We're All Religious

Michael Knowles, of The Daily Wire, spoke at a YAF event at George Washington University Wednesday. During the Q&A, he answered a question about social degeneracy and religion. This was his answer:

Michael Knowles speaking at YAF event
at George Washington University, October 2, 2019
screenshot from here

Conservatives need to talk, not just about policies and economic issues, but about culture. And not just about culture, but about religion, because, there was a famous cardinal who said, “At bottom, all political disagreements are theological disagreements.” St. Andrew Breitbart, the patron saint of Hollywood conservatives said, “Politics is downstream from culture.” And cult and culture are related words. What the culture worships defines that culture.

Nobody wakes up in the middle of the night, says, “Aaahhh! We’ve got to lower the top marginal tax rate by 0.2%. We have to! And then we’ll have a country.” But no one cares about that. I like low taxes as much as the next guy, but that is not motivating to people.

Because, ultimately, we are religious beings. We long for religion. And everybody’s got to serve somebody. So, when the left abandons traditional religion, they don’t just become materialists; they become weird cultist materialists.

Just last week you had children taking off school for multiple days at a time to protest the weather or something. And it was being organized by the government, so I don’t even know what they were protesting. They were all on the same side.

Bernie Sanders came out and said that we need to sacrifice our children to the climate gods. We need to stop global warming by not having children anymore.

You hear this on— NBC News came out and created a climate confessional. Very Catholic; I kind of like that. But it’s like the opposite of Catholic, because they’re worshipping the creation, rather than the creator.

The rot begins at that level—at the religious level. You will not have an irreligious America that’s successful. John Adams put it very well. He said the country is built for a moral and religious people. It is not fit to the governance of anybody else. Moral and religious, because morality doesn’t just float in the air. It has a shape. It has form. It looks like something. And, if you are not going to enact that, if you are not going to deal in metaphysical reality, then you are going to find yourself very very confused. Not without religion, but with a very very strange looking religion, where you are clamoring and screaming at the sky for it to stop being so sunny everyday.

I’m considering that idea, near the beginning, about political disagreements being theological disagreements. This may be true, even when people who disagree aren’t aware of their religious premises.

Let’s take a look at a historical example: slavery. The anti-slavery movement took root among people who came to believe it was morally wrong. What kind of people think about the morality of something that had been legal and practiced in most societies for millennia? People who believed some basic things: human beings are divinely created by God. God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34, Galatians 3:28). God grants us certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, the right to property ownership, and the choice to choose how to pursue our life’s work. Such people can see that taking the liberty of another person and using it for your own enrichment is morally wrong.

It took a religious people to recognize the divinity of human life, to raise awareness in a society that had accepted it as just the way the world always was, and then root it out.

That was a big task. And it took a good long time, which included a civil war here in America. But that society-wide repentance did happen. While slavery still may exist in the world, civilized people the world over all agree that it is morally wrong, and we must work to root it out.

There’s another divide now: abortion. The more we learn medically and scientifically, the more obvious it becomes that abortion is the killing of a human life. Looking at it morally, it appears to be a sacrifice to the religious belief that sex is a good, and a right, and should not have a negative consequence such as pregnancy. That’s not a Christian view. But it is religious—as Knowles calls it some “weird cultist” type of religion. This view actually sees killing a baby up to (and sometimes including shortly after) birth as a holy right (rite?), so moral that they require support of it by all of society through taxpayer money. It’s also political in our day.

Look at the religion of our founders. Sex outside of marriage was considered immoral. Sinning in that way, resulting in a pregnancy, was to be compensated for through marriage, since the important thing was to correct for the sin, for the sake of the new life coming from it. Killing the baby to cover up the sin was seen as abominable. That view was so long-standing that it is part of the Hippocratic oath, dating to about 275 AD Greece—not a Christian land, but you don’t get civilization without living the laws of civilization.

As a reminder, what are the principles necessary for civilization? You need a particular type of religious people—for the reasons I’m talking about today—who recognize God the Creator as the arbiter of good, to whom we are accountable, and from whom we are given our human rights. Such religious people need at least these five things: they honor God, life, family, truth, and property rights. As we’ve said here before, that is a summary of the Ten Commandments. And we emphasize the need for strong families—ideally a married husband and wife raising their own children in love and righteousness—in order to pass along the principles of civilization from one generation to another.

People can’t progress to being beyond a need for sexual morality, or beyond property rights. But many societies have decayed, or regressed, into sexual immorality and theft. Putting a government imprimatur on those things—or even government mandate for them—does not magically make them moral, good, or righteous. They lead inevitably to poverty and savagery.

So what we need is a moral revival—away from the pagan, selfish, prideful, life-sacrificing, liberty-depriving religion, and back to honoring God our Creator and right-giver, and therefore also honoring life, family, truth, and property ownership.

