More gun laws will not stop America’s moral decay

OPINION:

This past week our nation saw another morally lost young man enter a local school and proceed to shoot and kill 19 children and two teachers. The next shoe to drop was as predictable as the sunrise: Our nation’s elites rushed to their respective podiums to score political points. Their solution? Remove the personal rights of all law-abiding Americans and replace these rights with more laws.

In the minds of our country’s political class, this is the only solution. The average citizen’s freedom “to keep and bear arms” is clearly to blame for every heinous act reported on the nightly news. In the Mad Hatter’s world of today’s progressives, more laws and less liberty are the only things that will arrest our cultural collapse.

The only acceptable solution our country’s smart folks see to the tsunami of violence sweeping over our schools and through our streets is to take freedom away from you and me and give more power to themselves. In their minds, gun ownership equals gun violence in the same way car ownership inevitably results in vehicular homicide. All other possibilities of cause and effect seem to completely escape their thinking.

But setting aside the obvious non sequitur implied by those who seem to believe owning a hammer surely means you will bludgeon someone with it, let’s look at another flaw in the logic of those who argue for “gun control.”

The clear matter of fact is that the data do not support their premise; quite the contrary, the lessons of history prove the exact opposite.

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

Gun bans and the corresponding lack of the average civilian’s ability to defend himself have not saved human lives, as argued by those who fancy themselves our political superiors. Rather, such government control of guns has stained the corridors of history with the deaths of untold millions.

Here are just a few of many examples.

Government confiscation of guns by 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” of Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia. 

Seventeen million Jews, Slavs, Poles and Romani 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 clenched fist of their Axis superiors.

And lest we forget the apparent gold medal winners of man’s march for a gun-free world, the governments of Stalin and Mao left upwards of 60 to 70 million people dead and buried in the cemeteries of their “gun-free” utopias.

Could it be that the problem is not guns but rather ideas? Could it be that the preaching victimization and fomenting resentment have resulted in this chaos? Could it be that belittling morality rather than the availability of bullets is what has led us to the nightmare of Uvalde, Buffalo and Sandy Hook? Could it be that dumbing down the value of life by creating a culture of death is the real monster behind the mask?

Call me crazy, but maybe worshipping government rather than God is the problem. Maybe extolling socialism rather than elevating self-evident truths is the problem. Maybe the moral nihilism presently taught in your local public schools, and not the law-abiding citizens exercising their constitutional right to protect themselves, is the problem. 

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

Maybe we should revisit the ideas we are teaching in our classrooms before we simply assume that the solution to all that ails us is giving more power to our congress and our courts.

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 return to teaching what is good rather than evil, we will continue to see more and more young people enter our schools 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 (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery).