Emotion Doesn't Equal Caring

Emotion is part of being human. It tells us something about our environment, about what we’re experiencing. But it isn’t truth.

You can be angry for someone slighting you when that person had no intention to slight, wouldn’t have intentionally done such a thing, and in fact did nothing wrong, but you emotionally interpreted the slight based on some previous experience in your life or even someone else’s story.

Emotion is no basis for problem solving.

Problem solving happens another way:

·         You identify a problem.

·         You identify cause(s) for the problem.

·         You address the cause(s).

o   This will be based on whether the problem is within your circle of influence.

o   And will be based on whether the problem is solvable within your time frame (lifetime, possibly),

o   Or whether the problem is likely to resolve itself regardless of actions you (or others) take.

What will certainly not solve the problem:

·         Hysteria.

·         Haranguing others for not already having solved the problem.

·         Claiming righteousness based on your hyper-emotionalism about the issue.

I came across this post on a friend’s Facebook (a good friend, whose relationship I value and want to continue; she didn’t write this but only reposted). I’m not responding to that friend; I’m responding to the original poster, who is anonymous to me. This kind of thing is usually not worth the energy of a response. But I think it is a useful example of why emotion is standing between us and solutions to problems.

shared on a friend's Facebook page

So that you can see them clearly, here are the hysterical accusations in bullet-point format:

·       I don’t want concertgoers and schoolchildren to be routinely slaughtered in hailstorms of bullets. You don’t care.

·       I don’t want some kid’s first memory to be that of a jackbooted deportation force kicking down their door and ripping their father from them. You don’t care.

·       I don’t want a mother to bury her child solely because she couldn’t swing $600 for a two-pack of epipens. You don’t care.

·       Every day you wake up and deflect, but-what-about, twist, bend, contort, and echo whatever vile, clubfooted rationalization keeps you from having to admit that you’re, not just complicit in, but in fact actively facilitating this nightmare of a reality so many people are experiencing.

·       I care about other people. You do not.

Let me start with the first issue.

Violence

It is not routine for concertgoers or schoolchildren to attend those places and be “slaughtered in hailstorms of bullets.” There was one concert event, in Las Vegas in 2017, when a single deranged gunman set up a gun with a bump stock to shoot many bullets indiscriminately into the crowd. The perpetrator was killed. No such event has been repeated. That incident was an outlier, not routine.

There are more school shootings than any of us would like. We would ALL like that number to be zero. But routine bullet hailstorms?

There are 50.8 million school students this year in the US. I don’t know how many school campuses. Size varies. But if we generically say 500 per school, that’s 101,600 schools. What is the risk per child?

In 2018, there were 24 school shootings, resulting in 35 deaths, which included 28 students and 7 adults (teachers or other adult employees). Of those, all but 8 happened at the Parkland, Florida, shooting or  the Santa Fe, Texas, high school—just two incidents. That means the other 22 incidents resulted in a total of 8 deaths (not all of whom were students).

Of the remaining 101,576 schools, students remained safe from any shooting incident. And of 50.8 million students, 50,799,972 remained alive. An additional 72 students were injured but not killed, so that means 50,799,900 remained both alive and uninjured. As a percentage, that means 99.99980315% remained safe. 

graphic from here

Safe enough? Probably not. Let’s make our schools safer. (And consider homeschooling.)

There was an incident at a local high school—the school son Political Sphere attended before we withdrew him to homeschool. The kids in my Sunday School class experienced the lockdown and told us what they experienced. A student had been expelled, they thought for drug dealing or something similar. Someone had ratted him out, they said. He came to the school angry, with a gun. But someone had reported him to the police. I heard elsewhere later that it was the boy’s mother. The news said it was a parent, but was unclear whether it was his own parent. 

Officers were on the lookout for him when he showed up at the school. They chased him down, apprehended him, with no shots fired. That means even that young man was uninjured.

Twitter post from KHOU 11,
found here

Children and students had been somewhat traumatized. They had followed lockdown protocol—locked classroom doors, covered door windows, blocked doors with furniture, hid in somewhat barricaded area behind the teacher’s desk.  Within 45 minutes the lockdown was lifted. But students had texted their parents about what was happening, and a thousand parents showed up in cars within the hour to reunite with their children, so school had to be dispensed with for the rest of the day.

This kind of incident doesn’t show up in reports. Kids (and teachers, and parents) were upset, but the security system worked—including, and maybe especially, the parent sounding the alarm.