The question then becomes, how? Slowly, incrementally? Or fast, cataclysmically?

David Barton
screenshot from here

David Barton, at Wallbuilders, did a Facebook live this week (October 1), laying out the case for incremental progress in the right direction. He used the analogy of a football team, making relatively small progress down the field. From time to time they might make a long pass, but if they attempted the long pass every play, they’d probably be denied the progress they really want. He pointed out how slavery might have ended sooner if an incremental approach had been accepted at a certain point, but abolitionists insisted on all or nothing, and so the small step wasn't taken, and it was decades and war later before slavery was abolished.

I waiver between accepting small steps and wanting large leaps. We can celebrate small wins for civilization. But when we’re still wading in the muck of southern hemisphere tyranny and savagery, it’s hard to be patient enough to work our way up out of the swamp.

But the hopeful point is, social evils as long-standing as slavery can be overcome by a repentant people seeking to live the principles of civilization.

In my son’s elementary school, many years ago, the teachers used to give out awards—small things, such as a pencil, bearing the message “caught doing good.” It was an opportunity to interact with the kids when they were behaving in a way the teachers wanted to reinforce, and give them the idea that authority wasn’t always just looking for their mistakes. So, I’m in favor of catching people doing good.

Memorial Service for Sandeep Dhaliwal
screenshot from here

The outpouring of love in our local community for an officer, shot in the line of duty, was heartwarming. The incident happened just a few miles from our house. And the funeral yesterday was just a few miles further west. The love for this man, Sandeep Dhaliwal—and for his police brothers and sisters, and for the people of his religion (he was Sikh)—seemed unanimous.

Another heartwarming moment followed the upsetting trial of an officer who killed an innocent civilian when she entered the wrong apartment and thought she was facing an intruder. In the sentencing phase, the brother of the victim showed a sincere example of forgiveness, and asked if he could hug the convicted officer. She was found guilty and was sentenced to ten years, which is perhaps what society needed to do. But the brother—he was able to let go of the hurt and anger and see a contrite woman who had ruined her own life as well as his brother’s, and his compassion for her will be the most memorable part of that trial.

While both of these stories had people of various races and religions, these differences weren’t part of the story. Politics wasn’t part of the stories. Human love and decency were the important details.

If we keep finding the good, and refusing to accept the evil, maybe we can make incremental yardage toward the interrelated goals of freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

Freedom of Religion Is a Founding Principle

The phrase “separation of church and state” is not found in the Constitution. 

Danbury Baptist letter
from Thomas Jefferson
image found here

As I mention toward the end of the Civilization section of the Spherical Model, Jefferson wrote this phrase in a letter to the Danbury Baptists, 

to assure them that the “free exercise of religion” mentioned in the First Amendment was not a declaration that the right was granted by government, but that it was inalienable, and that there would not and could not be a religious sect favored by the US government to the exclusion of the others.

Unlike most other countries they were aware of, America would not have a state-sponsored, or favored, religion. That is what was meant by “establishment of religion” in the First Amendment. Rather than favor a particular sect—by taxing citizens to support it or favoring people who belong to it—the Founders wanted freedom of religion, and religious belief, to flourish. They did favor belief in God, and they favored people living religion-inspired lives.

Unfortunately, that idea has been twisted to practically the exact opposite of what the Founders envisioned. Somewhere along the line, government that would neither establish religion nor interfere with the free exercise thereof morphed into government that might override religious freedom whenever someone objected to something religious appearing in public view.

I’ve heard this called a couple of things: the dissenter’s veto, or offended observer status.

Let’s start today by clarifying what the Founders thought about religion in America.

A couple of weeks ago, in time for the 4^th of July, Ben Shapiro had historian David Barton on his Sunday Special interview show. Shapiro has written a book on the impact of religious thought on the American founding, and that’s something of a specialty for Barton, so it was a fun hour-long conversation.

David Barton with Ben Shapiro
screenshot from here

Barton points out that the Founders had no problem with religion. In fact, in the Northwest Ordinance, signed by George Washington in 1789, which allowed new states to join the US,

That law specifically says, Article III, “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and means of education shall forever be encouraged.” So, to this day, if you look in constitutions like the current North Carolina constitution; you look in Iowa, Kansas, etc.; it says, “Forever in the public schools of this state, religion and morality shall be taught, as well as knowledge.” So, they saw that as a mandate, that you can’t be a part of America if your schools don’t promote religion and morality.

Barton talked about the sources for many of the Founders ideas. Many of their phrases come from other writers: John Wise, John Locke, Charles Montesquieu—but more from the Bible. He recommended a book that actually tracked down the sources:

It’s called The Origins of American Constitutionalism. This is done by professors at the University of Houston, poli-sci professors; it’s published by LSU Press. And these guys said, you know, when you look at the American documents, we’re different from every other nation. We have ideas that other nations never implemented. Where’d our founders get those ideas? And they said, “We think that if we can go back and read what they wrote and see who they quoted, we’ll know where they got their ideas.”

