In the last post I mentioned that last August, Virginia Tech student Bradford B. Wiles called on the University to allow students licensed to carry in VA to do so on campus. Last night I received a link to an article that appeared in the Roanoke Times on Jan. 31, 2006, regarding a bill in the VA legislature (HB 1572) that would have nullified "rules or regulations limiting or abridging the ability of a student who possesses a valid concealed handgun permit ... from lawfully carrying a concealed handgun" on public university campuses. The article quoted Virginia Tech spokesperson Larry Hincker as saying, "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."
The article continued: "Last spring a Virginia Tech student was disciplined for bringing a handgun to class, despite having a concealed handgun permit. Some gun owners questioned the university's authority, while the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police came out against the presence of guns on campus. In June, Tech's governing board approved a violence prevention policy reiterating its ban on students or employees carrying guns and prohibiting visitors from bringing them into campus facilities."
I hope this incident results in drastically lower enrollment for Virginia Tech. They deserve all the bad publicity they receive and more for their irresponsible policy of dependence on the state for basic security while preventing students from lawfully defending themselves.
Having demonstrated that restrictive gun laws encourage violent crime as long as criminals can find a way to obtain guns themselves, it may be instructive to inquire whether any other societal changes over the past fifty years show a similar correlation to violent crime rates. I would suggest three more shifts in our society's thinking that I believe contribute to the chilling frequency of brutal criminal acts as compared to a half-century ago.
The first: education. Children are spoiled as infants, tolerated as young children, and abandoned as soon as possible to the care of "professionals." From these all-powerful experts they learn that they are simply animals at the top of the food chain. They are stripped of any faith in a Higher Being and encouraged to consult their own feelings above every other consideration except the mandates of the state. These are held up to their reverence in almost a superstitious manner, as the modern substitute for the primitive moral ideas of their grandparents. But in spite of the distinct lack of any effort to develop their critical thinking skills, most young people manage to discern the emptiness of the state's claim to moral authority. This realization is presumably encouraged by the palpable hypocrisy apparent in the disconnect between the commands of the state and its actions.
This paradigm shift is directly related to the next: self-worship, or the shift from Christian moral standards to a self-oriented mentality. By this I do not mean that there are necessarily fewer Christians now than in the 1950's, but that American society as a whole has accepted the idea that the moral standards found in the Ten Commandments are not absolute. While humanists are quick to argue that their ethical codes have equal merit with God's law, their argument falls apart when one inquires into the consequences for violation of such codes. The flimsy argument that "our understanding of ethics has evolved to the point where we believe X to be the proper action in this situation," obviously has no inherent value to one who believes that his own pleasure is the highest law.
The third shift has the dubious distinction of being both the most obvious and the most hotly denied culprit: entertainment. The amount of violence and brutality absorbed by Americans today through visual entertainment would likely give Nero himself nightmares. Our society is so thoroughly sick that torture and raw violence are "enjoyed" by tens of millions of Americans every day. Hollywood producers vie with one another to push the limits of human blood-thirst further than any post-deluvian society has ever done, making even African cannibalism or Aztec rituals seem tame in comparison. The scenes that sent hundreds of shell-shocked young men reeling from the trenches in WWI and WWII seem like child's play compared to the daily diet of today's fantasy-obsessed video gamester. Even young children scampering through the toy store now find such stimulating and educational material as the Mad Scientist dissecting aliens or HE-MAN fighting the evil SKELETOR.
Combine such a vicious visual diet with many of today's musical lyrics and it cannot fail to be obvious to any thinking person where the modern killer cuts his teeth. And yet - even when the Columbine shooters flaunt death metal T-shirts as they gun down their fellow students; even when Cho Seung-Hui slaughters young and old indiscriminately while decked out like an action figure - Americans clamor for their Big Brother to save them from the bad guys via more control and micro-management of their daily lives while tenaciously embracing the very violence that is the inevitable judgement of God on their nation.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
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