Gun Control and the Uvalde, Texas School Shooting
Yesterday, we saw the deadliest school shooting in a decade when a young man—18-year-old Salvador Ramos—killed 21 people at a Uvalde, Texas elementary school. Nineteen of those were children.
As a father of four young, school-aged children, I can’t imagine what those parents are going through. The utter, absolute senselessness of it completely blows the mind.
What has followed is what is to be expected in our hyper-politicized, ultra-divided society, namely, an opportunity for calls for gun control, more firearms regulation, the eradication of the second amendment, and the like.
And the rationale is obvious: events like this happen because the second amendment exists, therefore more gun laws (including and especially laws that outlaw guns) are needed to prevent these kinds of events from happening.
Never mind the fact that those who commit crimes with guns are, by definition, “criminals” in the sense that they have no regard for the law. But that very fact, of course, is precisely what elicits the cry for the nuclear option of the repeal of the second amendment altogether. Because, again, as the reasoning goes, if we do away with guns altogether so that no one has them, these kinds of things wouldn’t happen.
(Also never mind the fact that the constitutional right to bear arms exists not so that citizens can hunt, and not even so that citizens can protect themselves and their homes, but so that citizens can protect themselves from a tyrannical government that attempts to revoke the rights annunciated in the constitution.)
All of those things aside, my present concern is the tendency of so many in our society to grab any two facts that happen to be laying around—without any consideration of the correlative value (or not) of any and all other facts—and arrange them in cause-and-effect relationship.
“My present concern is the tendency of so many in our society to grab any two facts that happen to be laying around and arrange them in cause-and-effect relationship.
The Uvalde tragedy is a perfect example. Fact A is the shooting itself, Fact B is the absence of more gun laws (and ultimately the existence of the second amendment). And no less than the President of the United States—whose highest responsibility it is to protect the constitution, which presupposes the need to understand it—has seized upon the opportunity of the simultaneous existence of those two facts and arranged them in precisely the way we are describing.
However, since we’re randomly grabbing at facts and connecting them, I might suggest a few different equations for consideration:
1. These school shootings keep happening at schools.
We might just as easily conclude that what is needed is not a repeal of the second amendment, but the dissolution of public education. So what parents need is not merely school choice, but the full responsibility of educating their own children. “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” asks President Biden. But we might equally respond, “When in God’s name are we going to stop funding school shootings with taxpayer dollars? They’re your kids. You teach them.”
2. The people who keep committing these mass shootings are the products of the public school system.
Again, see the solution proposed above.
3. The increase in mass shootings directly corresponds with a society-wide increase in a naturalistic and secular worldview.
So what we need, therefore, is to abandon the underlying values in our culture that are increasingly producing disastrous results.
There are plenty of other arrangements of various facts that we might suggest, but this is the one that I would actually propose for serious consideration.
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Naturalism is the view that there is no supernatural or divine guidance at work in the world, either in its creation or maintenance. (I.e., as one man has said, ‘this is all just molecules doing what molecules do in these conditions and at these temperatures.’) Secularism, according to a modern, working definition, is the absence or even the rightful exclusion of “religion,” while “religion” in turn is understood to be a personal preference for an abstract set of subjective, unverifiable, self-generated ideas that have something to do with mysticism or spirituality.
And it isn’t just that our society is becoming increasingly secular. It’s actually becoming increasingly hostile to religion, and particularly to Christianity.1
The lead in the water of societal sentiment is that Christianity is actually the barrier to “justice,” “freedom,” and “social progress” because of its inherent moral value system. At the very least, it is increasingly viewed as backwards, taboo, somewhat offensive, and should be relegated to your own living room, or better yet to the privacy of your own mind. The conventional phrase “separation of church and state” has morphed from shorthand to supposed policy, and its assumed meaning is not so much the separation of church and state as it is the exclusion of religion from the public square.
We are a little off-topic, but our point is that the natural fruit of a worldview like this—one that combines naturalism and our kind of secularism—is hopelessness and despair. Just ask Nietzsche, to whom modern secular society owes much of its outlook.
And we haven’t even mentioned this new twisted, malevolent form of collectivism that comes right along with the new naturo-secularism—which, ironically, is anti-social and grounded in radical, autonomous, limitless self expression as the highest form of virtue and the goal of human existence. This collectivism puts every single individual in our society into one of two camps—Us or Them—based on whether or not they oppress Me. The whole assumption is that all societal structures—from the government, to the free market, to families, even to the assumptions that underly basic thought and reason—is one giant mechanism of oppression, so that you can’t be free and happy even if you want to.