It may be that the perpetrator was seeking only a particular person—whoever he thought was the person who “ratted him out.” There might have been no plan to rain down a “hailstorm of bullets” on the rest of the students. Because he’s alive, maybe officials will be able to find out. (Not to minimize, but a "hailstorm" implies an automatic weapon. Those have been essentially illegal for decades and one has never been used in one of these mass shootings in my lifetime.)

I don’t know how he obtained the firearm—he wasn’t old enough to purchase one. But if he was a drug dealer, chances are high that he was also a gang member—an outlaw. He would not have been thwarted by a gun law that would have confiscated guns from all law-abiding persons. He had to be stopped from using the gun he was unlawfully wielding. Fortunately, others—good guys who had guns but didn’t end up using them—were able to stop him in time.

If the many times the Parkland perpetrator had stepped over the line had been noted, and followed up on, he might have been stopped in time.

I could turn things around on the emotion-laden accuser and say, “You want people more vulnerable, unable to defend themselves. And you want to do nothing about those who have shown a clear danger to society but are ignored, time and again, until they strike. You don’t care.”

But what I really want to say is, “If you’ll stop being hysterical long enough, and dispense with the name-calling, you might find out that cooler heads not only care, but are better at finding the solutions to the problems you claim to care about.”

Doing something might seem to an emotional non-thinker to mean making guns illegal. But people who really care look deeper, at things like mental illness, fatherless homes, and other evils of a savage society.

What does making guns illegal do? It leaves guns only in the hands of lawbreakers. It does nothing to address stopping lawbreakers from using guns; it only limits the law-abiding, making us defenseless.

People who really care do what it takes to restore civilization.

Immigration

Briefly to address the other accusations, what is a “jackboot,” anyway? According to George Orwell:

"I am still without any clear information as to what a jackboot is. It is a kind of boot that you put on when you want to behave tyrannically: that is as much as anyone seems to know."

So you’re using that language only to inflame, not to inform. When ICE targets illegals for deportation, they target violent offenders, although non-violent offenders are not exempt. They knock on the door. The occupant of the house can ask to see the warrant by having it slipped under the door. Refusal to open the door would not result in a kicked-down door unless there were other circumstances warranting quick action in order to secure the safety of people.

In other words, no jackbooted tyrants kick down doors and tear innocent illegals from the arms of their wailing children. Doesn’t happen. It’s just an image used to stir up hysteria.

If you care about the children of illegals, then you ought to care about enforcing laws that would discourage people from illegally bringing children into the country. Also, as with all countries, illegals with children are welcome to take those children with them back to their home countries.

What you really need to understand is what sovereignty is, and why countries have borders—all countries in the entire history of countries, not just ours. And then you need to see the video “Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs,” which demonstrates why it’s impossible to allow in enough immigrants to solve the world’s problems.

screenshot from "Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs"

We need to help people solve their problems in their home countries—by teaching them the principles of freedom, prosperity, and civilization, while giving charitably as we feel able. Or don’t you actually care?

Medical Costs

About epipens. That price is accurate—but not. As with many things medical in a non-transparent non-free-market sector of the economy, things are not always as first quoted. You can pay the full price, but almost no one does. Insurance drops the price down around $100, and depending on your plan could cost you nothing. For those without insurance that covers prescriptions, you can get a discount card that saves you more than 50%. And if you make less than $100,000 as a family, you can apply for assistance that might leave you paying zero. If you’re on Medicaid (low income, can’t afford coverage, so government pays it for you), you pay zero. 

So there isn’t a mother out there who has to bury her child solely because “she couldn’t swing $600 for a two-pack of epipens.” That’s a lie you tell to raise hysteria.

If what you’re saying is that we all should pay for each other’s medical care, and the only way you can persuade people to do that is to get them hysterical enough—ah, then we understand each other.

But if you actually want to lower costs and improve service in the medical sector, then get government out of the way and implement free-market solutions. For anything that doesn’t get solved that way, we have voluntary charity and philanthropy.

We have less charitable problem-solving than we need because of government interference in healthcare. And because you "caring people" and your government keep coercively taking from people while calling them cold-hearted—using their money while calling yourself charitable. I could say, “Why don’t you donate $600 a year for one stranger’s epipens? Don’t you care?” But that doesn’t get us very far.

