The Problem with Freedom
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."--John Adams
During the Obama Administration, I created a Social Media meme that read, "The Second Amendment--Protecting the Other Nine Since 1791." This is really the truth--an armed populace is essential not only for the individual defense of the individual members but for the corporate defense of the whole. A friend of mine whose uncle was a high-ranking military official during World War II has told me that the Japanese did not attempt a ground invasion after their strike at Pearl Harbor because Americans were so heavily armed. History, especially the history of the 20th century, is full of examples of foreign invasions and of internal communist take-overs that involved the slaughter of unarmed populations. Tyranny begins with disarmament.
Since the completely senseless, tragic shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, there are many new calls for gun control. From the Twitter campaign to #BoycotttheNRA to the bill introduced yesterday to ban assault weapons, we are hearing once again that the problem in our country is too many guns in the hands of too many unstable people. Maybe we can stop these shooting by banning automatic weapons, or bump stocks or increasing background checks or waiting periods or at least by raising the minimum age to purchase these guns. On the other side, gun advocates claim that we need better treatment for mental illness or more armed guards.
I do not believe gun control will fix any of the issues we are facing--I DO believe that ending gun-free zones could help with the problem of shootings in schools but the issue there is that the teachers would have to be the ones to take responsibility for carrying these weapons and for training on them and for many that is not going to be practical. Personally, I would not want to be responsible for protecting everyone at my workplace with a gun. Teaching attracts, on the whole, liberal people who support big government at the expense of personal freedom. Certainly not all, but many, teachers believe that more government is the answer to problems. On top of that, we have created an environment in schools over the last forty years where teachers have been stripped of personal authority to deal with discipline problems or manage troubled students. It seems a little naïve to now ask teachers to be responsible for the personal safety of the class by arming themselves, training on weapons and shooting assailants when we have spent four decades creating a culture of non-confrontation in our schools.
The real problem in this country is neither guns nor lack of gun control. The real problem is that our free republic, as John Adams said so eloquently in the above quote, was created for a moral and religious people. Freedom requires individual responsibility and individual morality and as a society we have lost both. When we decided as a culture that we did not want to be "One Nation Under God" and that we did not want the Ten Commandments telling us "Thou Shalt Not Kill" we were sowing the seeds of the crisis we face today. We abandoned a Judeo-Christian culture with an absolute sense of right and wrong for a Secular Humanist culture with a relative sense of morality and told several generations "if it feels good, do it." Unfortunately, to some people mass murder feels good. Our Constitutional Republic with its protections for individual rights is "wholly inadequate" to govern people with no personal sense of morality who don't know right from wrong.
Banning guns, ironically, will not solve the issue of mass-murder. People who want to murder others will still find weapons and will still kill people. Gun control just disarms their potential victims and gives them more targets. But a godless society that relies more and more on the government is going to trade more freedom away to that government so that they don't have to be responsible for themselves. And as that happens, our country is lost.
For the present, I think the majority of Americans still support gun rights and the NRA is still a force to be reckoned with. And that is a GOOD thing because the Second Amendment Does still defend the other nine. But the society is rapidly becoming less moral and less religious rather than more so. Among, Millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000) only 40% say that religion is an important part of their lives and only 27% believe that the Bible is literally true. And this group will represent 40% of voters by 2020. Millennials are the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers, and they are neither moral nor religious.
If we as Americans do not return to our Christian heritage our Second Amendment freedoms and the other nine it protects will all be lost to a new generation that does not value them. We need to pray for our nation more than ever and take seriously the other warning of John Adams: "A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever."
Alexandra Swann's novel W: The Set , incorporates her novels The Planner and The Chosen which tell the story of an out-of-control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21 and NDAA. The set is available on Kindle. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net .
During the Obama Administration, I created a Social Media meme that read, "The Second Amendment--Protecting the Other Nine Since 1791." This is really the truth--an armed populace is essential not only for the individual defense of the individual members but for the corporate defense of the whole. A friend of mine whose uncle was a high-ranking military official during World War II has told me that the Japanese did not attempt a ground invasion after their strike at Pearl Harbor because Americans were so heavily armed. History, especially the history of the 20th century, is full of examples of foreign invasions and of internal communist take-overs that involved the slaughter of unarmed populations. Tyranny begins with disarmament.
Since the completely senseless, tragic shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, there are many new calls for gun control. From the Twitter campaign to #BoycotttheNRA to the bill introduced yesterday to ban assault weapons, we are hearing once again that the problem in our country is too many guns in the hands of too many unstable people. Maybe we can stop these shooting by banning automatic weapons, or bump stocks or increasing background checks or waiting periods or at least by raising the minimum age to purchase these guns. On the other side, gun advocates claim that we need better treatment for mental illness or more armed guards.