So they collected 15,000 representative writings out of the founding era. They went through all 15,000. They found 3154 direct quotes. It took them ten years to document every quote back to its original source. At the end of ten years they said, “We now know where the founders got their ideas.”

So, the number one most cited individual—and when you’ve got 6,000 years of writings, and you’ve got tens of thousands of nations that have come and gone, you’ve got a lot of people you can choose from—they said the number one most cited individual was Charles Montesquieu. Bear in mind, Montesquieu out of France, The Spirit of the Law, 1750, 8.3%. That’s a lot for one guy, when you’ve got thousands to choose from.

Number two was William Blackstone, his four-volume Commentary on the Laws. That was number two at 7.9%. Number three was John Locke at 2.9%, particularly this book by Locke: Two Treatises of Government. Those were the top cited individuals.

But what they found that was really kind of shocking was, the single most cited source in the American founding was the Bible: 34%. That’s twelve times more than Locke, four times more than Montesquieu, four times more than Blackstone. The Bible.

And then they said, “Which Bible verse is recorded most often? And which books?” And Deuteronomy is the number one most quoted book—where Israel is building its nation. Moses is setting up the nation. And then Isaiah was next most quoted.

And so, even the secular academics have documented that the Bible was the primary source in the ideas that shaped the American founding. So it’s not like it’s in the atmosphere and it’s in the culture; these guys really did think according to specific Bible verses, and they applied them.

And so that, and between the Founders’ Bible, it’s pretty compelling that it was just not the atmosphere or the culture; it was the thinking that went behind it.

What were some of the ideas they got from these sources? Things like government needing the consent of the governed, and all men are created equal, and we’re endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.

Meanwhile, presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke went to meet some immigrants and refugees in Tennessee and told would-be Americans that he’s ashamed because America was "founded on white supremacy." That’s what he said. It’s hard to be that wrong; he must work at it.

As Barton said, “If the government were at least not hostile, it would be helpful.” He talked about how Kentucky schools had a problem with a picture of the Ten Commandments being included among other art, such as George Washington and the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, hanging in the school halls. The question went to court as to whether it was constitutional for a student to voluntarily read the Ten Commandments on a piece of art at school. In that case the court ruled no.

And to quote the Court, it said, “If a student were to see the Ten Commandments, they might be induced to read them. If they read them, they might venerate, respect, and obey them. And that would be unconstitutional.” Oh yeah, things like don’t steal and don’t kill and don’t perjure yourself. So legally we can’t even put in front of kids what is hanging in more than 50 locations in the Supreme Court. US Supreme Court has more than 50 depictions of the Ten Commandments in it. Some of are in stone.

Barton refers to this situation—the removal of religion from public places—as the dissenter’s veto:It’s a ridiculous situation we’ve put ourselves in—or we’ve allowed the legal system to do to us:

if somebody objects to everybody else sharing their faith, we’re going to make everybody else stop so this this guy won’t object. Nonsense. You don’t let one person veto everyone else.

Barton is hopeful that, with new justices—and I think he means the US Supreme Court as well as many new conservative, law-reading justices in lower courts as well—things are looking up.

We’re starting to win some things we haven’t won in 50, 60 years. We’re seeing a turn.

Courts are no substitute for the people learning their history and purposefully living good, religious lives. But at least the courts can prevent some official hostility toward religion.

He’s not the only one to think things are looking up. On July 10th, on The Blaze’s The News and Why It Matters,^* one of the guests was Lathan Watts, Director of Communications, First Liberty Institute, with some good news. The story that he highlighted was from last week, a policy change issued by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, allowing the inclusion of religious content in publicly accessible displays at VA facilities.

Lathan Watts, with First Liberty Institute,
on The News and Why It Matters, July 10, 2019
screenshot from here

Here’s the story behind it. In Manchester, New Hampshire, at a VA hospital, the Northeast POW/MIA Network (First Liberty’s client) had received permission to put up a POW/MIA remembrance table, as is done in many VA hospitals around the country:

Every item on a POW/MIA table is symbolic. There’s a yellow rose. There’s an empty chair for the POW. And one of those symbols is typically a Bible that symbolizes the strength gained through faith, of the POW and his family while they wait.

Well, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation—which is an Orwellian named group, because they hate religious freedom—[started by a guy name Mikey Weinstein]. And he sent a letter to the VA facility in Manchester saying that it was illegal to have this Bible, and that it was somehow an establishment clause violation, threatening to sue them. So we sent a letter to the VA explaining what the law actually is, and what the current VA policy was, that this is a private display and it’s perfectly acceptable to have it there. And that director made the right decision, and it’s going to stay.

