We Are All In God's Hands

 Over at Bearing Arms, Tom Knighton has a piece entitled The Atlantic Has a Piece Premised On Long-Debunked Argument for Gun Control. Gentle readers can read the Knighton's article for themselves, and can also read The Atlantic article. I want to write about the basic premise itself, that the idea that your neighbor has a gun makes you feel unsafe, and that this 'feeling' gives you the right to oppress your neighbor.

The "feeling" of being safe or unsafe is a matter of your internal emotions and is entirely unrelated to the actual environment that surrounds you. Some people feel unsafe if they step out of their home. We tend to call these people agoraphobic and treat them as needing help. Others may feel threatened by being in a wood where suspected wild creatures may attack them at any moment. In both cases, a more realistic evaluation of the surrounding environment, coupled with additional knowledge of how to cope in these surroundings would have made them feel safer.

I have been in a room with 100-150 concealed carriers and felt perfectly safe. This is because I know that before granting a concealed carry license, the state vets a person to some degree. At least they haven't committed a violent crime. But in all cases, the feeling of safety is an illusion. You cannot know when a disaster may strike. You may feel safe driving down the road until another vehicle causes an accident that leaves you paralyzed. You may feel safe in your home until a home invader kicks in the door and threatens you and your wife and children if you don't comply. As these examples show, one's feelings of safety or vulnerability are an illusion.  You may want to emphasize your vulnerability, but that way lies insanity. 

Recognizing that our feelings are a matter of internal emotions, and do not necessarily reflect reality, they do not make a good basis for public policy. Rather than make one more law, which the criminals won't follow anyway, take reasonable precautions, evaluate your surroundings as realistically as possible at all times, and realize that we are all in God's hands. His will be done.

The Fatal Flaw of 'In Common Use'

 Yesterday, at Ammoland David Codrea had a must read piece illustrating, and I think providing evidence of the truth of his belief that the "in common use" test used by the Heller court was basically flawed. You can view his article at Chinese Coil Gun Could Prove Fatal Flaw in 'Common Use' Argument.

“State-owned arms maker China South Industries Group (CSGC) has released footage of its electromagnetic coil gun,” Interesting Engineering claimed Sunday. “Allegedly capable of firing 3,000 rounds per minute, the prototype represents a major technical leap in portable directed-energy weaponry.”

...snip...

“This bullpup gun uses coins as bullets,” a two-year-old video accompanying the story explains. “It is totally legal because there is no gunpowder, and the output power is limited.”

That would even make it outside the purview of ATF. Clearly, whoever presumed “total” legality did not take into account the Democrat mania for citizen disarmament. And the output power can be increased. Let these things hit the market and watch how fast demands to “Close the rail gun loophole” translate into regulatory oversight and outright bans on civilian ownership. Except for the “Only Ones,” of course.

And what about the Second Amendment? They are arms, after all. This is where our “gun rights leaders” may have painted us into a corner, by seizing on the criteria of being “in common use at the time” as the standard to determine if a gun ban violates the Second Amendment. It was never intended as a popularity contest. Since no innovation ever begins “in common use,” a government with the power to do so can ban all new weapon developments from those they would rule, retaining them exclusively for itself. Remember the core purpose of the Second Amendment. To argue the Founders thought sending an outmatched yeomanry to their slaughter would be “necessary to the security of a free State” is insane.

I encourage gentle readers to read the entire article. The anti-gun cracktivists will argue that the founders never imagined rail guns and energy weapons when they penned the Second Amendment. But of course, they would have endorsed those things as being within the scope of the Second Amendment. Just as they couldn't imagine television and social media, but they would have endorsed those as being within the scope of the First Amendment. Codrea is correct that at some point, the SCOTUS will have to confront the real purpose of the Second Amendment and give it its due in protecting our fundamental rights, or else give up on the idea of America.

Is Power a Tool or an End in Itself? It Depends

Ted Noel has an article that is, in my opinion, must read, at the American Thinker today entitled Why the Left Worships Power? If gentle readers will read the article to the end, they will discover that Noel is drawing upon two books by the late Michael Heiser. I have read The Unseen Realm by Heiser. It is an excellent book that brings to life much that is taught at the seminaries, but that the Pastors don't teach their congregations. Essentially, the God of the Old Testament does not rule alone, but has a whole council of spiritual beings called elohim and sons of God.  But they do not partake of the essence of God.  Only the unique Son of God, Jesus, has that title.  Once you have read Heiser, it brings the entire Old Testament to life.  It also explains, not directly because Heiser isn't political, the reason the Left worships power above all.

