Eliminating guns is a separate goal from eliminating violence.
The media supports the former but opposes the latter. It routinely
props up the culture of death, guarding abortion with even more
zeal than it condemns gun rights. “We need to have a conversation
about the killing of unborn children,” is a line you will never
hear from CNN’s Piers Morgan or Soledad O’Brien.
The lamentations of posturing pro-abortion journalists over a
coarsened culture don’t count for much. Piers Morgan, when not
hectoring the NRA, can usually be seen interviewing actors and
directors who have profited off the corruption of children through
demented depictions of violence. Will Piers hereby resolve to
cancel all bookings of violence-and-gore actors and rappers? Will
he ask the guard in front of the CNN building to disarm
unilaterally? Will he show the ultrasounds of “precious little” (a
favorite phrase of journalists in recent days) unborn children to
stay the scalpels of Planned Parenthood doctors?
No, the more commonplace violence of abortion leaves the media
untroubled. Journalists scoffed when Mother Teresa appeared at a
D.C. prayer breakfast in the 1990s to say that “any country that
accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love but to use any
violence to get what it wants.”
The media likes to isolate evil, suggesting that it exists only
on the margins of society, while ignoring the violence at the
center of it. As C.S. Lewis said, violence sanctioned “in clean,
carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white
collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not
need to raise their voices” poses the greatest risk to
civilization. The respectably violent often turn up at the media’s
cocktail parties: domestic terrorists from the 1960s, musicians
sprung from prison, partial-birth abortionists feted for their
“bravery.”
Polite society will even turn children over to them. One of the
most influential figures over public education in the last few
decades is a radical who tried to blow up buildings, Bill Ayers.
“Guilty as hell, free as a bird,” he bragged of his crimes. From
his perch as vice president for curriculum of the American
Education Research Association, Ayers determined what public school
teachers would learn at education schools. Violence in the name of
vague resentments — which is only slightly more intellectualized
than the thinking of lunatics recently in the news — is the chief
idea Ayers sought to advance. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” Ayers
said. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”
The self-righteous gasping over “unthinkable violence” is a
little hard to take from pols who blurb books by Ayers or from
pundits who consistently ignore the mass-murdering lunacy of
radical Muslims. “If [Adam Lanza] had had an Arab name, people
would be going nuts about what we ought to do right now,” claimed
CBS’s Bob Schieffer. No, it is more likely that journalists would
be downplaying it. After the worst shooting on a U.S. military base
ever at Fort Hood by an open jihadist, they shrugged. They
cautioned against backlash and hasty prescriptions. Obama’s top
brass appeared on their shows to fret over the loss of “diversity”
stricter policies in light of the shooting might cause.
“We are the only country that regularly experiences horrors of
this sort,” harrumphed pundit E.J. Dionne. Never mind the steady
stream of stories from abroad in which children are blown up by
suicide bombers. The proximity of the shootings to the media center
of New York City accounts for some of this intense navel-gazing,
making the spree more real and singular to journalists than if it
had occurred in the Middle East or even the Midwest. Dionne’s
insular comment also fits with the media’s agenda here, which is to
advance the idea that America is a peculiarly misgoverned country
in need of a good gun sweep.
The media’s proposed solutions are always collective and
federal, not individual and local. Rousseau’s idea that evil comes
not from the human heart but from a poorly designed society has
been much in evidence in the media’s pontifications. Panelists
nodded vigorously on Meet the Press as Tom Ridge said that
no one is born bad but only becomes bad as a consequence of
collective failings.
In a less de-Christianized society, at least one of the
panelists might have noticed that he had just repudiated the
foundational idea of original sin. Don’t expect any “conversations”
on that subject.
