More laws do not a moral people make

OPINION:

This past Valentine’s Day, Nikolas Cruz entered a classroom in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and proceeded to murder 17 people and wound 15 others. Before any meaningful criminal investigation could even begin, our nation’s cultural elites rushed to their respective podiums, finding fault and casting aspersions. Scoring political points is the name of the game. Removing personal rights embedded in our Constitution and replacing them with more laws and less freedom seems to be the only way they know to keep score.

In the minds of our country’s political class, it seems the average citizen’s freedom “to keep and bear arms” is clearly to blame for every heinous act reported on the nightly news. As is almost always the case these days, progressives think only more laws and more regulations will solve our culture’s problems.

The only acceptable solution our intellectual oligarchy sees to the violence we all see in our schools, at our concerts, and in our city streets is to take freedom away from the people and give more power to themselves; i.e. the government.

In their minds, gun ownership equals gun violence in the same manner car ownership inevitably results in vehicular homicide. All other potentialities of cause and effect seem to totally escape their thinking.

But setting aside the obvious non-sequitur implied by those who say owning a hammer surely means you are going to bludgeon someone with it, let’s look at another chink in the logic of the advocates of “gun control.”

The clear fact of the matter is that the data simply doesn’t support their premise. Quite the contrary, the classroom of history proves the exact opposite.

A quick overview of the world’s most prominent examples of gun control and gun confiscation does not show less gun violence but rather exponentially more.

Government control of guns and the corresponding lack of the average civilian’s ability to defend himself and his family, has not saved human lives, as argued by Sens. Pelosi, Schumer, Sanders, Nelson and a host of others, but rather, government control of guns has stained history with the deaths of untold millions.

Here are just a few of many examples to make my point: Government confiscation of guns under the authority of the Supreme People’s Assembly of North Korea has resulted in a minimum of 1 million deaths to date in Kim Jong-un’s collective paradise.

At least 1.5 million defenseless people died in the “gun free zones” — aka killing fields — of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. We know that at least 17 million Jews, Slavs, Poles, and Gypsies suffered their fate as they stood helpless, and empty-handed, staring down the barrel of a gun, not held in the hand of a neighbor, but in the clinched fist of a government that had convinced them safety was more important than freedom.

And lest we forget the apparent gold medal winner of man’s march for a gun-free world, the “redistribution of guns” from civilians to the government left upwards to 60 million people dead in the graves of Stalinist Russia and as many as 70 million buried in the cemeteries of Mao’s “gun free” China.

Could it be that the problem is not guns but rather ideas? Could it be that the preaching victimization and fomenting class resentment is the problem? Could it be that race baiting and belittling traditional morality is the problem? Could it be that dumbing down the value of life by creating a culture of death is the problem?

Could it be that worshiping government rather than God is the problem? Could it be that affirming and extolling the atheistic ideologies of history’s worst socialist regimes while castigating the self-evident truths endowed to us by our Creator is the problem? Could it be that these terrible ideas, and not the law-abiding citizens exercising their constitutional right to protect themselves, are the problem?

Newsflash: Nikolas Cruz wasn’t posting the Ten Commandments or the Beatitudes on his Facebook account. You don’t stop evil by teaching victimization and revenge. You stop evil by teaching virtue and repentance.

Maybe, just maybe, we should revisit the ideas we are teaching in our schools, in our classrooms, and unfortunately even in some of our churches, before we simply assume that the solution to man’s sin is to give more power to a government of men.

Take away their guns and they will use a sword. Take away their sword and they will use a club. Take away their club and they will use a rock. When you take away a culture’s soul, there is nothing to stop the evil that lurks in every human heart.

You can outlaw guns, swords, clubs, and rocks but until we start teaching self-evident goodness (dare I say the Gospel?), rather than worshiping the government, we are all still broken and angry people filled with hatred and rage.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams

• Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, is the author of “Not A Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery 2017).