Loss of Our Moral Compass Has Led to Loss of Morality

John R. “Buck” Surdu

After the tragic school shooting in Texas this week, the Leftist blamestorming was predictable. The same people who openly want to censor Constitutionally guaranteed free speech also want to infringe on the Second Amendment as well. The drooler in chief is quoted as saying, “As a nation we have to ask, when in God’s name are we gonna stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?” As Governor Abbot was and others were holding a press conference, Beto O’Rourke approached the stage shouting about gun control and had to be taken away by police. The claims that the way to curb gun violence is to take firearms away from millions of law-abiding gun owners are baseless. In fact, despite President Biden’s false claim this week, the Justice Department study admitted that they have no conclusive evidence that assault weapon bans have any impact on gun violence. Never mind that 50 people are gunned down in a typical Chicago weekend in a city with the toughest gun-control laws in the country. Pundits have been trotting out the usual litany of solutions: more gun laws, take guns away from law-abiding gun owners, put armed guards in all schools, arm teachers, employ more thought police to scan social media (and identify parents and conservatives as potential domestic terrorists), lock up all people who contributed to Trump’s campaign, open concentration camps for conservatives, etc. ad nauseum. Few, however, are willing to take on the real issue: the Left has successfully removed all moral compasses from our culture, and then we wonder why people act immorally.

The 2021 Secret Service study on Averting Target School Violence concludes that

The analysis of 67 averted school attack plots contained in this report demonstrates that there are almost always intervention points available before a student’s behavior escalates to violence. Students who plotted school attacks shared many similarities with students who perpetrated school attacks…

• • Had histories of school discipline and contact with law enforcement.
  • Experienced bullying or had mental health issues, frequently involving depression and suicidality.
  • Intended or committed suicide as part of the school attack.
  • Used drugs or alcohol.
  • Had been impacted by adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), including substance abuse in the home, violence or abuse, parental incarceration, or parental mental health issues. Research from the CDC associates these types of ACEs with a range of health, social, and behavioral problems throughout life.

The Foundation for Economic Education analyzed the data on “assault weapons” and mass shootings, including a massive RAND study, and they concluded,

The studies, data, and examination of the available evidence by scholars suggest that assault weapons bans or buybacks will have little if any effect on rates of violent crime and gun violence. There seems to be no relationship between these gun control measures and reductions in firearm homicide or suicide, and there doesn’t appear to be any clear evidence they reduce mass shootings.

It is worth looking at the graphs of data presented in this article.

Today law enforcement is undermanned (thanks in part to the Left’s crusade to defund police) and has no choice but to respond to crime rather than prevent it. Gone are the days of the cop walking a beat, building a relationship with the community, and stopping crime before it happens. And at the highest levels, the Injustice Department focuses its attention on persecution of January 6^th protestors, spying on citizens, and vilifying parents. We are still waiting for the facts of the Uvalde shooting; however, the Buffalo shooting and other recent events tell us that law enforcement frequently misses indicators that a crime is being planned and that often the crimes are committed by people with long rap sheets for violent crimes but have been released back onto the streets by Leftists judges and prosecutors. Emerging details show the usual pattern in Uvalde: a troubled teen with a likely anti-social personality disorder who gave plenty of warning that he was going to do something evil, but nothing was done to provide treatment for the shooter before he committed his atrocity.

In the military before Secretary Austin and General Miley set out to destroy our armed forces, we used to talk about “getting to the left of the bang.” This refers to a timeline in which the “bang” was on the right and events left of the bang were the steps taken by the enemy to cause the “bang.” Getting to the left means identifying root causes and trying to prevent the event rather than respond to it. More law enforcement to investigate reports of mentally ill people planning horrific attacks is an example of getting to the left of the “bang.” (I do have concerns about the Injustice Department spying on citizens and what the Leftist activist sycophants in charge will consider terrorism given their characterization of parents in school board meetings as domestic terrorists.) But scanning social media is not left enough of the “bang.”

We must focus on bad people and how to prevent them from becoming bad people rather than the tools bad people use.

In America today Leftists have characterized all standards of conduct as tantamount to bigotry. Everything from holding open a door, punctuality, honesty, going to church regularly, showing work in math class, living within your means, expecting an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, or maintaining a healthy weight is some form of white supremacist micro aggression. Manners are a lost art; rudeness prevails, particularly when protected by the anonymity of the Internet. Under the Giuliani “broken window” theory (that worked, by the way) little crimes lead to bigger crimes. Perhaps the Left’s penchant for destroying all cultural norms and engaging in identity politics contributes to the bigger hate that is endemic in America today. The Left never creates; they only destroy. In the wake of the dissolution of the cultural norms that made America great, the Left’s legacy is a norm that says you must hate and vilify anyone with whom you disagree.

England has largely eliminated guns; however, their rate of violent crime is greater than in the US. Violent criminals use clubs, knives, and other tools. A couple of years ago, a madman rampaged through a campground in the Netherlands assaulting people with a knife. A madman used car to smash through a Wisconsin parade. A madman followed a young Chinese woman home in New York and stabbed her repeatedly. Also in New York, a madman pushed a woman in front of an oncoming subway train. During the summer of hate, BLM, Antifa, and other fascist hate groups employed improvised explosives, commercial fireworks, and bottles of frozen water against federal facilities and law-abiding citizens. In Oklahoma City a madman made a bomb out of fertilizer and levelled a building. Criminally insane people intent on murder do not need a gun to do so.