In the process of defending against Weinstein’s attack, First Liberty sent a letter to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, asking for a nationwide policy, to prevent this anti-religious group from attacking one VA facility after another, since the current policy was to leave such decisions to the facility directors, who may not be aware of their rights and could comply needlessly. And that led to the Secretary’s issuing the new policy.

There’s more good news attached:

And the great thing about their press release is, right at the end they say, “The US Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the important role religion plays in the lives of many Americans, and it’s consistency with constitutional principles.” That’s a direct cite of the recent case that we just won about three weeks ago, the American Legion v. American Humanist Association. So it was great to see almost an immediate impact of that decision. And a new policy’s going to protect these types of displays all over the country.

We hadn’t spent much time on that case, but we did mention it, as a bit of good news, at the end of Monday’s post. In that case, the Bladensburg WWI Veterans Memorial, a large cross that has been standing for close to a century, was found offensive by the American Humanist Association for “establishing” a religion—in other words, forcing nonbelievers to participate in an established government-approved religious sect—simply because they can view the memorial. Finally, we have a court that doesn’t buy that.

Watts comments,

The constitution protects your rights, not your feelings. It’s as simple as that. And that was one of the great things in the American Legion decision. Justice Gorsuch, in his concurrence that Justice Thomas joined… said now that we’re returning to the original text of the First Amendment in analyzing these cases, we should also completely do away with the offended observer status. And Thomas agreed with him and said these types of cases should be dismissed for lack of standing. Just because you’re offended by seeing an object should not provide you standing to go into court and have that object removed or torn down.

About that offended observer status—what David Barton referred to as the dissenter’s veto, the supposed loophole that gives a single individual the right to overrule everyone else’s religious freedom—he says he thinks such cases will be more easily dismissed. He adds that offended observer status is

only present in establishment clause cases. It’s the only place in the law where we recognize this right to go to court and have something torn down because you don’t like it. It’s only in establishment clause cases.

And so, hopefully this is the indication that it’s morning in America again.

Let’s hope so. Let the light dawn once again on those Founding ideas that made America exceptional in the first place.

________________________________________________

* This link may require a subscription. But the segment is available on Facebook here. 

Scary Guns

A free people ought not only be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.—George Washington

Since it’s President’s Day, it seems appropriate to start this discussion with George Washington’s words on the subject of the day

The hue and cry for gun control, in the wake of last week’s school shooting in Florida, is deafening but unconvincing. Emotions of course run high after such a senseless massacre. But sometimes things that seem like the “obvious” solution when you’re high on emotion look a lot less sensible when you calm down and look at facts.

I’m not a gun expert. What I do is look at the factors that lead to freedom, prosperity, and civilization. Those are the northern hemisphere of the Spherical Model. The southern hemisphere is made up of all stripes of tyranny, poverty, and savagery.

The school shooting was savage. Any response that is southern hemisphere by nature—such as coercion—will not lead away from savagery up to civilization.

Since that is a principle I know—or, rather, is a theory I believe plays out in society—I am looking for facts to either prove or disprove the theory. Facts are less emotional, and therefore more logical. Feelings have their place, but I won’t allow them to take society southward into tyranny and all bad things if I can help it.

So I’ve been gathering some facts. There is a short piece at Ricochet.com by contributor Henry Racette, with some statistics that give perspective to start with:

At the current rate, an American high school student faces a risk of being murdered in a school shooting in a year of about 0.0014%.

That’s about one in 71,000.

Based on last year’s crime statistics, the overall probability of a person in the US being murdered in a year is about 0.005%.

That’s about one in 20,000.

Also based on last year’s crime statistics, a citizen of St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, or Detroit—including children in those cities—has a risk of being murdered in a year of about 0.049%.

That’s about one in 2,000.

If the current rate continues, there will be about two dozen school shooters this year—based on a reasonable definition of what constitutes a school shooting. Their total victims will constitute about one half of one percent of all United States homicides.

Overall, in the United States, about 16,000 murders will be committed this year. Most of them—about two-thirds—will be committed by males between the ages of 17 and 35.

The 30 most violent cities in America represent about six percent of the US population but account for about a quarter of all murders.

There is nothing trivial about school shootings, but there is also nothing typical about them. If we wish to reduce their frequency, we have to find ways to reach the last 0.0003% of the male high school population. Put differently, 99.9997% of the young men in our high schools are not in danger of becoming school shooters.

Let’s look at the two dozen who are and try to understand their pathology. But let’s not mistake them for normal. Most of the other 99.5% of murders in the United States this year will be more typical, more predictable, and more preventable.

What we’re looking at in school shootings are outliers. Oddities. Atypical events.