I do not believe gun control will fix any of the issues we are facing--I DO believe that ending gun-free zones could help with the problem of shootings in schools but the issue there is that the teachers would have to be the ones to take responsibility for carrying these weapons and for training on them and for many that is not going to be practical. Personally, I would not want to be responsible for protecting everyone at my workplace with a gun. Teaching attracts, on the whole, liberal people who support big government at the expense of personal freedom. Certainly not all, but many, teachers believe that more government is the answer to problems. On top of that, we have created an environment in schools over the last forty years where teachers have been stripped of personal authority to deal with discipline problems or manage troubled students. It seems a little naïve to now ask teachers to be responsible for the personal safety of the class by arming themselves, training on weapons and shooting assailants when we have spent four decades creating a culture of non-confrontation in our schools.
The real problem in this country is neither guns nor lack of gun control. The real problem is that our free republic, as John Adams said so eloquently in the above quote, was created for a moral and religious people. Freedom requires individual responsibility and individual morality and as a society we have lost both. When we decided as a culture that we did not want to be "One Nation Under God" and that we did not want the Ten Commandments telling us "Thou Shalt Not Kill" we were sowing the seeds of the crisis we face today. We abandoned a Judeo-Christian culture with an absolute sense of right and wrong for a Secular Humanist culture with a relative sense of morality and told several generations "if it feels good, do it." Unfortunately, to some people mass murder feels good. Our Constitutional Republic with its protections for individual rights is "wholly inadequate" to govern people with no personal sense of morality who don't know right from wrong.
Banning guns, ironically, will not solve the issue of mass-murder. People who want to murder others will still find weapons and will still kill people. Gun control just disarms their potential victims and gives them more targets. But a godless society that relies more and more on the government is going to trade more freedom away to that government so that they don't have to be responsible for themselves. And as that happens, our country is lost.
For the present, I think the majority of Americans still support gun rights and the NRA is still a force to be reckoned with. And that is a GOOD thing because the Second Amendment Does still defend the other nine. But the society is rapidly becoming less moral and less religious rather than more so. Among, Millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000) only 40% say that religion is an important part of their lives and only 27% believe that the Bible is literally true. And this group will represent 40% of voters by 2020. Millennials are the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers, and they are neither moral nor religious.
If we as Americans do not return to our Christian heritage our Second Amendment freedoms and the other nine it protects will all be lost to a new generation that does not value them. We need to pray for our nation more than ever and take seriously the other warning of John Adams: "A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever."
Alexandra Swann's novel W: The Set , incorporates her novels The Planner and The Chosen which tell the story of an out-of-control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21 and NDAA. The set is available on Kindle. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net .
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This is a great blog. Our society has blurred the lines between reality and fantasy until kids no longer understand the world around them. And our culture has cheapened human life to the point where it no longer matters.It's very sad.
Thanks for sharing your insights.
"So long as the young generation is, and continues to be, well brought up, our ship of state will have a fair voyage; otherwise the consequences are better left unspoken.”—Plato, LawsWhen a civilisation declines, it has stopped getting stronger and cleverer, but has started to become sillier and weaker; it has gone into reverse. This waning is the result of a reversal in the nature of authority; instead of authority ruling its charges, its charges rule authority. A change in authority only won by a rebellion when power is forcibly wrested from the traditional rulers and placed in the hands of the agents of ‘the occasional will of the people’—Democracy. An act which Toynbee noted in his work ‘A Study Of History’ as a class war and the inevitable signal of the start of the decline of a civilisation.
Decline is inevitable because the reversal of authority has an immediate and crucial impact on the process by which a community constantly renews itself: the way it rears its children. Then, instead of parental authority demanding obedience and respect, so sensibly teaching that community needs are more important than private wants (sanity), it is ruled by childrenʼs wants, so insensibly teaching that private wants are more important than communityʼs needs (insanity). With the inevitable increasing lunacy of offspring, as advertised by schools and law courts, eventually winning social collapse.
Therefore, The study of our decline will continue.
May God have mercy on America.
“One can argue, and some have, that the decision by the Supreme Court – in a series of three decisions back in 1962 and 1963 – to remove Bible and prayer from our public schools, may be the most spiritually significant event in our nation’s history over the course of the last 55 years,” Jeynes said.On June 25, 1962, the United States Supreme Court decided in Engel v. Vitale that a prayer approved by the New York Board of Regents for use in schools violated the First Amendment because it represented establishment of religion. In 1963, in Abington School District v. Schempp, the court decided against Bible readings in public schools along the same lines.