You’ve said I, and people like me, deflect, “but-what-about” (which is not a verb that I understand), twist, bend, contort, and echo vile, clubfooted rationalizations (can rationalizations be vile and/or clubfooted, or are you using a vile metaphor that belittles actual people with a real physical condition?) And you’ve said I am complicit in—and not only that, I’m actively participating in—the nightmares so many people are experiencing.

Or, it could be that I’m not. But those accusations might actually apply to you. Because you think government is god, and the more power that god has, the more virtuous you feel in appeasing it. It’s not about caring at all; it’s about power.

But government isn’t god. It’s just a tool for us free people to use to protect our lives, our liberty, and our property. As we say here often:

Whenever government attempts something beyond the proper role of government (protection of life, liberty, and property), it causes unintended consequences—usually exactly opposite to the stated goals of the interference.

Any time we allow more power to fall into the hands of government than it should have, we are causing harm, rather than solving problems. If you were less hysterical, I could show you how to read and understand the Constitution, which lays out the best way in history for a people—any people—to deal with the “nightmares so many people are experiencing.”

The rules for freedom, prosperity, and civilization work every time they’re tried. Not instantaneously. And life in a fallen world still happens. But they work. And they include thoughts and prayers, which you obscenely shoved. 

When you calm down and get over the hysteria, maybe you can ask and find real answers from people who actually do care.

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.

Start with Ourselves

During weeks like this, when the news is covering mainly one horrible event, it can wear on a person.

One response is, as Mr. Rogers’ mother advised, to look for the helpers. And there have been many. Stories of heroes, in Las Vegas, who acted instinctively to do what would help others—those are the stories that really tell who we are as a people. Here’s one.

Johnathan Smith, hero
image from CNN

The less helpful response is to insist that anyone who doesn’t believe in taking all the guns from all the law-abiding citizens lacks compassion. And I feel the urge to respond. If pinned down, these gun haters aren’t against all guns; they’re against anyone but the government having them. Because they won’t be against police and military having them—unless they’re in favor of dying defenseless. So, they’re really just against non-government citizens having weapons to defend themselves. I’d like to know why they suddenly trust the government so much.

There’s talk of outlawing the bump stock, apparently used in the Las Vegas shooting to make a semi-automatic rifle fire almost like an automatic rifle. Fully automatic weapons are already outlawed. The NRA is not against outlawing the bump stock. Most shooting ranges already forbid them. If a person isn’t trained in rapid fire—the kind of training you might get in the military—it’s easy to lose control and shoot the ceiling or anything (or possibly anyone) within range.

So there’s a good chance there will be some agreement on this. At the very least there may be some control over where such items can be owned or used, since they make a legal weapon into what is essentially an illegal weapon.

I don’t know how the debate will go. What I expect, though, is that when a murderer doesn’t have access to one way of killing, he will find another.

What we really need is a better way to identify the kind of mind and heart willing to mass murder. I don’t know if that’s possible. Isn’t that the idea of the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report? I don’t think things went well when interventions pre-empted actions.

Even better would be creating minds and hearts that don’t go so far awry.

Scarlett Lewis, the mom of one of the Sandy Hook Elementary victims, says that gun control isn’t the answer; misuse of guns is a symptom of a larger societal problem. She suggests teaching young people social and emotional learning. A program she promotes focuses on five points: how to have positive and healthy relationships, deep connections, coping skills, resilience and compassion.

Lewis believes we can see the end of these killings, if we teach every child how to cope with anger, how to be compassionate, and how to love.

Getting out of savagery and up to civilization is a simple but not easy process. We live in a fallen world, with too much evil. A lot will still go wrong. But we can start with ourselves, and with helping and encouraging those around us. The basics include those things that get us beyond our selfishness, the things we get from the Ten Commandments: honor God, life, family, property, and truth. A person who follows this path doesn’t plan and carry out savage atrocities.

During the LDS General Conference last weekend, Elder M.Russell Ballard said this:

We need to embrace God’s children compassionately and eliminate any prejudice, including racism, sexism, and nationalism. Let it be said that we truly believe the blessings of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ are for every child of God.

I testify that “the trek continues,” and I invite you to stay on the gospel path as you continue pressing forward by reaching out to all of God’s children in love and compassion, that we may unitedly make our hearts pure and our hands clean to receive the “multiplicity of blessings” awaiting all who truly love our Heavenly Father and His Beloved Son.

Good and Evil Are Both Real

Darkness is the absence of light. Evil is the absence of good. If good exists, then evil also exists wherever there is not enough good.

