Counting

By Steve Woodward

A Washington Post headline on May 30: U.S. marks Memorial Day weekend with at least 11 mass shootings.

Chicago’s Memorial Day weekend gun violence tally: 52 shot, 10 fatally, raising the year’s fatalities by gunshots to 220. 

Aborted births of living babies performed in the United States in 2022: 856,730.

Let us shed light on how the corrupt media and its political idols on the Left define what is “tragic” in the course of human events.

Black and Hispanic (many illegal) street thugs wielding stolen firearms can rampantly target innocent victims, all ages, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, devastating urban communities and leaving in their wake dead bodies and critically injured survivors. This is life as we know it in 21st Century America. Nothing to see here.

But if a white, deranged, societally alienated teen-ager opens fire on a supermarket or an elementary school, wearing military tactical gear and engaging by brandeshing so-called assault rifles, we have a crisis that must be exploited before the bodies are buried, a crisis of gun ownership that overshadows a declining, secular culture breeding assassins stalking soft targets.

A letter published in The Wall Street Journal noted our media’s obsession with sensational evil and indifference toward mundane evil.

President Joe Biden fuels the faux outrage by rushing to Buffalo and Uvalde (Texas) for photo opps and to “comfort” the grieving. He and his surrogates will not be showing up in Chicago to console Memorial Day weekend victims. They will not schedule fly-arounds to visit the 11 locations in the Post’s headline. 

Yet when it comes to defending murdering babies more barbarically than any legal gun owner could contemplate, Biden’s Lefties have a tendency to become as unglued as the ranting psychopaths who forecast their evil intentions across social media. Infamously, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) threatened Supreme Court justices in a rabid public rant, promising consequences should said justices ever contemplate the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Will you have them shot, Chuck?

Lost amid the deafening vitriol is the fundamental decency that unites Americans. No one on either “side” condones random gun violence that kills innocents. But our unity is tested when we see elected leaders tolerating other causes of suffering and death, mostly among the young, such as smuggled fentanyl, which pours across our unprotected southern border with Mexico. The “mules” who carry the deadly drugs then stick around to commit violent crimes such as rape. These incidents happen every day yet the Presidential entourage has not made one visit to the southern border to observe the chaos.

Americans also are united, or should be, by an insatiable desire to envision a future for our country and, by extension our children and young families, that is full of promise, liberty and prosperity. We do this at the grassroots. We achieve this by restoring Judeo-Christian values in our households and our schools, by returning to faith in Almighty God rather than shunning God’s presence, and by taking practical steps to protect one another from the neglected, discarded lives in our midst who dull their agonies by wading into the cesspool of unchecked social media where the seeds of radical behavior are sown. Tech’s unrelenting censors let children game-plan their evil fantasies in the open (as did the Uvalde gunman) but shuts down citizens who espouse freedom from medical tyranny and oppose abortion.

We can also take deliberate steps to protect our schools and houses of worship, the softest targets. In Moore County it has come to light that school resource officers have not undergone active shooter training in more than five years, inexplicably. Not only is training a no-brainer but, as Uvalde demonstrated, so are specific protocols that stop deranged gunmen in their tracks. Dead in their tracks.

Evil is in the world. That’s the tragedy on which to focus. Secularists and relativists who increasingly dominate governance, corporations and education deliberately tolerate evil as long as they gain ever more control over all of us. Calculated or not, this is where we are in 2022.  Thus, the Second Amendment is more vital than ever and worthy of being defended.