Nationalist People’s Radio reported,

The disappearance of long-term-care facilities and psychiatric beds has escalated over the past decade, sparked by a trend toward deinstitutionalization of psychiatric patients in the 1950s and ’60s, says Dominic Sisti, director of the Scattergood Program for Applied Ethics of Behavioral Health Care at the University of Pennsylvania.

The article goes on to contradict President Trump’s claim that there is a linkage between criminally insane people and gun violence. I guess we should ignore our own lying eyes when the news reports that many of these mass shooters have a history of mental illness and past criminal activities. Even if we identified the criminally insane; however, there seems to be a shortage of places to house and treat them.

The Left wants to blame violence on guns, but the real culprit is a society devoid of a moral compass. When as a society we remove all moral compasses from our culture, it shouldn’t be surprising that a great many people lose their way.

The first amendment of the Constitution that the Left (whether in government or the tech tyrants) seeks to abridge states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. [My emphasis added]

Note that the phrase “separation of church and state” is not mentioned! That was a doctrine created by activist courts at the urgings of the Left. The Founding Fathers, those nefarious dead white guys, had no intention that the US would be a godless country. Yet here we are.

Under this bankrupt notion of separation of church and state, judges have been forced to remove the Ten Commandments from courtrooms and courthouses. Teachers cannot display them in their classrooms. There was a case of a young girl who was suspended from school for the temerity of reading the Bible during her lunch period. Late night talk show hosts routinely denigrate religious people. Former President Obama famously referred to a large swath of Americans as clinging to their Bibles and guns. Faith, along with patriotism, is a concept the Left cannot abide and seeks to destroy. Faith must be purged from all public spaces. The Left calls religion offensive and triggering.

To a large swath of Americans, no longer brought up under a church going tradition, moral relativism reigns.

Descriptive moral relativism, also known as cultural relativism, says that moral standards are culturally defined, which is generally true. Indeed, there may be a few values that seem nearly universal, such as honesty and respect, but many differences appear across cultures when people evaluate moral standards around the world.

Relativists believe there is no higher authority, no guidance on how to behave. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, there is a higher authority, God, who has defined good and evil, right and wrong. Yet stunningly few Americans are religious or look to the Bible or the Torah for guidance. If moral relativists can make their own decisions on what is right and wrong, it is easy to rationalize the murder of unborn children, stealing cars, human trafficking, abusing controlled substances, shooting at Republicans at a baseball game, or gunning down 10-year-old children. Recently, Democratic Representative for California, Katie Porter, argued that one of the reasons women should be allowed to have abortions is the increasing inflation occurring during President Joe Biden’s administration. How is that for moral relativism? If those people are evil because they voted for Trump, have the wrong skin color, or don’t believe what I believe, then I am justified in any action I take, including mowing down participants in a holiday parade.

In addition to a distinct lack of a moral compass for many Americans, the divisiveness of the media and our government “leaders” contributes to this problem. Everything is a means of dividing the nation, of destroying our culture, or eroding trust or tearing down our institutions. Race, color, creed, voting patterns, level of wokeness, zip code, punctuality, work ethic, and a myriad of other things are all tools used by the Left to divide the nation. The Left has created a victim mentality in the Once-United States in which one’s difficulties are always someone else’s fault, not the results of poor personal choices. If bad things have happened to me, it is your fault, and my moral relativism tells me it is okay to lash out against you.

In his partially debunked book Men Against Fire and his less well-known book written after the Korean War, Commentary on Infantry and Weapons in Korea 1950–51, S.L.A. Marshall claimed that a key factor in getting more soldiers to conduct aimed fire against the enemy was to desensitize them to killing. One of his recommendations was to replace circular marksmanship targets with those that look like human silhouettes, a practice that is generally used throughout the world today. There is even evidence in other literature that suggests PTSD is caused more by the act of killing than other wartime experiences. One can argue that hyper violent video games and movies that desensitize young people to killing also play a role in the violence within our society. It is one thing when playing Dungeons and Dragons to kill orcs with a few dice rolls in an abstract manner. It is an entirely different thing to cause the head of a human (or humanoid) target to explode in ghastly detail while playing a first-person shooter game.

I assert that the formula for violent crime in America is this:

Criminals will always have guns and be willing to use them. Without guns, criminals and the criminally insane will find other means of killing. When seconds matter, law enforcement is minutes away. In Uvalde, the police waited outside for an hour, using their tasers on parents, instead of stopping the shooter.  During the summer of hate that the Injustice Department refuses to prosecute, in blue cities 911 was so overwhelmed that they admitted they could not respond to calls for help. Taking firearms from law-abiding gun owners will not reduce violence, as has been shown in England, but it will leave peaceful citizens at the mercy of criminals.

Instead, we should focus on purging the diseases that infect our culture. We need to emphasize what makes us all Americans and marginalize the Leftists who seek to divide us. We must increase, not decrease, policing. We must eschew the glorification of violence and criminal behaviors. We must stop canonizing criminals killed by police because they are in a lionized demographic. We must punish the criminal, not the tool. This means not releasing violent, recidivist criminals to act again. Crime must not be rewarded in our society, as it seems to have been rewarded in recent years. We must stop giving murderers media coverage. (The Daily Wire refuses to print the names of these mass murders so as not to reward their bad behavior with ill-deserved fame.) We must find effective identification, treatment, and when all else fails institutionalization of those with mental illnesses that might lead to violence.

Mostly we need to return to traditional Judeo-Christian values that provide a strong moral compass. In the absence of this moral foundation, many Americans are dark in their souls. America grew to greatness when guided by traditional Judeo-Christian values and a strong “protestant work ethic.” Are we due for 40 years of enslavement because America has turned its back on God? Or for many Americans, is our nation today what Purgatory looks like?

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