Late last night a man took aim from a 32^nd story window in Las Vegas, shooting into a crowd of concert goers, killing 50 or more, injuring hundreds, maybe as many as 500 (estimates are still fluctuating). The perpetrator killed himself as a SWAT team entered his hotel room. Multiple rifles were found. Video footage from people in the crowd sounds like machine-gun fire; i.e., fully automatic weaponry, which is not available for sale. Eventually information should come out about where the murderer was able to obtain such weapons.

Image from BBC News

This was an act of terrorism. It was designed to kill as many innocents as possible. While ISIS claimed credit, there is no evidence of any connection, so that seems unlikely at this time. We don’t know if we will uncover a motive for such an evil act. What we do know is that murdering innocents is evil.

Graphic from BBC News

This morning, while covering this atrocity, Ben Shapiro was talking about evil. He referred to a book:  Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence, by Roy F. Baumeister. In this book, the author talks about four types of evil, or motivations to do violence (I’m summarizing from Ben Shapiro’s explanation):

·         Instrumental: This is the idea that you have an object in mind, and you don’t care what means are used in order to gain that end. You want money; you don’t care that it’s not your money; you go to the bank and rob it, and if don’t care if you shoot somebody in the process. That is instrumental evil. Violence is just an instrument you’re willing to use to get what you want.

·         Ego-driven: Quoting Baumeister, “Violence is perpetrated by a subset of people who think well of themselves. And indeed it mainly occurs when they believe that their favorable images of self have been threatened or attacked.” This is what we’re seeing on college campuses where protesters commit actual violence because they think someone might say words they find offensive. They even call speech that disagrees with their views violence, to justify actual violence against those who disagree.

·         Ideological: This is the people who believe, for example, that communism justifies the murder of a hundred million people, because you’re creating utopia. If people would just succumb to your vision, they wouldn’t need to be wiped out of your way. It’s also what we see with Islamic terrorism, although that can also come under instrumental or ego-driven evil.

·         Sadistic: This is the idea that you enjoy violence, that you grew up from a kid who tortured puppies, and now you go out and you murder human beings.

Often we think of evil in that fourth category. Evil seems inexplicable. The Las Vegas shooting might turn out to be in that category. But this type is actually the least common.

Sadism requires a mind that has released a person from sensing guilt, allowing unfettered “enjoyment” of inflicting pain. Most of us aren’t likely to embody this type of evil. It’s rare, because most of us feel guilt when we do wrong; guilt, or conscience, stops us from committing evil. Shapiro also says it’s the only one of the four types we can profile against.

The other three are evils all of us mostly sane people are susceptible to. And the only solution to these first three types of evil--the only way to civilization--is moral education. We need to learn that the only justification for violence against human beings is self-defense.

Moral education teaches you that your desire for money, or some treasure, or some outcome must be subordinate to the safety of fellow human beings.

Moral education teaches you that your concerns about your identity, or your beliefs, are not that important. Disagreement isn’t an attack. As Shapiro says, “We have to stop feeling offended when we are disagreed with politically. We have to stop attributing evil motives to people who disagree with us, because then we’re more likely to become evil ourselves.”

Moral education teaches that your ideology isn’t worth killing people for. You want communism? Go to someplace people have already chosen that, or set up your commune on a private island somewhere. Don’t impose it by force on anyone. You want Sharia law? There are places you can live under that law; go there. You want your ideologies to win? Try expressing your reasons in a persuasive way. Imposing your ideologies on others is tyranny, and tyranny is evil.

We’re seeing evil in people’s reactions to the atrocity.

CBS legal executive Hayley Geftman-Gold tweeted that she felt no sympathy for the victims. Calling them “Repugs,” she said, “I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans are often republican gun toters.” That’s evil. I don’t know whether you’d categorize it as ego-driven or ideological, or some combination. It was recognized as unacceptable, and she was fired for her comments. This person didn’t commit the atrocity, but she thinks people she judges as inferior (because country music = non-Democrat voter) are therefore worthy of being mowed down by machine gun. That way of thinking is evil. And evil thought comes before evil action.