Since 1963, Jeynes said there have been five negative developments in the nation’s public schools:
• Academic achievement has plummeted, including SAT scores.
• Increased rate of out-of-wedlock births
• Increase in illegal drug use
• Increase in juvenile crime
• Deterioration of school behavior
“So we need to realize that these actions do have consequences,” said Jeynes, professor at California State College in Long Beach and senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J., “When we remove that moral fiber -- that moral emphasis – this is what can result.”
1950’s; I was in grade school. My heroes were Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and the Lone Ranger. These were the toughest, bravest men in history. They maintained peace on the wild frontier primarily bare-handed. There would be wild brawls with broken chairs and collapsed tables. In the end, they subdued the miscreants without so much as causing a bloody nose. Occasionally, gunplay was required. These were the fastest, straightest shooters ever. They could whip their gun out, shoot from the hip, and hit the evil doer’s gun, knocking it to the ground without any injury to the opponent. In school we boys fought by pushing and shoving, mostly. We used cap guns when necessary, and wounds to the opponent were based upon the honor system. “Bang, I got you.” “Nuh uh, you missed.”
In the 1960’s, I was in high school. There was an increase in Hollywood violence on TV. Matt Dillon (US Marshal) and Paladin (Hired Gun) came on in the late !950’s running into the 60’s; they were killers. They didn’t like it, and in fact, Dillon was more apt to whack someone up the side of their head with his gun if they drew on him when he was close enough. On the rare instances when they did kill, they would shoot for the abdomen avoiding spurting blood from the heart or brain and bone fragments splattered from the head. Back in those days, a shot to the abdomen did not bleed and was instantly fatal or death might prolog until the victim had a chance to make a last statement.
I will admit my dad’s significant gun collection and ammo were "safely" stored in the unlockable closet in his unlockable bedroom. I know this was also true with some of my acquaintances, maybe more than I realized. Gun control was pretty much unheard of – probably the price charged was the major form of control. As a result, there were far more guns per capita in the country than today.
Adults were pretty protective of the kids. In 1961, the first version of the song “Big Bad John” could not get released until the line, “At the bottom of this mine lies one hell of a man” was changed to, “At the bottom of this mine lies a big big Man.” Oddly enough, despite the abundance of readily available guns to children, no one I heard of ever took guns to school to kill anyone – and we watched the national news every night.
I have lived over 70 years in the United States. I know how kids used to be raised. It’s way different now. The entertainment world (Hollywood, movies, music, TV; internet, animated games, etc.) create the most graphic, realistic, violent, degrading, vicious, horrific, acts of the destruction of human life imaginable. The wall they put between this evilness and children is like Trump’s wall – imaginary at best. Often children hold mock guns, aim them, pull the triggers, and are rewarded by seeing a virtual human, not just killed, but blown to bits – in 3D; at their hand. And they get a good score for it. The human brain does not complete its development until in its twenties. To imagine some children exposed to that debased violence are not negatively impacted is stupidity. When confronted with the bullying, rejection, etc. that some unfortunate children encounter, they have that backup reaction securely implanted. This is also true for adults who grew up enmeshed with this crap. Many psychologists say that progressive actions in schools intended to effeminize boys to reduce natural aggressiveness create an emotional confusion which, in some boys, results in extreme aggression.
When a Congressman was shot over a year ago, the congressional progressives belched their anti-gun distraction from their mouths. What did they actually do on paper? They immediately increased their security. Congressmen are safer – because of the anti-gun rhetoric? HELL NO!! Right after Columbine was the time for progressive congressmen & women to put aside their dreams of disarming America and do for school children what they quickly do for themselves. I submit that dead children are what they need to further their gun agenda. They don’t kill, they just refuse the security, which they demand for themselves, letting psychologically defective children and young adults do the killing for them. Now progressives have worked up the children to cry for more gun control. To use their immaturity, their fear, and their pain to force new laws that will absolutely not make them safer. I hear nothing from the progressives demanding security. Without doubt, deadly guns and ammunition were much more available to me and my friends back in the 1950’s and 60’s than today. Since then, a multitude of gun control laws have been passed and implemented; some of them I agree with. Now, AFTER those laws, the children are being killed. AFTER decades of steadily increasing exposure of children to violence, psychological experimentation, and removing moral guidelines, some of the children are killing children. Well, there is a lot of money being made by those who peddle virtual violence and a lot of votes going to progressive dunderheads. Oh, by the way, the NRA does not produce or participate in that crap.