Conscience, Not Guns

Creators Syndicate ^ | December 18, 2012 | Dennis Prager

[jazusamo]

From the moment Americans learned of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre last Friday, the entire left — editorialists, columnists, broadcasters, politicians — used the occasion to promote one idea: gun control.

For the left, the primary reason for just about all American gun murders is the availability of guns.

I have no interest in debating gun control here. I only wish to ask the left one question: We have a massive system of drug control laws. Yet, the left is the first to argue that the war on drugs has been a failure. And whether or not one deems it a failure, the war on drugs surely hasn't prevented tens of millions of Americans, including teenagers, from obtaining drugs illegally. Why, then, does the left believe that a war on guns would be any more effective than the war on drugs?

That question aside, what matters most here is the left's preoccupation with guns as the root of the murder problem in America.

It explains a great deal about the left's worldview. The moral values and the conscience of nations as well as individuals seem to play almost no role in the left's understanding of human behavior.

That is why the left wants all nations, including the United States, to destroy their nuclear weapons. The problem for the left is not the moral values nations hold, it is the weapons nations hold. American nuclear weapons were just as troubling to the left as Soviet nuclear weapons during the Cold War and just as troubling as Iran having nuclear weapons today. So, too, the problem of gun violence in America is not the moral values of gun owners, it is gun ownership.

[originalbuckeye]

My sentiments exactly. We (collectively) have raised a generation or two, maybe three, that have a fair number of youths with no conscience. I fear that the lack of religion in our culture has left the youths with no fear of wrongdoing. Lax punishments for criminal activity. If they were taught right from wrong they don’t care about wrongdoing. Leftists must be rejoicing at the lack of substance in so many these days.

[DJ Taylor]

Bottom line, in case you missed it:

"Want to know a major cause of criminal violence in America? Try leftism's denial of the importance of moral values among nations and individuals; its systematic destruction of character education; and its elimination of God as the source of moral law.

Not guns."

[TurboZamboni]

Yet, the left is the first to argue that the war on drugs has been a failure.

plenty of statists on the right who still insist on growing the 'war on drugs' ,too.

[jazusamo]

I concur...It seems as years go by there are more and more people with little or no moral compass.

Parents, teachers, lack of religious beliefs and society in general are all to blame I suppose.

[Morris70]

Mind control?

[skeeter]

That question aside, what matters most here is the left's preoccupation with guns as the root of the murder problem in America.

They do not intend to solve the problem of murder. The subject is simply a means to an end, a shroud for their true goal.

Like everything else what the left says they want and what they are really after are two entirely different things.

[Sergio]

bkmk

[goldstategop]

There is the psychopath. A condition aptly called “folie sans maliere.” Madness without delirium.”

There are people who are simply evil - who have no conscience and no known means exist of implanting in them empathy for others. Your life has no more meaning to a psychopath than a bug’s or a worm’s has for the rest of us.

No one gun control law on earth is going to stop the person who is bent on mass murder, period. Evil will always be a part of human nature. That is why good people, including children, suffer. We can neither eliminate the evils of man nor nature.

[lentulusgracchus]

[Prager] That is why the left wants all nations, including the United States, to destroy their nuclear weapons.

Prager got it wrong.

The Left only cares about America and the West, and it is only our weapons -- from nuclear weapons down to sidearms -- that the Left wants removed from our control.

That is because their real agenda is the destruction of our independence, freedom, and control of our own country.

It isn't about guns or nuclear weapons. It's about their rule or our ruin. Forbidding America and Americans weapons is about the ruining.

[familyop]

That’s a great article. Sadly, the truth of it is denied and opposed by members of the political class that is trying to violate our civil rights, including the Second Amendment.