Hillary Clinton and Tom Brokaw both claimed that the shooting was because of gun sales, which should therefore be denied to sane, law-abiding US citizens, since the shooter used guns that were ILLEGAL ALREADY. In fact, legal automatic weapons have been used in a total of three crimes since 1934. And atheist Richard Dawkins mocked, in a tweet, “Durn tootin’, great shootin’. Cool dude sertin’ he’s 2nd Mendment rahts. Hell yeah! / Every country has its psychopaths. In US they have guns.”  In other words, they used this sadistic violence to support their political ideology. While that is clearly multiple steps less evil than committing mass murder, it is using the murder—as though it is a good thing, because we should “never let a crisis go to waste.”

Not related to this incident, but while the rains were still coming down following Hurricane Harvey, a Florida sociology professor tweeted that the people of Texas deserved the death and destruction because they are evil GOP voters. (Note to the professor: Harris County, where the majority of flooding happened, went for Hillary Clinton.) He added later that Floridians who voted for Trump deserved any disaster that Hurricane Irma inflicted. That’s hate speech. It reveals that he thinks people’s lives are worthless if they do not agree with his politics. The professor did, by the way, get fired.

What do good people do when they see others going through tragic circumstances? They send love, prayers, and help—just like you saw in Houston following Hurricane Harvey. Here’s a suggestion of how to help the suffering in Las Vegas. And this:

What do evil people do when they see others going through tragic circumstances? Decide whether or not the sufferers are people they hate, and if so rejoice in their suffering. If there’s room in your heart for that much darkness/evil, you really need to fill yourself with more light/goodness.

Ben Shapiro concluded:

All I would suggest for everybody is that we focus in on how we cleanse our own hearts of the tendency to do evil things, how we look at the world. And that we think a little bit more about the fact that we’re all brothers and sisters in this fight against evil people. And we really need to focus together on how we can make our country a better place across the board without tearing each other apart over simple political disagreements.

The how-to for cleansing our hearts of the tendency to do evil would fill another entire post. But for now, let me suggest some of the goodness I filled my life with this past weekend. It was the semi-annual General Conference for my church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with hours of one good, uplifting talk after another. Here are a couple that share the good:

·         Jean B. Bingham, General President of the Relief Society

·         Elder W. Craig Zwick, of the Quorum of the Seventy

The Usual Suspects

Tragedy struck again yesterday. It happened at a Christmas party at Inland Regional Center, a social services center for the developmentally disabled, in San Bernardino, California. Fourteen were killed, and an additional seventeen were injured, including a police officer (numbers may change as further reports come out).

Inland Regional Center, site of the tragedy
photo credit KTTV via AP

The details are available in multiple news reports, and more information will continue to come out. But when something like this happens, logic and experience tell us it is likely one of two things: an insane individual (usually male, loner, and known—or should have been known—to be insane and possibly dangerous), or Islamist terrorists.

A couple of other possibilities also come to mind: drug cartel violence or gang violence. In fact, inner city black-on-black gang violence is so common (more killed and injured in Chicago inner city over the weekend than in yesterday's slaughter) that it ceases to be news. There was also a shooting spree in New Orleans on November 22; 17 were injured (no deaths, at least by the time of the story I read). Almost no news about it.

This one was radical Islamist terrorism. In this case, the suspects, who were killed in a shootout with police later in the day, were not as easily identifiable as some. The male, Syed Rizwan Farook, age 28, was a US citizen, a graduate of a local high school. He attended local mosques, was known as mild mannered, and fellow Muslims were unaware of his Islamist radicalism. He worked as a food inspector.

The other perpetrator was female—his wife, Tashfeen Malik, age 27. He went to Saudi Arabia a year or more ago (reports vary—maybe just last spring), during Hajj, and had plans to marry her there. Some reports say they had a baby. I have not seen reports of where the baby was during their attack, and where the child is after the death of its parents. For the child’s sake, it may be better that we don’t learn that from media. But curiosity leads to some questions: was someone else notified of the parents’ plans? Did a childcare provider have anything to do with the planning?

Explosives, AK-47s, pipe bombs, as well as other weapons are reportedly part of the incident, including the makings of maybe a dozen pipe bombs and/or IEDs in the couple’s garage. Neighbors of Farook report seeing Middle Eastern men delivering large boxes to the garage, where police found the explosive materials. Neighbors hadn’t reported suspicious activity, however, for fear of appearing racist. When the perpetrators were apprehended in the vehicle, police were cautious about possible explosives being rigged in their SUV.

The couple wore assault-style clothing and gear (may have included body armor). It should go without saying, but one doesn’t accumulate assault gear and explosives on the odd chance that an argument might come up at a workplace. Clearly it was a planned event. The particular target may have been a spontaneous decision, but they appear to have been preparing for such an attack for some time.