They’re horrible. If we can find a way to prevent them, we should do so. Maybe it’s time to consider metal detectors and armed guards in every school, and possibly teachers who voluntarily qualify to carry concealed weapons. These and other measures that don’t infringe on the rights of law-abiding citizens might actually work.

As Brandon Minoff, a young man from the high school, said about football coach and security guard Aaron Feis, who was killed, “If coach Feis would have had a gun or any of the other security guards would have had a gun it definitely would have been less fatal," he said. "[The shooter] and coach Feis were face-to-face and he just shielded kids instead of having the ability to kill the shooter."

In the immediate aftermath, we were told the killer had not had a criminal record. That wasn’t exactly true. He had a long record of incidents, 39, many violent, in his home over many years. But as a juvenile. Yet the moment he turned 18, that record was hidden from people who may have needed to see it, such as the gun seller doing a background check. Police and other authorities knew of his record. The FBI had received what now appear to be credible tips about the killer’s plans to carry out a school shooting.

Do we need to get better at identifying these threats and finding ways to prevent? Absolutely. If there is a law that needs adjusting, it may be that violent youth crime shouldn’t be hidden just because a person reaches a particular birthday, since a birthday is no guarantee of change in behavior. It may need to be case-by-case. I don’t know. Those kinds of things could be debated in legislatures.

But the debate tends to be, instead, on “common sense gun laws,” often meaning getting rid of those “assault rifles.” The term lacks definition. There is no legally defined such thing. But the term is used to imply scary, military style weapons, with great capacity to do mass murder. Many of the people making these arguments just lack facts. So let’s start with more information about these guns.

This 5-minute Glenn Beck video clip is from 2013. The whole thing (below) is useful visually. I’ll describe a few parts of it:

Glenn picks up a scary looking metal gun, which he terms an “assault rifle,” and also a rifle with a wooden stock, which he says is a 22.

Paul Michael, owner and instructor at Strictly Defense, says. “They’re both the same caliber. They both can do the same damage. One just looks different from the other.”

The 22 holds 17 bullets. The other holds a high-capacity magazine of 20 bullets. Not much difference.

Of the collection of guns displayed on the table, Glenn suggests, if he took all the wood-stock guns off the table and left the metal ones, you might look at that collection and say the owner was a madman. But if you take away “the spooky black shotgun” and replace it with “this nice shotgun,” then people would assume the owner was a hunter.

What’s the difference between the two shotguns? Michael says, “Cosmetics. They’re both the identical shotgun. They’re both Remington 1100s.” The only differences are a synthetic (black) stock, an extended barrel, and extended magazine tube. Why the black? Glare. Some hunters believe the game can get a glint off the shiny metal parts, so they prefer a matte black finish.

There’s further discussion about a hunter-looking rifle and a slightly smaller black gun. The rifle is more accurate. The black one is less accurate, but lighter weight, easier for a woman or a less experienced gunman to use in a pressure situation. In other words, it’s good for self-defense. It has the added self-defense benefit of the pump sound, which can scare off an intruder who suddenly realizes someone has a gun ready for him.

Using handguns, they discuss the difference between a revolver and a semiautomatic. With the revolver, it’s mechanical. You need to pull back the handle to load the bullet to be ready to fire by pulling the trigger. The semiautomatic uses gas pressure from the cartridge to load the next bullet to be ready to fire, so it does one step for you. Depending on your skill, the revolver can be as fast, or nearly as fast, as the semiautomatic handgun.

Neither of those is automatic—which means, like a machine gun, firing multiple bullets with a single trigger pull. Production and sale of automatic weapons to the public have been illegal for several decades. They are not technically outlawed, in that you can buy existing ones, for very high prices (around $20,000 and up compared to around $500 for a semiautomatic but otherwise similar gun), and with lots of paperwork about how it will be stored, who can touch it, how it can be transported, and how and where and under what circumstances it can be shot.

The Tommy guns of the 1920s might be what you picture. But since this law went into effect, no mass shooting in the US to date has used an automatic weapon.

We could add that,  those “scary guns,” aren’t the weapon of choice for gun crimes; handguns are used in 80% of gun-related crimes. Nicholas Johnson gives the full story is in this PragerU video:

Earlier in January 2013, Glenn Beck had another discussion with David Barton, of Wallbuilders, on natural law and self-defense.

Natural law is where we disagree with anti-gun people. And its irreconcilable. We are not granted the right to defend our own lives, loved ones, and property by government—not even by the Second Amendment. We are granted that right by God. And God-given rights are inalienable—they cannot be infringed legally, only by tyranny.

Rescinding the Second Amendment, as has been suggested again this week, would not take away the natural law—nor the natural reaction to fight off an attacker—that you know inside you is your right. Think about it. If someone is attacking your child, do you have the right to fight them off? You do.

If that person is using a gun against you or your child, don't you have the right to use a gun or other lethal force to fight back? If you’re saying, “Yes, but not a scary black gun,” then it’s on you to explain that distinction.

