Mourners look at a memorial for the victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, in a park in Parkland, Florida on February 16, 2018. A former student, Nikolas Cruz, opened fire at the Florida high school leaving 17 people dead and 15 injured. / AFP PHOTO / RHONA WISE
In light of the well-organized, well-funded, and unprecedented attacks on the Second Amendment and on its supporters in recent days, it seemed good to me to set down a few inconvenient truths relating to the right to bear arms and the causes of mass shootings
First, as the old saying goes, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” An article in the Huffington Post from last fall called this argument tired, logic-deficient, obvious and irrelevant, but it is nothing of the sort.
True, the argument has been around for a while. I remember it being used back in the day when I was a kid, but that doesn’t make it tired. In fact, it may be one of the most important truths to bring up in any discussion about the Second Amendment.
Guns are inanimate objects. They have now will of their own, no moral agency. In themselves, they are neither good nor evil. Guns are tools as are hammers, baseball bats and pickup trucks. And just as hammers, baseball bats and pickup trucks can be used for both good and evil, so too can guns.
Neither good nor evil reside in the gun, they reside in the heart of the person using the gun.
The Huffpo calls this point obvious. But is it? It’s fair to say that it should be obvious, but given the rush to restrict or outright ban gun ownership by certain groups following the school shooting in Parkland, FL, I’m not so sure it is.
If it were obvious, it should be equally obvious that stripping citizens of their right to bear arms is not the proper response to mass shootings. Yet the gun grabbers have never been more shrill in their demands to limit, or completely eliminate, Americans’ Constitutionally guaranteed right to own guns.
“There ought to be a law to banning ‘X’ to ensure that ‘Y’ never happens again,” on the other hand, really is a tired response to tragedy, but that doesn’t stop people from making the argument.
This leads to my second inconvenient truth: crime punishment, not crime prevention, is the proper approach to criminal justice.
Crime prevention punishes everyone in an attempt to keep crimes from happening. For an extreme example of this philosophy, think about the 2002 movie Minority Report. Set in the year 2054, the film depicted a conflict between a special police unit called PreCrime and a man who had been fingered by this unit as a future murderer.
Crime prevention is the philosophy of the regulatory state. The idea is to regulate – that is to say, punish – everyone in the hope of stopping future wrong doing. Crime prevention is the hallmark of the statist, not of those who love liberty. Certainly, it is not the philosophy of the Bible.
In the civil law of ancient Israel, there was no provision for a regulatory state. The law of Moses did detail the procedures for the investigation of crimes, set up due process for the accused, and set forth proper sentencing. That is to say, Israel’s civil law was clearly about crime punishment, not crime prevention.
And this leads me to my third inconvenient truth, the right of self defense. Many people, including many Christians, operate under the assumption that men have the right to self defense. This assumption is correct, but as Christians we must tie our understanding of self defense to Scripture. This is not hard to do.
In Exodus we find the following: “If the thief is found breaking in, and he is struck so that he dies, there shall be no guilt for his bloodshed. If the sun has risen on him, there shall be guilt for his bloodshed” (Exodus 22:2-3).
As one commentator noted, “Two basic principles taught in this text are the right to own private property and the right to defend that property.”
The Bible clearly teaches that under some circumstances there is no guilt in killing another. In Biblical times, this was referred to as the power of the sword. In our own time, guns have replaced swords as the primary means of self defense, but the principle is the same: men have the right to use force, deadly force if necessary, to defend their property and their persons.
Those who seek to restrict Second Amendment rights or eliminate altogether civilian access to firearms find themselves in opposition, not only to the constitution, but to Scripture as well.
Fourth, those who seek to prohibit private ownership of guns, knowingly or not, are on the side of tyranny. In his cheerily titled book Death by Government, political scientist R.J. Rummel puts the total number of people murdered by various governments during the 20th century at over 169 million.