The news reports, and details coming from police and FBI officials throughout the afternoon and early evening, refused to say what they knew about the perpetrators—that they were Islamist terrorists. There may have been some tactical reason for keeping that information from the public. But it makes us in the public wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to be honest with us, so we can keep a lookout for additional danger.

San Bernardino Chief of Police Jarrod Berguan
at a news conference following the attack
photo credit KTTV via AP

A couple of essential questions come up. Why would anyone do such a thing? And how do we identify people who would do such a thing?

I can’t say why someone would become a radicalized Islamist. I am guessing it has something to do with wanting meaning in life while also wanting control over anyone who isn’t part of the meaning-granting ideology.

The question of how we identify people who would do an Islamist terrorist attack grows increasingly challenging, especially if we don’t want the dragnet to sweep up many innocents. But we can start with the stereotypes:

Muslim. That should go without saying, because no Islamist terrorist isn’t Islamist, which is an ideology within or attached to Islam. The questions should, therefore, include belief. But if the people who attend at the same mosques can’t identify the radicals, that is definitely problematic.

Middle Eastern heritage, or possibly Pakistani (Farook was from a Pakistani family). Although black American Muslims (a good number of whom are converted/recruited in prison) and black African Muslims might also be among the suspicious. And occasionally even white Americans have been recruited and radicalized. Still, Middle Eastern Muslim is the most likely radical Islamist.

Male. Probably between age 16-45. But because that is the stereotype, radicals are learning to push the envelope, including women, children, and older men. The second perpetrator in this attack was a woman, with a child. Which adds to the difficulty of identifying the radicals. Still, those radicals beyond the stereotype are probably attached to someone within the stereotype.

We also don’t know what changes a regular Muslim into a radicalized Islamist (defined as enforcing Islam as the only power in the world, subjugating or killing all others, including moderate Muslims). Farook was born and raised in America. He had all the benefits of other citizens. The mosques where he worshipped, at least according to what we know so far, are made up of people who are horrified by his terrorist attack.

What we need is an omniscient way of reading minds, to clear the innocent and watch those who are wavering or turning bad. That is a power God has, but that I do not trust government officials to do. So, we need government, which we have tasked with the responsibility of our protection, to be diligent in noticing patterns, listening to sources, and following those with suspicious connections and suspicious behaviors.

What we do not need is a government that fails to admit that radical Islamist terrorism exists—anywhere in the world, but especially not on our shores. We do not need a government that uses the tragedy to assert power over innocent American citizens, claiming that we just need stricter gun laws.

Does it even need to be pointed out that AK-47s and pipe bombs are already against the law in California, which has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. Because reports are still sketchy, maybe we can’t be certain AK-47s were involved, but any fully automatic rifle (machine gun) and most semi-automatic weapons are illegal in California.

Here is what the president said in his response to the attack: "We're going to have to, I think, search ourselves as a society to make sure that we can take basic steps that would make it harder—not impossible, but harder--for individuals to get access to weapons.”

So let me rephrase what our president is saying: Even though the right to bear arms has been greatly infringed already, especially where this attack just happened, we are sure that further infringing on those rights for law-abiding citizens will make people safer from the lawless killers who use already outlawed weapons to kill innocent people.

In looking at things through the Spherical Model lens, we can see that radical Islamist terrorism is savage. It is deep down in the southern hemisphere where you find tyranny and savagery, and in the southwest quadrant of chaos. Tyranny intended to control politically, as Islamists intend, is in the southeast quadrant of statist oppression, so they are offering up a choice: continued terrorist attacks until you submit to tyrannical rule.

There may be, at least for now, a difference of depth, but tyranny that infringes on innocent citizens’ right to protect themselves is also southeastern statist tyranny. For those who only see the southern hemisphere, offering relief from the chaos is a common response of those vying for power.

But the better way to get away from both chaotic and statist tyrannies is to move north to the freedom that guarantees God-given rights of life, liberty and property. It takes a civilized, self-governing people—religious people with strong families—to get there and stay there. The northern hemisphere ideas beat every flavor of tyranny every time.

Gun Non-Violence

As one who loves our Constitution, I have strong feelings in favor of the 2^nd Amendment. I don’t write about that issue very often, because there are many others who are more clearly laying out the issue than I can. But the onslaught since last month, along with the president’s unprecedented 23 executive order yesterday, merit some comment.

