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Liberals want to ban guns following the massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. They argue that Nikolas Cruz could never have slaughtered 17 students and teachers without being able to legally buy an AR-15 rifle. After every school mass shooting, the left’s cry is the same: take away the guns—especially, “assault weapons” such as the AR-15.
This is not just nonsense, but leftist propaganda. Liberals aren’t really interested in preventing school atrocities. If they were, they would acknowledge a seminal fact: Guns don’t kill, it is the people using them who do. The left’s real goal is to repeal the Second Amendment and disarm all Americans. Why? In order for the ruling class to further expand its power and control over its citizens. A disarmed citizenry would be at the mercy of the federal Leviathan. Our Founding Fathers believed in gun rights because it serves as a bulwark against an all-powerful state.
The media, however, is determined to peddle the pernicious myth that guns are to blame. Yet, liberals never ask a central question: How come before the 1990s, school mass shootings were almost non-existent? America had a prevalent gun culture; most Americans owned firearms, even “dangerous” ones, such as the M 16. But aside from notorious exceptions like the 1966 University of Texas massacre, school atrocities were rare. Hence, it’s not the guns or the availability of them that’s changed. Something much more profound has changed—our culture.
For the past 30 years, America has undergone a technological, social and cultural revolution. We have created a sick, toxic culture. We are reaping what we have sown. And the biggest victims are children. The cultural wreckage is everywhere—family breakdown; soaring illegitimacy rates; fatherless homes; loss of respect for authority and tradition; the proliferation of pornography; the rise of violent videogames that desensitize our kids; the prevalence of the Internet and social media that encourages narcissism, self-absorption and cyber-bullying; an entertainment industry that glorifies sex, violence and fame; and an explosion in drugs, both legal and illegal. Nikolas Cruz was a product of this twisted culture. Make no mistake: He is responsible for pulling the trigger. His actions were not just evil and savage, but premediated. And Cruz deserves the death penalty.
Liberals, however, refuse to confront a dark reality: A sick culture produces sick individuals. What is it about our society that we keeping churning out mass murderers, such as Cruz, Adam Lanza or Stephen Paddock? The reason leftists will not address this is because they are complicit. They have been instrumental in fostering America’s moral decay and cultural disintegration.
Moreover, it was the left that, during the late 1960s, pushed for the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill. America is almost unique among Western nations in having laws that prevent obviously mentally deranged people from being institutionalized (and given proper medical and psychiatric care) against their will. In almost all of the infamous mass shootings of the past several decades—Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook and now Parkland—there has been one common theme: severe mental illness. All of the perpetrators had serious mental health issues, and all of them were ignored or swept under the rug. America does not suffer from a gun crisis; it suffers from a mental health crisis. Ban the guns, and psychotic individuals filled with hatred, paranoia and delusion will find other weapons to kill. For example, what the media often ignores about Columbine is that the perpetrators didn’t just use guns. They also brought two propane bombs into the school. Only sheer luck prevented those bombs from going off; if they had, over a hundred students would have been massacred.
Yet, the biggest reason for the explosion in mass shootings is spiritual. America has become a post-Christian nation. For 40 years, our liberal elites have purged Christianity and religion from the public square. Schools no longer can teach about God or the Ten Commandments. Every healthy civilization is an outgrowth of its culture and religious faith. Destroy religion and morality is smashed as well. Students are no longer taught—and many do not even know—right from wrong, good from evil. Their conscience is empty, barren and soulless like the iPhones and iPads they play with all day.
We are paying a heavy price for liberalism’s experiment in creating a society without God. Unless there is a moral revival and spiritual renewal, more kids will continue to die and we are doomed to endure more mass shootings.
It’s not the guns. It’s the culture, stupid!
-Jeffrey T. Kuhner is host of “The Kuhner Report” on WRKO AM-680 in Boston.