MISGUIDED MOMS PUT FEELINGS AHEAD OF FACTS

by Bill Dunn 

Well, the so-called Million Mom March has come and gone, and as with most liberal “causes” nowadays, this event was a triumph of feelings over facts, emotions over evidence.

To listen to the passionate and occasionally hysterical rhetoric on display in our nation’s capital on Mother’s Day, one would think firearms were invented no more than a decade ago. The scourge of these evil devices suddenly appeared on the American scene, it was implied, and we all have a moral duty to get rid of them pronto.

What was not mentioned is the fact that firearms have been plentiful in America since before our nation was officially founded. For countless generations, citizens have responsibly owned and used guns for a multitude of purposes: hunting, target shooting, personal protection, and the sole reason the second Amendment was written, to discourage the central government from stomping on the inalienable rights of the common people.

A gentleman recently told me of his childhood in Pennsylvania in the 1940s and 50s. During hunting season, half of the teenage boys would bring rifles and ammunition to high school in the morning and store them in their lockers (unlocked!). When school let out in the afternoon, the boys would retrieve their guns and go hunting. No one in school was ever hurt by one of those rifles. No one felt threatened by the presence of those “evil” devices. In fact, no one even gave it a second thought.

Can you imagine what would happen today if a teenage boy walked into his high school carrying a hunting rifle? TV news anchors would sprain their hairdos sprinting to the “horrific crime scene.”

Firearms have changed very little since the 1940s and 50s. But high school boys have changed a lot. None of this was mentioned at the MMM in Washington.

The proliferation of senseless gun violence in recent years has nothing to do with the proliferation of guns. Increased violence is the direct result of the proliferation of failed liberal social policies.

Liberal social engineering, where good intentions are more important than actual results, has devastated the nuclear family, destroyed inner cities, turned public education into an ultra-expensive joke, and increased the violent crime rate by disarming law-abiding citizens.

No matter. Liberals are never judged by results, only by their compassion (and, of course, their willingness to spend other peoples’ money).

For almost four decades the enlightened elites who shape our culture have been teaching our youth that all values are relative, that morality is optional, and that no one—absolutely no one!—has the right to tell them what to do.

The late Francis Shaeffer called this misguided philosophy “humanism.” It is the idea that mankind can create its own moral code while ignoring the laws of Nature and Nature’s God. Shaeffer explained, “Humanism, with its lack of any final base for values or law, always leads to chaos. It then naturally leads to some form of authoritarianism to control the chaos. Having produced the sickness, humanism gives more of the same kind of medicine for a cure.”

The Million Mom March, with its demand for additional gun-control laws, was nothing more than a call for more authoritarianism to control the chaos produced by the misguided philosophy of humanism. Unfortunately, as history has proven time and time again, when people incrementally surrender their freedom in exchanged for security, they discover after it is too late that they have lost both their freedom and their security.

If the MMM gets its way—more gun-control laws and ultimately, a complete prohibition on gun ownership—you can be sure chaos and violence will escalate. (You see, criminals have this nasty habit of ignoring laws. And when they know their potential victims are unarmed, it’s like Christmas morning for bad guys.)