One of the common threads connecting that century’s most murderous regimes was their opposition to gun ownership by their citizens. The Nazi regime in Germany, for example, “seized power and used the records [gun registration records compiled during the days of the Weimar Republic] to identify, disarm, and attack political opponents and Jews. Constitutional rights were suspended, and mass searches for and seizures of guns and dissident publications ensued” (Stephen P. Halbrook, “How the Nazis Used Gun Control,” The National Review, Dec. 2, 2013).
The goal of the Nazis was to disarm their opponents to make them easy targets.
There’s even an example of this sort of thing found in Scripture. When King Saul was fighting the Philistines, Israel found itself at a serious disadvantage due to lack of weaponry. “Now there was no blacksmith to be found throughout all the land of Israel, for the Philistines said, ‘Lest the Hebrews make swords or spears’…So it came about on the day of battle, that there was neither sword nor spear found in the hand of any of the people who were with Saul and Jonathan” (1 Samuel 13:19, 22).
Worth noting, also, is the lack of any prohibition in the law of Moses against private individuals owning swords. It was not the Mosaic law that caused Saul’s men to lack swords and spears, it was the tyranny of the Philistines.
Fifth, the inability, and even at times the incompetence, of government officials makes a strong case for private gun ownership.
Even the best-run police departments cannot be everywhere at once to protect law abiding citizens from criminal activity. This logically implies that private citizens have a right, and even the responsibility, to look after their own safety.
But even where police are present, there is no guarantee that they will act properly. Not long after the Parkland school shooting, it was reported in the media that an armed Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy stationed at the school remained outside while the massacre was taking place.
Within the past day, new reports have surfaced that there actually were multiple deputies present at the school during the shooting, all of whom failed to act to stop the attack.
Then there is the issue of the FBI’s failure to follow its own protocol after being warned well in advance that shooter Nikolas Cruz was a powder keg ready to explode.
The New York Times reports that on Nov. 30 an unidentified caller warned the FBI that Cruz, “could be a school shooter in the making.”
In fact, the FBI was warned several other times that Cruz was a ready to go off, yet did nothing. On Jan. 5, a woman called the FBI saying, “I know he’s going to explode,” and that he may go “into a school and just shooting the place up.”
In a transcript of the call released by the FBI, the concerned informant told the Bureau that Cruz stated on social media he wanted to kill people, used a large sum of inherited money to buy guns and ammunition, dressed up like an ISIS guy, and had pulled a rifle on his mother to get money.
Commenting on this, Ron Paul asked, “[H]ow is it possible that the FBI once again missed so many obvious clues that a violent person intent on causing massive harm to others was about to strike? Is the FBI actually this incompetent, or perhaps its focus was in other areas – like meddling in our own elections by presenting ‘evidence’ they knew was flawed to the FISA court to get permission to spy on the Trump campaign?”
A sixth inconvenient truth about mass shootings is that they often involve people on psychotropic drugs known as SSRIs. Continuing with his critique of the gun control narrative, Ron Paul noted, “Why does it always seem that the shooter in these mass killings has been on some kind of psychotropic drugs? As the New American magazine pointed out this week, at least ten high profile mass shootings have been committed by individuals who ‘were either on – or just recently coming off of – psychiatric medications.’ The young killer in Florida was no different. According to his aunt, he had been on these medications to treat mental problems.”
Why are no questions raised about the role of these drugs in mass shootings. Clearly psychotropic medication is a common thread connecting many mass shooting, yet the focus of the media is always on the guns, never on the meds.
A further question that can be asked is why were all of the institutions for the mentally insane closed. President Trump raised the very sensible point that mental institutions may help reduce mass shootings, an idea that was immediately dismissed by “the experts” as “ridiculous.” Clearly the only option is to disarm the public, an option which, of course, is never considered ridiculous.
A seventh inconvenient truth is that in some cases mass shooters may, in fact, be demon possessed or involved in Satanism in some way. Such a statement will be dismissed as foolish by secularists, but it seems to this author to explain the extreme evil demonstrated by these murderers.
Cruz is not the first mass shooter to report hearing voices. Just last year, NBC reported that Esteban Santiago, the man who killed 5 and wounded 8 in the Fort Lauderdale airport, “was being treated in Alaska after complaining of hearing voices.”