We’re not saying, “Tough luck! We just have to tolerate the mayhem.” Again, we should be talking about what can and ought to be done to prevent attacks. But you might be comforted to know that the anti-gun lobby (including the media) has been lying to you when they say, “More guns mean more gun deaths.”

Steven Crowder responds to an anti-AR-15 piece, and includes video from March 2016, in which he debunks a Vox video that tries to pass off propaganda as a dispassionate demonstration of facts—just not true ones. It’s longish, but it will help you understand why it’s easy to be manipulated if you don’t think things through. For example:

Ah, see, now this chart is comparing countries. But this chart is not about homicide; it’s not about firearm deaths. It’s only about gun ownership. All of this is designed to lead you into believing that gun ownership—legal gun ownership—results in increased violent gun crime. Important to note: If gun ownership as seen in this chart is so much higher, but the United States still ranks 28th in gun-related deaths, why is that the case? It also ironically unravels her own point. If gun ownership is so drastically higher in the United States, but we’re only 28th ranked in overall gun homicide rate, that means proportionally legal gun owners in the United States are committing fewer crimes.

Also doing some debunking is Ben Shapiro, in his show from Friday, February 16. He’s responding to a Bret Stephens piece in the New YorkTimes, which Shapiro says is the best argument around for getting rid of the Second Amendment, but it’s not a good one.

There’s this, for example:

Stephens cites a study in the American Journal of Public Health from 2013 to show the “states with high rates of gun ownership have disproportionately large numbers of death from firearm-related homicides.” But there’s only one problem with the study. This examines the statistics on a state level, which doesn’t make any sense, given that virtually all murder in the United States takes place not in the rural areas of states, but in the big cities. In those big cities there are very harsh gun laws. In the big cities, that’s where nearly all murder in the United States takes place, in big cities. So there is very little link, actually, between state law and state homicide rate, as Eugene Volokh of the Washington Post pointed out.

Shapiro uses John Lott’s website, the Crime Prevention Research Center, which goes through the annual death rate from mass public shootings, comparing the European countries to the US and Canada on a per capita basis, instead of sheer numbers. As Shapiro says,

One of the things that happens is that the United States is compared to Britain, for example. He says there are a lot more shootings here than in Britain. Right, but we’re a much larger country than Britain. When you actually look at the death rate per million people from mass public shootings from 2009 to 2015, according the Crime Prevention Research Center, the number one country was Norway, because they had that horrible Anders Breivik shooting. And then it’s Serbia, France, Macedonia, Albania, Slovakia, Switzerland, Finland, Belgium Czech Republic, and then the United States.

How about frequency? Forget about the number of dead. How about frequency of mass public shootings? So, if you look at the frequency of mass public shootings from January 2009 to December 2015, per million people, in order it’s Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, Switzerland, Norway, Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, Austria, Czech Republic, France, and then the United States.

The average incident rate per 28 EU countries is 0.0602 with 95% confidence interval of 0.0257 to .09477. The US rate is .078 higher than the EU rate. But the US and an average for EU countries are not statistically different. In other words, we’re having about the same number of mass shootings as are happening in other countries, and we have significantly more guns. So this idea that everything lines up is just not statistically correct.

“Common sense gun laws,” and “No one needs an assault weapon” are code for “We want to ban all gun ownership for self-defense or any other purpose.” But despite what media and various celebrities would portray, the American public is very much against full-scale gun confiscation and outlawing firearm ownership. That's why, when Democrats had both houses and the presidency, they didn't even bring up gun legislation; they know the people won't stand for it. 

The more the anti-freedom people lie about what they really intend, the more likely they will lose the debate in a nation that knew better from its founding than to cede natural rights to a tyrannical government.

MLK's Ten Commandments

It’s Martin Luther King Day today. Yesterday I came across a Wallbuilders post in honor of the day. David Barton of Wallbuilders pointed out that he was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  There are schools that remove the “Reverend” title out of some misguided idea that mentioning a historical person’s religious affiliation is somehow “establishing” a national religion.

Ten Commandments of Nonviolence
image from here

If that is true of some school—yet another reason to homeschool.

But David Barton went on to share Martin Luther King’s Ten Commandments for those joining him in the nonviolent movement. If we share nothing more about the man today, these Ten Commandments of nonviolence ought to be repeated.

1.       MEDITATE daily on the teachings and life of Jesus.

2.       REMEMBER always that the nonviolent movement in Birmingham seeks justice and reconciliation—not victory.

3.       WALK and TALK in the manner of love, for God is love.

4.       PRAY daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free.

5.       SACRIFICE personal wishes in order that all men might be free.

6.       OBSERVE with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy.

7.       SEEK to perform regular service for others and for the world.

8.       REFRAIN from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.

9.       STRIVE to be in good spiritual and bodily health.

10.   FOLLOW the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration.

So, the tenth is directly related to the movement, at that time, in a particular city, so we may not need that right now. And the second is worded as time and place specific as well, but the idea of seeking justice and reconciliation rather than some nebulous idea of victory is still valid.