Here are the two main points:

·       The main purpose of the 2^nd Amendment is to guarantee the God-given right for individuals to protect themselves against attack—from any (Spherical Model) southern hemisphere attacker, either from the chaos side, as criminals are, or from the state tyranny side, either foreign or domestic.

·       The only purpose of an executive order is to direct federal employees in the manner in which they will enforce duly legislated laws; the executive branch does not have power to make laws for individual or all Americans.

One of the best things I’ve read in the past month is a 13-part essay by my Facebook friend Shawn Rogers. He does have a blog, with a small part there: www.sbrogerstx.blogspot.com. But to get the full essay, you’ll need to “friend” him and start reading in the last half of December 2012. One article he recommends a piece by Larry Correia, from December 20, 2012, called “An Opinion on Gun Control.” It’s a very long but worthwhile piece (18 pages, about 10,000 words). This part comes after you’ve scrolled down a ways (links are from original):

It doesn’t really make sense to ban guns, because in reality what that means is that you are actually banning effective self-defense. Despite the constant hammering by a news media with an agenda, guns are used in America far more to stop crime than to cause crime.

I’ve seen several different sets of numbers about how many times guns are used in self-defense every year. The problem with keeping track of this stat is that the vast majority of the time when a gun is produced in a legal self-defense situation no shots are fired. The mere presence of the gun is enough to cause the criminal to stop….

So how often are guns actually used in self-defense in America? http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

On the high side the estimate runs around 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year, which dwarfs our approximately 16,000 homicides in any recent year, only 10k of which are with guns. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm Of those with guns, only a couple hundred are with rifles. So basically, the guns that the anti-gunners are the most spun up about only account for a tiny fraction of all our murders.

But let’s not go with the high estimate. Let’s go with some smaller ones instead. Let’s use the far more conservative 800,000 number which is arrived at in multiple studies. That still dwarfs the number of illegal shootings. Heck, let’s even run with the number once put out by the people who want to ban guns, the Brady Center, which was still around 108,000, which still is an awesome ratio of good vs. bad.

So even if you use the worst number provided by people who are just as biased as me but in the opposite direction, gun use is a huge net positive. Or to put it another way, the Brady Center hates guns so much that they are totally cool with the population of a decent sized city getting raped and murdered every year as collateral damage in order to get what they want.

Unlike the DOJ (I’m referring to the Fast and Furious debacle), I am in favor of keeping guns—of any kind that will shoot even a single bullet—out of the hands of violent criminals. That is already the law. So it’s puzzling why it would take four full years before this president finally mentions to his employees that they should enforce that law.

I am also in favor of keeping guns out of the hands of the criminally insane, even if they haven’t yet committed a violent crime. But doctors are not employees or agents of the federal government, and any directive to them is an overreach. And, as with all power overreaching, the unintended consequences bring about almost exactly the opposite of the stated intended result. If people thank that simply going for treatment for a mental illness, either for themselves or for a family member, could result in forfeiting their 2^nd Amendment rights, that discourages people from seeking treatment, resulting in more untreated mentally ill.

While I appreciate having a criminal data base, so that background checks can be quick and thorough, I am against any federal database identifying law-abiding citizens who own guns. There is no Constitutional reason for such a database, but it does hold the potential of laying the groundwork for the federal government to move ahead with an incremental encroachment on our civil liberties.

I appreciate the Texas response to the president’s overreach, pointing out the hypocrisy. I also appreciated the Wyoming response, to arrest any federal agent who attempts to enforce federal gun laws in that state. A growing number of states have responded that they will nullify any attempt by the federal government to infringe on the 2^nd Amendment rights of citizens within their states. In addition, various US Congressmen, such as Rand Paul, are putting forth legislation to nullify those 23 executive orders, defund them, and press the Senate to file a court challenge to them.

Standing up against tyranny is exactly what the 2^nd Amendment is about, so that’s what I like to see.

That being said, one of the interesting things I came across this week was Glenn Beck’s suggestion on Monday that there is a better way of standing up against tyranny than shooting any federal agent that shows up to take your guns. Resist, but don’t attack. (The full video clip is below.) I’m reminded that Ghandi spent a number of years in prison, when the government was in the wrong to put him there. It may be that, before Americans have a moral right to violently respond, a number must first be willing to say no, stand firm, and suffer even wrongful incarceration, to prove the wrongfulness of the tyranny—which is something best thought of in the calmness of theory before any of us must face it in reality.