Aaron Alexis, the Washington Navy Yard shooter also claimed to hear voices in his head.
According to the Guardian, Columbine shooter Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, “shared the cheap thrills of the black occult with their predecessors who shot their classmates in Jonesboro, Arkansas.”
A CNN report from April 21, 1999, a day after the Columbine shootings, quotes a student describing Eris Harris in these words, “He’s big on that, they’re all big on that. They’re all big on anti-God, Satanism. They’re really just pure hate is the way the entire group is.
The report also notes that Harris had posted on the web, “a scribbled drawing with a Satan-like figure and features that seemed to portray violence.”
As far as the Jonesboro shooters goes, a quick web search reveals that the Jonesboro shooters, a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old, were part of a satanic cult.
One website I found quoted The Sunday Mail from March 19, 1998 thus, “The older of the two boys accused of having ambushed fellow students at an Arkansas school had a fascination with the occult, according to classmates. Mitchell Johnson, 13, apparently had discussed Satan with his classmates, according to a psychologist who counselled students after the killings.”
Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza is another case in point. As the Daily Mail reports, “The Sandy Hook gunman worshiped the devil and had an online page dedicated to Satan, a former classmate revealed.”
Doubtless, the sophisticated gun grabbers would howl with laughter at any suggestion that the devil made ’em do it. But Satan is real, and there is massive evidence that occultism is common thread behind many mass shootings.
But of course, the real problem is guns, the Second Amendment, and the deplorables who love them.
An eighth inconvenient truth about the Parkland shooting is that the corporate news media, rather than trying to report on the story honestly, appears bent on pushing a propaganda narrative calling for gun control.
One student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, JROTC cadet Colton Haab, claimed that he originally was asked to write a speech and questions for last week’s televised CNN town hall, but was later told that he would have to ask a question scripted for him. During an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show, Haab expressed his belief that the entire town hall event was scripted.
The father of another Parkland shooting survivor commented, “The producer [from CNN] insinuated to me they were looking for people who were willing to espouse a certain narrative which was taking a tragedy and turning it into a policy debate and I read that as being a gun control debate.”
If these claims are true – and from what I can tell, they appear to be consistent with the sort of narrative journalism known to be pushed by CNN and other mainstream media outlets – then once again the American people are being lied to – thought shaped is the word journalist Greg Hunter likes to use – by the very organizations that hold themselves out as purveyors of the truth.
Joining forces with the news media to push this narrative are our SJW corporate overlords, who could couldn’t wait to distance themselves from the NRA and American gun owners.
When it comes to mass shootings, all right thinking, respectable people just know that the root cause is guns. No other explanation is necessary; no other explanation is permitted. In this essay, I have attempted to lay out some of the reasons why this is not so.
Our Constitution has guaranteed Americans the God-given right to bear arms and to defend themselves, but there are many people in high places who don’t like that one bit. May God grant Christians in this nation to courage to stand up and speak the truth.
Lux Lucet 
Hi Steve,
Thx for your thoughts on this subject. I appreciate the arguments you used from Scripture to show that people there did have weapons.
I am confused though and have a few questions that have bugged me for a long time. I wonder if you have some thoughts on these? Thx.
1. Whilst one could argue that weapons were given in Scripture, one could also argue that Scripture removes the weapons in the NT. e.g. Jesus to Peter, “Put away your sword”. Was this not an incident for self-defence against an unruly mob, even if the mob was sent by the government? Yet Christ tells Peter to stop. And we don’t find Peter or the other disciples pulling out weapons later in the NT, even though they are attacked.
2. If guns are neutral, so is heroin or LSD. Heroin and LSD can sit quietly in a cupboard and not bother anybody. Yet we think it is a good law to stop people having heroin etc in their home.
3. Government is not just to punish evildoers, but also to protect their citizens from evildoers. We have police and armies for protection as much as to punish evildoers.
4. We think it’s OK to take a drug like paracetamol for a headache, but not LSD for depression. So a small weapon might be useful for self-defence, but do ordinary citizens need guns that can fire many times a second?