Not everyone is Christian. Nevertheless, I believe it is true that meditating on the teachings and life of Jesus. The remaining commandments are a pretty good description of what a regular person might work on to be more Christlike—to live a more truly civilized life.

There’s a lot in there about love—even when love isn’t offered in return—and about being kind, courteous, self-restrained, and selfless toward others.

The list I use most often to describe civilized behavior is the summary of the original Ten Commandments: honor God, family, life,property, and truth.

And another good list comes from the description of charity, the pure love of Christ, in I Corinthians 13:

4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is    not puffed up,

 5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

 6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

 7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

 8 Charity never faileth

I love the King James English language, but if you need a quick translation, the list is

·         Long suffering

·         Not envious

·         Not self-centered, no over-inflated ego

·         Well-mannered (courteous, kind, modest)

·         Not self-serving

·         Controlled temper

·         Controlled thoughts to avoid evil

·         No joy in doing bad, but joy in finding truth

·         Tolerant and long-suffering

·         Positive, believing, and hopeful

·         Enduring in goodness through life

As Peter taught, “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34). In the Book of Mormon, Nephi taught the same principle, that God “inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile” (2 Nephi 26:33).

The required bahaviors of civilized behavior—leading to the comforts and joys of true civilization—apply to everyone. Live that way, among others who live that way, and you can fully enjoy civilization.

Live that way even when not among others who live that way—and work, as Rev. Martin Luther King did, to persuade others to live that way as well.

That is still a movement to get behind.

The Clear Choice

I have been hoping, for this election, for clarity. I wanted the situation to be that people could see clearly who the candidates were, so the choice could be made without deceit. I believed that, if the American people had the clear choice before them, they would make the right choice for our country.

Here is what was clear to anyone with eyes willing to see:

President Obama divides the people, ignores the constitution, and has a four-year record of failed economic policies. His behavior toward our allies has been offensive. His behavior to our enemies has been apologetic and submissive. His specific lies following the Benghazi attack are so egregious as to require impeachment. His history, while sketchy, clearly indicates a disdain for our beloved constitutional ideals. He seems incompetent as a leader (specifically failing to persuade others to follow his actual ideology when truthfully stating it). Meanwhile, I think he is consistent in moving to transform the nation from a constitutional republic into a marxist tyranny. His tone is condescending and his attacks on his opponent are petty and small-minded. Because I love my homeland and the blessed freedom we inherited from our forefathers, I see him as an enemy. It is difficult for me to see positives about him. Others see him as a “great” orator; I have never heard him give a speech that moved me, and most of his speech I find grating and the opposite of inspiring. But I grant that some people swoon and feel moved, for whatever reason. (People do that over various rap “singers,” and I feel similarly puzzled.)

Romney during the GOP convention
from Ann Romney's Facebook page

Deserved-President Romney has been knowable all along. He is, despite the mischaracterization, about as steady and consistent as I have ever seen a public figure. He has a genuine history of remarkable success. His open record shows a very smart man, with an extreme work ethic combined with almost superhuman energy. His priorities are with God and family, and caring for individuals, with personal hand labor, not just with money. This was the hardest thing to get to know about him, because his quiet service is a way of life; he does it to serve God and fellowman, and it detracts from that purpose to talk about it. But his friends, real people who have known him in real life over long years, testify on his behalf. The stories of his sterling character are legion. Meanwhile, no one, virtually not a single human being, comes forward to testify of Obama’s lifetime character record.

Romney seems, in ways our founding fathers were, raised up by God for such a time as this. He had the sterling qualities, the valuable life experience, and the understanding—in addition to natural leadership qualities that inspire the best in those around him. Whatever our serious, practically insolvable problems in this country, if a human being, who would turn to God for guidance, could be seen to find solutions and turn the country around, that human being would be Mitt Romney. As Ann said, “This man will not fail.”

The choice was between Obama’s failure for our country and damage to our constitution, and the return to the constitution, free-enterprise, and civilized living. This was a difference between right and wrong, between freedom and tyranny, between prosperity and depression. The differences could not have been more stark.

It was inconceivable to me that, with that clarity, a majority of the American people would do anything other than rush to the polls to make the right choice. I was wrong.

I had felt peace in the couple of weeks before the election, that the clarity was there, and more than anything that God had things in hand. In my perspective, which is a much smaller perspective than God’s perspective, I could only imagine that meant a Mitt Romney win, and I was counting on improved economic and other considerations—that we would have some relief from the government-induced pain. So the immediate reaction was to mourn the loss of my hopes and plans.