And it forces us to answer this question: How can I possibly make it through life productively or successfully in any meaningful way if I believe that true happiness can only be found in the full, unhindered expression of my own inner impulses, but that will never happen apart from the total dismantling of all current societal structures because it’s all those structures that are the cause of everything that’s wrong with my life because they oppress rather than celebrate Me—and on top of all that, there is no objective meaning, morality, or goodness in anything, neither is there anything outside of us, above us, or beyond us because there is no “us” after we die?
The transient, temporal, eroding here-and-now is where we as a culture place all of our hope, and it’s all under a utilitarian, ultimately-baseless imposition of suggestions and speculation about ‘good’ and ‘right.’ At worst, meaning and morality are cogs in the machinery of The Oppressor, and at best they’re your own opinion for the end goal of a happier you in the here-and-now. Meanwhile, everything to which we put our hand perishes with use and is crumbling like the pavement outside. Experiences vanish like a mist and are over when they’re over. On top of all that, everyone dies, and after death is nothing but lifeless matter, like dirt and rocks.
How can a person possibly have any sense of hope, fulfillment, purpose, or obligation toward others when that is their understanding of all this?
So here’s the moral of the story:
If we were serious about the cause-and-effect relationship of facts behind the increase in mass shootings in general and school shootings in particular, we’d ask this question: ‘What kind of outlook on life, self, reality, and humanity does a person who commits this kind of atrocity have, and is there a common thread?’
Or, more to the point, we would ask whether there is a direct relationship between mass shootings and the rise in society of a naturalistic, secular worldview and the degeneration of religion. Because anecdotally, my impression is that we all feel like these kinds of tragedies are happening more and more. I certainly do. And I cannot help but see the connection between these two facts, namely, the replacement of religion with naturalism and secularism, and a rise in mass shootings. Both seem to be more common today than they were 30 years ago. Is there a connection? Since these two facts are existing somewhere in the same vicinity at the same time, can we at least speculate about a possible relationship? Gun laws and anti-gun sentiment, meanwhile, have only increased…
“I cannot help but see the connection between these two facts, namely, the replacement of Christianity with naturalism and secularism, and a rise in mass shootings. Both seem to be more common today than they were 30 years ago.”
And when I talk about a decrease in ‘religion,’ I’m not talking religion in general or religion as the seculars imagine it (see above). Not that kind of ‘religion’ at all; in fact, it is exactly that view of ‘religion’ that I am criticizing, that is the product of naturalism and secularism, and that itself helps to produce the society-wide increase in chaos, hopelessness, and violence that we are all sensible of.
No, the religion I am talking about is protestant, evangelical, reformation, New Testament Christianity—the faith that Jesus and the New Testament authors laid out as true, real, objective, good, and obligatory. While our secular, naturalistic society sees “faith” as a practically-inconsequential preference for one set of mystical or spiritual-sounding ideas in a world of equal and equally-relative options, Jesus and the New Testament authors presented “faith” as a reasonable, life-directing confidence that God is, that he has made himself known to us and revealed truth to us, and that he will be faithful to who he says he is. Even if the mechanisms of that religion do not always create people who are genuinely regenerate in the sense that Jesus and the New Testament authors meant it (see, for example, John 3.1-15 and Titus 3.1-7), they at least create people with a sense of real, moral obligation to fulfill objective purposes for which they exist, to do good to others, and to avoid real, objective evil. While ‘settling’ for that is a total loss in actuality and eternity, it is a massive gain in the temporal sphere.
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Here’s an outgoing ‘prophecy,’ as it were, for the coming years, and I’m willing to be held to it: as the broader culture of our society becomes more post- and anti-Christian, and instead becomes more naturalistic and secular, it will become more chaotic, more violent, and more unstable. Ultimately, the relative peace and freedom we all have today will not be sustainable.
I am not including Roman Catholicism in my definition of “Christianity,” because, according to the standard of what Christianity is (viz., the Bible), Catholicism is not Christianity, properly speaking. What I mean by “Christianity” is protestant, evangelical, reformation, New Testament Christianity; that is the kind that I am defending and the only kind that I believe is ultimately defensible. It also happens to the be only kind that “works.” All that said, however, I do recognize that public perception is that Catholicism and biblical, New Testament Christianity are kinda the same thing, and that the anti-religion sentiment in society extends to Roman Catholicism and even to Judaism to a lesser degree.