We left my last essay with a conundrum. “What was my Irish Setter supposed to do when he caught the UPS truck?” Or in political terms, “What do the Democrats want to do with the power they are so ardently seeking to seize?” Even so great a thinker as historian Victor Davis Hanson admits to being a bit puzzled by this.

...snip...

The oldest manuscript we have of Deuteronomy 32:8-9, the Dead Sea Scrolls, points out that the division of humanity into warring tribes at the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) placed each of those tribes under the authority of individual rebellious elohim, celestial beings created by YHWH, the One True God.* Each of them chose to rebel in order to be, as described by Isaiah 14:13-14, “like the Most High,” on a throne “above the Most High.” In short, they gave up service to their exclusive higher purpose in exchange for a quarrelsome “Me, Me, Me” life.

This is the status of the modern left. Various constructions, such as the post-modern “my truth,” point out that the left has no Pole Star for service. At this point, please forgive me if I leave out your favorite example. There are simply too many. Every example has a single key element. The individual is supreme, and there are no exceptions. Any suggestion that the leftist must submit to any higher authority is met with violent opposition, or, in the face of irresistible enforcement, some form of psychological decompensation. We are all familiar with the leftist protester screaming at the sky.

The Left ultimately does not believe in God. If they did, they would say "Thy will be done," and because their will and God's were aligned, their will would be accomplished. But because they stand in rebellion to the One True God, their plans ultimately fail.

Ultimately, the faux power will fail. As YHWH says in Psalm 82:6-7 (quoted by Jesus in John 10:34), “I said, “You are gods, and all of you are sons of the Most High. Nevertheless, you will die like men, and fall like any one of the princes.” (Psa 82:6-7 NAS).

Will we be able to reclaim some of those who have fallen into the pit of depravity, or are they so fully committed to the evil elohim that they simply cannot allow themselves to leave the dark side? My crystal ball is cloudy, so for now, we must spare no effort to right the ship of state and, in the words of Herman Cain, “Save the saveable.”

Why Carry a Firearm

 Somewhere in the past I have several posts telling why I carry a handgun.  You are free to go looking for them if you like, but Mike McDaniel has a pretty comprehensive list at the American Thinker today entitled Why I carry a handgun, and you should too. McDaniel first offers up the usual reasons most of us have:

*Evil exists and may confront anyone at any time and any place.

*Evil exists to destroy all that is kind, good and loving.

*God exists and expects me to protect myself, those I love and those unable to protect themselves.

*Self-defense is a God-given, natural, unalienable right.

*The lives of the innocent—friend or stranger—are worth far more to me and to a just society than the lives of vicious criminals and terrorists.

*By carrying a handgun, I honor the foresight and wisdom of the Founders in writing the Second Amendment, which acknowledges, but does not create, the right to keep and bear arms.

*The Constitution does not bestow liberty; it restrains government from infringing on our liberties. Arms have always been necessary to remind government of that.

Not only does the amorphous term "evil" exist, but it is actually a person variously called "the ruler of this world, powers, and principalities."  Fortunately, Christ has sealed a lot of us through baptism, so that the Evil One cannot "possess" us, but it is human nature to listen to his calls, and some chose to act on those calls. We see it in the news all the time. These are enough reasons, but McDaniel has more specific reasons as well.

*A government that labels half of the nation “white supremacists,” “insurrectionists,” “domestic terrorists,” “racists” and sends federal law enforcement to spy on and harass parents objecting to the sexual and political indoctrination of their children makes plain the wisdom of the Founders in writing the First and Second amendments.

*So does a government that throws open our borders, admitting known terrorists, violent criminals the diseased and criminally insane.

*It demonstrates, as nothing else can, that I am the master of my government not its slave, that elected officials work for me and only with my continuing consent.

*It reminds politicians every iota of power they possess is on temporary loan from me and every other American on condition of good, lawful behavior. They hate that.

