind of Orwellian (“All animals are equal, but some are more equal that others”), or Tacitus-ian (“They make a desert and call it peace”).

This long harumph is my way of introducing a couple of posts that Zombie wrote, each of which tracks Leftist protests, all of which come complete with signs. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to review the images Zombie shares, and to spot the Leftist sales pitches in all their glory. They are, without exception, illogical strident, obscene, or selfish (or some combination of the four).

“Unite Against the War on Women” march, Los Angeles

Decolonize Oakland May Day Occupy Rally

Of course, when the logic of illogical slogans fails, Zombie’s other posts proves that war is indeed the answer:

Occupy Oakland May Day General Strike

SF May Day Occupier hurls bricks and iron bars at police, injures bystander—live video

The quivering, whining cowards on the Left UPDATED

March 26, 2010 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Okay, I’m not really saying that those on the Left are quivering, whining cowards. They are, however, working hard to present themselves in that light — or, rather, in the light of helpless victims — in the hope that they can convince ordinary Americans that conservatives, libertarians, Tea Partiers, etc., are unhinged neo-nazis who are filled with an insatiable blood lust.

To that end, starting on Saturday, they’ve been accusing people opposed to Obama Care of racism, spitting, violence, powder threats, etc. My suspicion is that (a) many of these alleged threats are imaginary, for propaganda purposes; (b) that those making the threats are often Leftists who are faking the attacks as part of the Alinsky tactic of making conservatives look evil; and (c) a few fringe people who should be ignored, rather than spread out over the front pages.

I’m assembling here a collection of solid posts that expand upon my own suspicions about the Left’s propaganda technique here and that remind us that, even in their wildest imaginings about conservatives, Leftists haven’t managed to come close to what Bush and other conservative politicians suffered through for 8 years. Without further ado:

Brutally Honest: The incredible hypocrisy of the “inciting violence” crowd

Patterico’s Pontifications: Leftist Issues Death Threats to Palin and Family on Twitter

Wizbang/Lorie Byrd: Josh Marshall — Beyond Absurd

Mudville Gazette/Greyhawk: Rabble rousing, Part I and Part II

Michelle Malkin: Unhinged: the mugshot collection

UPDATE: James Taranto opens his Best of the Web Today with a nice collection of provably false (or, at least, grossly exaggerated) accusations health care supporters have made against the bill’s opponents.

Modern England increasingly Darwinian

November 3, 2009 by Bookworm 9 Comments

The other day, the Daily Mail ran an article about the exponential increase in stranger attacks in England, a byproduct of the public drunkenness that is increasing at an even faster rate than the violence. I still remember when England was a remarkably safe, clean little country, except in the worst neighborhoods of the biggest cities. Now, there is no time and no place in England that isn’t as randomly violent as a Third World country or a predator-filled jungle.

If you live in this kind of jungle, it pays to be prepared. So here is a satisfying story about a BBC reporter who, after patiently enduring verbal attacks from two drunken yobs, turned on the physicality when the yobs tried to throw a punch. (Did I mention that the BBC reporter is a black belt?)

Increasingly, England looks like a Mad Max culture. How sad.

How political correctness is complicit in enslaving women

March 16, 2009 by Bookworm 5 Comments

A young British woman, raised in the North of England, escaped her abusive Muslim father and converted to Christianity, a fact that saw her father lead an axe wielding mob clamoring for her death. She wrote a book about her experience. When the Times interviewer asked why she didn’t seek help from the authorities, the woman explains how political correctness creates a straight jacket as tight as fundamentalist Islam itself:

When, at school, she had finally summoned the courage to tell a teacher that her father had been beating her (she couldn’t bring herself to reveal the sexual abuse), the social services sent out a social worker from her own community. He chose not to believe Hannah and, in effect, shopped her to her father, who gave her the most brutal beating of her life. When she later confronted the social worker, he said: “It’s not right to betray your community.”

Hannah blames what is sometimes called political correctness for this debacle: “My teachers had thought they were doing the right thing, they thought it showed ‘cultural sensitivity’ by bringing in someone from my own community to ‘help’, but it was the worst thing they could have done to me. This happens a lot.

“When I’ve been working with girls who were trying to get out of an arranged marriage, or want to convert to Christianity, and they have contacted social services as they need to get out of their homes, the reaction has been ‘we’ll send someone from your community to talk to your parents’. I know why they are doing this, they are trying to be understanding, but it’s the last thing that the authorities should do in such situations.”

This is the sort of cultural sensitivity displayed by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, last year when he suggested that problems within the British Muslim community such as financial or marital disputes could be dealt with under sharia, Islamic law, rather than British civil law. What did Hannah, now an Anglican, think on hearing these remarks?

“I was horrified.” If you could speak to him now, what would you say to the archbishop? “I would say: have you actually spoken to any ordinary Muslim women about the situation that they live in, in their communities? By putting in place these Muslim arbitration tribunals, where a woman’s witness is half that of a man, you are silencing women even more.”

She believes the British government is making exactly the same mistake as Rowan Williams: “It says it talks to the Muslim community, but it’s not speaking to the women. I mean, you are always hearing Muslim men speaking out, the representatives of the big federations, but the government is not listening to Muslim women. With the sharia law situation and the Muslim arbitration tribunals, have they thought about what effect these tribunals have on Muslim women? I don’t think so.”

Hat tip: Hot Air