What I had refused to believe was that the country, because of the people and their choices, was in as bad a shape as turned out to be true. This changes my understanding completely.

In the Book of Mormon, there is an understanding that there is a societal pattern we could call The Pride Cycle. A free and prosperous people tend to become complacent and prideful and forget about God, which leads to corruption and then bondage. And then, in their really bad straits, the humbled people turn back to God, and they eventually get deliverance and return to prosperity. Until they become complacent and prideful again.

My son Political Sphere had been listening to the returns on TheBlazeTV (Glenn Beck’s coverage online). And he said one of the guests, historian David Barton, actually talked about the cycle. He called it the Cycle of the Body Politic, but it is similar enough, I think we’re looking at the same cycle. I found this, beginning at the 4:12 mark (four hours and twelve minutes in):

David Barton: It’s called the Cycle of the Body Politic, and it goes through these steps:

·         You start with bondage as a nation.

·         Then you hit spiritual truth.

·         From that you develop great courage.

·         From great courage you fight for liberty.

·         You then have abundance once you get liberty.

·         But then selfishness sets in.

·         And then complacency.

·         And then apathy.

·         And then you go back to dependence.

And that’s the typical cycle of nations.

Glenn: I think the United States, many of our friends and neighbors are at apathy and dependence, in that transition period. But there’s probably a third of us that are in spiritual truth and great courage. We’re just at opposite ends of the circle.

I think that’s right. Because I have mostly surrounded myself with like-minded people, those of us at the “spiritual truth and great courage” place, I believed we were a critical mass that could move us up toward liberty and abundance. But indeed a thin majority of the voters saw Obama and what he represents as what they want. They do not want to hear truth. They refuse to believe in principles of truth. They were willing to believe Romney was an evil plutocrat out to gouge money from the poor, with all evidence to the contrary. They were willing to believe Obama had their best interests at heart despite the high unemployment, higher taxes, and anti-business policies. One could say there are many among them that are too stupid to know the truth, but I believe right now it is more willful disbelief. Government is their replacement for God. Compared to the real God, government is a pathetic substitute.

Even if we find there was enough voter fraud and disenfranchisement of military voting to make the difference, the country itself is nevertheless under condemnation--more than half choosing not to follow God's principles. The sizable percentage of eligible voters who failed to vote in essence assented to the current path southward into tyranny. I was simply wrong about there being enough of us to prevent the inevitable drop into the bottom bondage point of the cycle—and bondage is a synonym for tyranny. We are already suffering a fair amount of tyranny and have been suffering it for some years. I don’t know quite how to envision what is yet to come. But in order for God to humble His people and persuade them to turn back to Him, they must be made uncomfortable in their suffering.

There has to be a way to move back up north to freedom. We’ll talk about that in days to come. For today, let me just say that we owe a debt of gratitude to Mitt Romney for his tremendous sacrifice. He is a natural leader without the common love of power. We might not ever see a candidate for president who is as good a man as Mitt Romney has been his whole life.

There is a character in the Book of Mormon, a strong leader named Captain Moroni; it was said of him: “Yea, verily, verily I say unto you, if all men had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever; yea, the devil would never have power over the hearts of the children of men” (Alma 48:17). If we had a preponderance of men like Mitt Romney, instead of this one singular man, we would have prosperity, civilization, and liberty at the very top of the sphere, with no slipping southward.

I believe he was called by God to run this campaign and give it his all. The cost physically, emotionally, and economically to him and his family was significant. He knew going in that the odds were against him, but he was the very best option, and he did his very best to give us the choice we needed. I believe it was part of God’s plan to have Romney there, so the choice would be stark, so that when the inevitable suffering of a people under condemnation comes, the suffering will clearly be the natural consequence of the choice.

What do we—who are already choosing right—what do we do now? Whatever God continues to call us to do. There was this discussion at the 4:54 mark of Glenn Beck’s coverage (my apologies that I couldn’t locate the General’s full name and don’t recognize him):

General: I’m disappointed, but I’m not discouraged. I’m going back to the hotel tonight. I’m going to get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow I’m going back to Washington, and I’m gonna do exactly what I’ve been doing. And, David, you’ve just got to keep on writing books. And, Glenn, you’ve got to continue to be the Ezekiel 33:6 watchman.

Glenn: It doesn’t end well for those guys.

General: You’ve got to be the watchman. We’ve got to keep doing what we’ve been doing. It’s what we’re called to, and we keep doing what we’ve been doing. And the outcome is not up to us….

David Barton: John Quincy Adams fighting a losing battle, for him; he fought against slavery. But he never quit, and when the media asked him why, he said, “Because duty is ours; results are God’s.” And if we’ll stay on the track of doing the right thing, and don’t worry about the results, it doesn’t alter what we do, we’ll be all right.