*I am a free man, and no evidence of that fact is more meaningful and convincing than that I own and carry the firearms I prefer.

McDaniel here offers a powerful list of reasons that he carries a firearm and thinks you and I should too. The one that struck me, again, was one I have stated in the past. The government that does not trust its citizens with a firearm is not to be trusted. One thing I will add to McDaniel's list is that, though evil exists, and one must always be prepared to defend oneself, one must also pray to never need to fire that weapon at another human being.

The Left's Evil Plan

Over at Townhall.com today, Kevin McCollough has an article entitled Why the Left Fears Birthrates. Of course, the Left doesn't fear birthrates per se, but rather fears Americans who have large families. They view immigrants comming into our country from third world hellholes as somehow more easily persuaded to the Democrat/socialist/Communist/Marxist party line. Does this mean that the Leftists may be a bit racist? That is for you to decide.

Hillary Clinton—perpetual candidate, bitter scold, and queen of projection—finally said the quiet part out loud again this week: she doesn’t like it when Americans have more children. Especially not when those children are born into households where parents love God, cherish life, and might—gasp—vote differently than she does. Her latest broadside came during a public discussion at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, where she scoffed at the idea of encouraging higher U.S. birthrates and instead suggested, “That’s why we have immigrants.”

Let that sink in.

In Clinton’s view, building families from within—through childbirth, parenting, and faith—is antiquated and unnecessary. Just import replacements. That’s her worldview: don’t raise your own kids, we’ll bus in a more politically useful class of future voters instead.

...snip...

But who is she to criticize larger families, anyway? She raised one child—amid tremendous privilege, global influence, and the fawning protection of media elites. Meanwhile, millions of American families, some with five, six, even eight or more children, raise their kids with love, sacrifice, and conviction, often in conditions far less favorable. In coastal elite circles, large families are derided as backward or hyper-religious. But in truth, they are America’s best and most vital asset: units of resilience, character, and continuity.

It’s not the size of the family that Hillary and the Left fear—it’s what those families represent.

Let’s not pretend the modern Left even values childbirth. They cheer abortion like it’s a sacrament. They craft laws allowing for the dismemberment of children in the womb up to the moment of delivery. They mask death in euphemisms like “choice” or “reproductive justice.” Clinton herself is the face of this culture—a high priestess of abortion-on-demand who campaigned with Planned Parenthood like it was a cabinet post.

And if a child does make it out of the womb?

Well, then the Left shifts gears: separate the kids from their parents as fast as possible. Not at the border—but in the schools. From age 3, they want to hand your child over to state institutions. Public schools—overseen by unelected bureaucrats and ideological activists—are the new reeducation centers. Parents’ values? Irrelevant. Faith? Silenced. Independence? Quashed. And if you dare object, you might just get labeled a “domestic terrorist” by your own Justice Department.

They don’t want to raise your child. They want to program them.

Go and read the whole article. The Left continues to show its true colors, and those colors are red with the blood of millions. The only people these guys care about is themselves.

Teaching Students to Think Critically

 Olivia Murray has a post at the American Thinker today entitled Oklahoma public schools to teach about the 2020 election 'discrepancies' using real data, and leftists are losing it. You can read all about it, as it is a post and fairly short. The thing that struck me was what Ms. Murray states in passing:

(I remain convinced that you can’t be a thinker and believe in leftism; you can be intelligent, or smart and be a leftist, but you cannot actually be critically analyzing reality.)

I think Murray has hit on an important principle, that of noting and analyzing situations and ideas not as one wishes them to be, but as they are. Each one of us must come to his own conclusions, but the facts are not in dispute. Leftists are bound by their ideology. They analyze everything through the lens of their ideology. In the same way, I have noted that one cannot be a Christian and be a leftist. This is why so-called "liberation theology" is not Christian. It stems from the same principle. The Bible lays out the facts, the reality if you will. In doing so, it respects nobody's ideology but rather points to the ultimate reality: that of God our creator who revealed His true nature on the cross.

May more schools adopt similar curricula to teach students once again to analyze and think critically. We don't want to feed them the answers but rather teach them how to find the answers on their own.