5. I do not know the circumstances of the writing of the Second Amendment. But is there any credence to the idea that the right to bear arms was due to the historical situation of having no police force or regular standing army to defend their citizens at that time? Or perhaps the citizens of the United States back then were too spread out for effective gov’t protection, so they were allowed private means of protection.
In Australia we did have one really bad massacre due to a lone gunman going crazy. It is referred to as the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania. It was in 1996. 35 people were killed and 23 injured in a restaurant. After that, very strict rules were brought in by the government restricting the private ownership of semi-automatic rifles, semi-automatic shotguns and pump-action shotguns as well as introducing strict uniform firearms licensing. We have not had such an incident in the last 20 years. I mention this because it seems to have made a difference. Criminals are still caught with these weapons occasionally, but they have not used them for mass murder.
Thx for taking the time to write about these issues Steve.
As an aside, regarding the use of drugs in these terrible situations. I remember reading a book over 35 years ago by Fred Catherwood (he was son-in-law to Martyn Lloyd-Jones). Catherwood used to be high up in British govt. committees. He said that there was an easy way to stop the drug trade. That was to close the banks down in the Caribbean by stopping large transactions with them. Without a way for the drug lords to launder their money, the drugs would stop overnight. But no Western government was prepared to do that. That was over 35 years ago. I don’t know if the same strategy would work today via the banking system. I guess it wouldn’t.
Hi John,
Thanks for your questions. I’ll take them in order.
1. Regarding weapons, you are correct that Jesus told Peter to put away his sword. Yet just a few hours earlier, Jesus told his disciples that he who was without a sword should sell his garment and buy one (Luke 22:36). So how do we reconcile these two statements? One suggestion that makes a lot of sense to me is the idea that, when speaking to Peter, it was under the circumstances of his being taken prisoner for the crucifixion. Peter sought to interfere with this through physical violence. Besides, Peter was not really acting in self defense. The priests had come for Jesus, not Peter.
2. I would argue that even LSD and Heroin are neutral. Opiods can be used as effective pain medication. Hemp can be used for many industrial products or smoked to get high. It all depends on what one wants to do with it.
3. I agree that government are to protect, but even the most competent police department cannot be there when someone breaks into your home in the middle of the night. In the time it takes them to arrive, you could be dead.
4. Regarding the types of weapons permitted, the Constitution nowhere addresses this. If we look at how this has been handled historically in the US, there was a time when you could order a fully automatic machine gun through the Sears & Roebuck catalog.
The most sensible explanation of the Second Amendment I’ve seen is that the idea was to grant citizens the right to have firearms equal to those of the armies of the day. At the time the Constitution was written, that was a flintlock musket. Today that would be a fully automatic weapon. That may sound extreme, but I think it’s logically defensible.
Am I saying we should all go out and by machine guns, go on a rampage and overthrow the government? No. But what I am saying in that the idea behind the Second Amendment was to allow citizens to be armed in a way that is comparable to the government. The Second Amendment speaks of a well regulated militia, which I understand to be a group of citizen soldiers who are responsible to a lesser government magistrate.
John Calvin is the one who developed the doctrine of the lesser magistrate, by which he meant that if governors at the top were acting unjustly, the lesser magistrate had the right, the duty even, to oppose them, by force if necessary. My understanding is that the framers of the Constitution understood the citizen soldier as playing a key part is helping the lesser magistrate carry out his duty.
5. Regarding the circumstances of the writing of the Second Amendment, I’ll quote the eminent Constitutional commentator Joseph Story, “One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offence to keep arms, and by substituting a regular army in the stead of a resort to the militia. The friends of free government cannot be too watchful, to overcome the dangerous tendency of the public mind to sacrifice, for the sake of mere private convenience, this powerful check upon the designs of ambitious men” (Joseph Story, A Familiar Exposition of The Constitution of the United States, 319).
Regarding the idea that the government allowed people private means of protection, strict Constitutionalists would argue that far from allowing people to defend themselves, the intention of the framers of the Constitution was to guarantee in writing rights that were given to men by God.
