You really can’t get a starker difference in outcomes, with a specific factor directly influencing that difference, than the two sets of disturbing attacks on Judeo-Christian organized religion happening in New York City in the last three weeks and in White Settlement, Texas, outside of Fort Worth on Sunday.

Start with the Texas incident. A dysfunctional loser in a black trench coat and a hoodie entered the West Freeway Church of Christ through the front door and squeezed off two rounds, hitting a pair of parishioners (he killed one; doctors at a local hospital miraculously saved the other), before he was immediately shot and killed by a parishioner legally carrying a gun.

The deranged White Settlement shooter’s identity and potential motive weren’t known as of this writing, so it might be presumptuous to call his horror an attack on Christianity. Perhaps he just figured a crowded church was the best place in town on a Sunday to harvest innocent souls and had he wanted to do his shooting on a Monday he’d have chosen a school instead. Still, the atrocity in White Settlement is a warning that our society has changed and that hostility to Christianity is at an all-time high in America. The evil descending upon White Settlement is only a symptom of that hostility, and it should be understood as such.

But while the death of one innocent and the serious wounding of another in a house of worship are unacceptable in a civilized nation, that White Settlement wasn’t far bloodier is a blessing.

But in New York, the violence of the past three weeks has come in multiple incidents of violent anti-Semitism, culminating in the bloody knife attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Monsey, New York, north of New York City. An unhinged nut named Thomas Grafton, who like nearly all of the perpetrators of the Hanukkah attacks is black, brought a long knife described as being as long as a broomstick and put five of the celebrants into the hospital, including the son of the rabbi at whose house the celebration was being held.

Prior to Grafton’s rampage, though, there had been an anti-Semitic attack every single day in New York during the Hanukkah season, all of the previous ones taking place in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights and Williamsburg, and nearly all of them perpetrated by African-Americans. Friday’s attack was fairly typical — a 30-year-old black woman named Tiffany Harris accosted three Jewish women and said “F**k you, Jews,” while slapping them in the face. She was charged with the attack and released without bail.

Saturday night’s attack in Monsey was the bloodiest, and indicative of the worsening nature of the wave of violent hatred against Jews in the nation’s most populous city. Following Saturday night’s attack the Guardian Angels, the famous anti-crime organization, announced it would be conducting patrols in Brooklyn in an effort to protect the Jewish community.

While the Guardian Angels’ volunteer efforts are laudable, what’s obvious is this will only get worse because it’s a cultural, not a policy, problem. For some reason violent anti-Semitism has been allowed to become widespread in New York’s black community, and unless it is made unfashionable it’s only a matter of time before someone is killed in an episode of this escalating Jew-hatred.

And the worried warblings of Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio certainly won’t change the current fashion.

What will change that fashion and put a stop to those attacks is the knowledge that perpetrating violence against those people is a dangerous thing to do because they can fight back against you — perhaps even with the level of force the people being attacked in White Settlement, Texas, were able to use to put down the villain in their midst.

We know that good guys with guns are the best terminators of violent crime. We’ve always known that. It was proven over the weekend in Texas. But sadly, there will be no good guys with guns stopping anti-Semitic attacks in New York, and those will quite likely escalate.

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The good news is that it doesn’t appear the Democrats’ assault on the Second Amendment in Virginia is escalating. Just before Christmas it began to appear that the moronic rhetoric of that state’s governor Ralph Northam, who might be the single most unfit politician in America now that Mitch Landrieu is out of office, has begun to dissipate. Northam had on multiple occasions, in support of patently unconstitutional proposed legislation purporting to confiscate lawfully-owned firearms (it bans their possession, which would mean to implement the law would necessarily involve confiscation), threatened to call out the Virginia National Guard to enforce the law if it passed, in jurisdictions refusing to cooperate in its implementation. Those jurisdictions included more than ninety percent of Virginia’s counties, which declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, and Northam’s statements legitimately raised the specter of civil unrest, or worse, in Virginia.

But Northam began backing off his “assault weapons” agenda, offering a grandfather clause which would allow current owners of AR-15s and other such popular firearms to keep what they have. They would still have to register those weapons and no further sales in Virginia would be allowed.

That isn’t a resolution. The only resolution in Virginia comes when Northam and the new Democrat legislative majority ceases attempting to take away the rights of their citizens to defend themselves as they see fit. But the fact remains Northam and his legislative allies want every owner of an AR-15 or similar weapons to register them with the government, which is a necessary precursor to confiscation.

Hopefully Northam and his allies will recognize the disastrous outcome they’re courting and just give up on this stupid gun-grabbing agenda. Any idiot politician who thinks calling out the National Guard to confiscate legally-owned weapons is a good idea has no business holding the levers of power — and if Northam is stupid enough to do it here’s hoping President Trump’s response would be to immediately federalize the Virginia National Guard to keep it from being abused by the lunatics in Richmond against the citizens of the Commonwealth.

…

So I’ve had the TV glued to the college football bowls, partially in search of a team with an argument they can beat LSU (nobody is close yet; sorry, Clemson) and partially because these are the last chances to watch the world’s best game before next fall.

And while watching Iowa slaughter USC — the Trojans are still kicking themselves over hiring Clay Helton instead of Ed Orgeron, a mistake from which they haven’t recovered and for which all of Louisiana owes its undying thanks — I saw something very peculiar.

Namely, a commercial which says the world’s leaders are laughing at Donald Trump and that America needs a president they’ll all respect.

The ad says that president is Joe Biden.

Joe Biden is respected by the world’s leaders, y’all. I know this because I saw it on my TV.

I don’t suppose any further comment on this is needed, so I’ll not bother with any. But I didn’t hallucinate; the ad is real.