Interesting Times Ahead

J.B.Shurk today, at the American Thinker has an article entitled The Great Simmering of the West in which he outlines the current and future problems facing people living in the United States and Europe along with Australia and to a lesser degree Japan. No surprise, he points out that a very few, very rich men believe it is their right, though they view it as a burden thrust upon them, of course, to tell the rest of us how to live. It just so happens that their vision of our future makes them even richer.

People all over the world are worried about the future. While regional wars continue to fester, the prospect of global war weighs heavily on many. However, likely belligerents are not all foreign aggressors. Nearly a century of globalization has erected a web of clunky international institutions that wield tremendous power while disregarding sovereign borders. Concomitantly, mass immigration has transformed once-homogenous national populations into stews of many competing cultures and religions. Battle lines forming inside nations are more serious than those forming among them.

Self-described “futurists” such as Bill Gates and Yuval Harari believe that artificial intelligence will soon replace most humans in the workforce and that a small cadre of global “elites” must centrally manage humanity’s transition to general “uselessness.” With A.I. entities independently running machines and becoming exponentially smarter and more competent in their tasks, entire industries will transition from human to synthetic labor until all industry surrenders to A.I.

The "surrender to A.I." will, of course, render us all as useless eaters (a term coined in the Soviet Union) in their opinion. No longer being useful to our demigods, as they view themselves, we can be disposed of. Note that the thinking here is strictly Marxist and materialist. It does not partake of a Christian outlook, knows no compassion, and assumes that not man, but these men, are the measure of all things.

For much of the last century, this noxious brand of Establishment “conservatism” has infected Western politics. Whatever monstrosity the political left constructs today, “ruling class conservatives” work breathlessly to conserve tomorrow. The West’s collapse has been a bipartisan effort. That’s why lowly citizens in America, Britain, Holland, France, Germany, Austria, Poland, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere no longer see competing political parties. They recognize one Establishment Uniparty working against them.

That’s bad news for Western “elites.” They have built a miserable world in which pornography, social media voyeurism, and online “likes” have replaced individual purpose, real relationships, and growing families. National pride and cultural traditions have given way to open borders and contradictory multiculturalism. Despite decades of technological abundance, the future still looks bleak and dangerous. “Art” is all the same because “artists” and “intellectuals” have been conditioned to think and say the same things.

But we have been here before. When Christ entered history, the great monster in the world was the Roman Empire. The Jewish High Priest and the Sandhedrin oppressed the average Jew to please their masters in Rome as well as to make themselves wealthy. Such is the nature of man left to his own devices. But there is another article today, also at the American Thinker by Twilight Patriot entitled Where the New Pope Came From that gives us hope that the new pope might actually intend to speak for Christ, as the Roman church claims.

Patriot makes a case that new pope wanted to send a signal that he, like Leo XIII would work for justice. Progressives and leftists are gushing over the new pope's choice of name as Leo XIV. But hold on a minute. Leo XIII was in favor of private property and capital. He just wanted the working men to get to earn a decent wage, be able to buy property for themselves, and raise a family faithful to God is He intends. Hmmm-isn't that what used to be the American Dream?

A lot of progressive commentators are gushing over the new Pope Leo’s apparent admiration for Leo XIII, whom they describe as a “social justice” pope, who, by issuing the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, “defended workers’ rights” and “laid the foundation for Catholic social teaching.”

The expectation seems to be that the people who read these headlines will nod along with the progressive buzzwords without thinking too hard about what these things meant in 1891, much less actually reading Rerum Novarum for themselves.

I am of the opinion that everyone should read Rerum Novarum. (Here is the Latin original; here is the official English translation.) “But I am not Catholic,” some of you might say, “so why should I care what a long-dead pope had to say about the proper relationship between labor and capital?”

So, I am not Roman Catholic either. And my Latin was never very good. I could never reconcile myself to learning a language that was no longer spoken except in the Roman church. And the English translation is quite long, as these things tend to be. But I urge reading it anyway, and pay particular attention to number 46:

46. If a workman's wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income. Nature itself would urge him to this. We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.

The Ten Commandments assume that people will have private property. That is why stealing is wrong, as well as coveting something that belongs to your neighbor. Yes, everything is ultimately God's because He made it. But He put us here to be stewards of His creation which means wisely using the things He has made. Well, it will be interesting indeed to see what Leo XIV will do with the office.