One other thing to think about is that even if the government succeeded in removing all guns from all private citizens, there still would be a gun problem: The government would have all the guns. As RJ Rummel discussed in his book Death by Government, the 20th century alone saw something like 169 million people murdered by government. And the biggest murderers were also regimes that disarmed their citizens.
That’s an interesting thought you brought up about Catherwood and the banks. I can’t say for sure if he was right or not.
My thought is that if you closed the banks in the Caribbean, others would take up the slack. For example the megabank HSBC was busted a few years ago for laundering billions of drug cartel money and they received a slap on the wrist https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213
Thx Steve. Very interesting. You make good points that I had not come across before.
I must admit that even though I had read about militias before, I had not realised their secondary purpose of keeping the people sharp about their own defence as the Story quote intimates. But today, would a local militia be more than “a bump in the road” for a regular army to overcome? Perhaps what we see in Syria at the moment is militias vs army, but I wonder if what the militias have achieved there has been worth it.
I have many more questions, but I wonder how you would tackle the problem of the mass killings that have occurred in the USA in recent years? Is it to make the death penalty mandatory for murderers? Would that at least go some way in stopping these kind of crimes?
Regarding the militias being effective against a better armed regular army, that’s an interesting question. My thought is that a militia doesn’t have to be able to go head to head with a regular army to serve as a deterrent. If all it does is to make the job of a tyrant harder and cause him to think twice about overstepping his bounds, that’s probably good enough.
As to mass murderers and the death penalty, we have capital punishment in the US. The shooter in Florida, Nikolas Cruz could be charged with capital murder https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/22/opinions/should-parkland-shooter-get-death-penalty-jackson/index.html
I’m not sure how much the death penalty deters mass shootings, because in many cases the shooter seems to go in with the intent of dying himself. There are exceptions, of course.
Nikolas Cruz, for example, was not suicidal.
When these mass shootings occur, I sometimes wonder what people in other countries think of Americans./ I suppose we come off looking like a bunch of crazies.
But back to your question about the deterrent effect of the death penalty, I do believe that in general it does reduce violent crime.
In economic terms, the more something costs, generally fewer people will take of it. That’s why there are more Toyotas and Chevrolets on the road than Mercedes or Rolls Royces.
Looked at from an economic standpoint, the death penalty raises the cost of murder to the potential criminal, so it stands to reason that you will have fewer murders in a with a death penalty than in its absence.
There was a period of time from the 1960s until the 1980s when the death penalty did not exist in the US. Unsurprisingly, the murder rate went up.
This may sound counterintuitive, but violent crime in the US has declined sharply over the past 25 years. Here’s one recent study showing this http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/30/5-facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/
I don’t want to suggest that the reintroduction of the death penalty is the sole cause of this decline, but I suspect that it is at least a factor.
Another factor contributing to the decline in violent crime likely is the increase in gun ownership among Americans. Thirty years ago, it was unheard of for people to carry concealed guns for self-defense. Now, almost every state in the union issues Concealed Carry permits. I have one from the state of Ohio.
The spread of Concealed Carry permits means that the bad guys never know if the person they’ve targeted has a gun. Once again, this raises the cost of crime to any potential thug.
Hi Steve,
Thx for your reply & the link to the Pew Research.
You wondered “When these mass shootings occur, I sometimes wonder what people in other countries think of Americans”.
I know in Australia we shake our heads, wondering why the gun laws are not changed to help with the immediate problem. But our population is very different than the US. We only have 25 million people and close to 40% of those are in just two cities, Sydney and Melbourne (5 million each).
There are certainly pockets of crime, but generally our laws and Police force deal with the situations quickly. There are tensions between rival groups that spill out into the streets occasionally, but again, it usually is dealt with by the police quickly and a week or two later it’s settled down again.
We don’t have any capital punishment and I do NOT think that is a good thing. It is against the Scriptures.
I don’t know, maybe some of the issues in the US are related to the population numbers vs other countries.
Anyway, it has been very informative to read your articles on the current situation in the US. Thankyou.