My Two Cents on What Happened in Uvalde

          YET another shooting has occurred and taken over the airways. 19 innocent children and two teachers have been killed in cold blood. This is by all means a tragedy, and even the people with the most depraved and politicized responses to this event acknowledge that deep down. One of the most disturbing details is how the oh-so-noble “Thin Blue Line” dilly-daddled for nearly an hour before an exasperated Border Patrol agent went in and ended it. However, just as with all tragedies, the Establishment media has not taken long to contort this one and use it to advance the abridgement of our property rights (which justifies self-defense). Social media is positively blowing up in response to this, and I feel obliged to make a statement regarding such a significant event.

          What I feel most compelled to speak about is the root of this crime. While so many left-wing pundits and politicians are already squealing about gun control this and assault weapons that, the truth is that guns are not the problem. Not only do we have the ability to own guns due to our right to property, but guns are tools, and tools are inanimate. A gun lying on the ground can lie there for an entire century and will not fire a round unless a human being comes up and wields it. Many anti-gun advocates try to say, “Whenever X product causes deaths, it is recalled, why won’t we do the same with guns!?” The problem with this is that a gun is not a product in the conventional sense, it is a weapon, and weapons are designed to harm. The problem arises when the harm is dealt to innocent people and not game or criminals, but - as I just detailed - whenever that happens it is the person’s fault, not the gun’s. Guns are not the problem, people are.

          However, people in general will not commit a crime. This is abundantly clear. Something differentiates criminals from law-abiding people, and in the case of mass shooters, such as Salvador Ramos, it is mental health. A study from last year showed that 80% of mass shooters over the last four decades had mental illnesses. Indeed, psychiatrists have been chirping for some time now about a mental health crisis in America (see this, this, and this; there is also a brewing global mental health crisis, see here). If they aren’t severely ill they will become so because of the overabundance of psychiatric medication that is prescribed, the next most significant common denominator between mass shooters, medication that often leads to violent tendencies, as I covered in my article “The Pharmocracy”. Many people have picked up on this, and I have been retweeting them; one particularly good example is this one: “Bruh I’m looking at the history of school shootings. Mind-blowing, kids brought guns to school until the 70s. Only 3 school mass shootings between 1903-1966. What happened?”

          What happened, indeed. What is causing this mental health crisis? I believe it owes to the increasingly relativist and modernist culture we are experiencing that has led to so much degeneracy, as this playlist by Paul Joseph Watson shows in great detail. The rise of pathological personality types was first and most scathingly documented by Christopher Lasch in his book The Culture of Narcissism (see Lasch 1991). The anti-capitalist undertones of this book and its author aside (Lasch essentially blamed consumerism and materialism on capitalism, for rebuttals to such views see this, this, and this), Lasch made a great point that American culture and its values were shifting, and shifting for the worse, and the warnings of this late-20^th century book have become incredibly obvious nowadays in face of the aforementioned mental health crisis. America has also thoroughly secularized over the decades, and irreligion has been - convincingly - linked with mental health issues due to its purposelessness and nullification of the individual’s ultimate, intrinsic worth. This is something that Nieztche himself warned about, prophesying, “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries…I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism… For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe.” I also refer you to William Lane Craig’s work on “The Absurdity of Life without God”.

          One of the best conduits for this culture of meaninglessness has been the public school system. This has been the career-long endeavor of John Taylor Gatto to expose (see Gatto 2017 and 2001). Indeed, one chapter of Gatto’s book Dumbing Us Down is titled “The Psychopathic School”. We do not interact with each other as we should, as we are whisked away from our parents for hours a day to be indoctrinated, which content exposed by the account Libs of TikTok has shown and John R. Lott Jr. has argued is the intrinsic function of public schooling (see Lott Jr. 1999). Schools are not training kids to function in society anymore (they never were, in fact), they are just teaching the children how to obey orders. The institution itself, even if not some of the individual agents of it, is psychopathic.

          Thus, we may begin to connect things. The spike in mental health issues and school shootings? Many thanks to the public school system, one of the most vile and cancerous outgrowths of the State (for more on public schooling see this, this, this, this, and this; see also Richman 1994 and Rothbard 1999). What is the solution to our woes then? Not only is it a massive reboot of our cultural values and expectations, but it is a massive reboot of our education system, which would likely lead to the former anyway. What we need is to take power away from the public schooling system, we need to see the restoration of parental sovereignty over their children, the best means of accomplishing this being homeschooling (see Dusseau 2020). This has been promoted by Rothbard, Gatto, Ron Paul, and many others as the ideal replacement; it is even more ideal than private schooling because private schooling still removes the kids from their parents, homeschooling keeps them home, even if their education is aided by a tutor.

          It is interesting how deep the Uvalde shooting goes. However, I feel like that tends to be the case in a sick society, that every tragedy comes from an intermeshing of various societal infirmities, from a moribund culture to a depraved elite. Salvador Ramos was a victim just as much as the children and parents of Robb Elementary School, a victim of a flawed system, culture, and nation. Justice is owed to everyone in the wake of this tragedy, and in every other tragedy that afflicts us, and our demands are directed to the sophists and libertines who sit in ivory towers and have us imbibe their sophistic and hedonistic fumes.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Dusseau, Anna, The Case for Home Schooling: Free Range Home Education Handbook (Stroud, UK: Hawthorn Press, 2020).
• Gatto, John T., Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Paperback (Gabriola, CAN: New Society Publishers, 2017).
• The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling (New York, NY: The Odysseus Group, 2001).
• Lott Jr., John R., “An Explanation for Public Provision of Schooling: The Importance of Indoctrination,” The Journal of Law and Economics 33:1 (University of Chicago Press, 1990): 199-231.
• Lasch, R. Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991).
• Richman, Sheldon, Separating School & State: How to Liberate America's Families (Fairfax, VA: Future of Freedom Foundation, 1994)
• Rothbard, Murray N., Education: Free and Compulsory (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999).