A Hard Heart Kills: Why Liberal Values Breed School Shootings
Traditionally, the school shooting phenomenon was perpetrated by young, disaffected males. But, a disturbing new trend seems to be forming. The tragic shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School this week was committed by a young girl. A fifteen-year-old with a digital history indicative of the deep angst experienced by many young teenagers left adrift in existential darkness.
It is a very disturbing trend indeed when our young girls, typically characterized by feminine compassion, who should be anticipating the joys of family, motherhood, or career, instead are driven to find meaning in mass homicide. Surely, this is a sign of cultural apocalypse.
Reportedly, Natalie Rupnow had an online obsession with mass shootings and death. Can it really be surprising that our culture of death (the death of God, death of the unborn, the death of personhood) produces mass-murdering kids?
We treat the unborn like bio-waste and devalue life to the point of absurd irrelevance, discarding it at will. The message to anyone paying attention is that life is disposable and subject to whim or convenience. Making a statement with the lives of innocent people is a simple metaphysical extension of the secular culture of grievance and lack of eternal accountability.
Perhaps some old-fashioned hell-fire preaching might go a long way toward saving lives, both temporal and spiritual.
How is it surprising, if our politics and culture celebrates the destruction of personhood by promoting a trans agenda that reduces the fundamental aspects of personality to caprice, as our youth drown in an ocean of unresolvable contradiction and madness. If their own fundamental concepts of self-worth, morality, and compassion have been torn to shreds in a vortex of irrationality and will to political power — why does it surprise us that “acting out” becomes murderous ennui for the susceptible?
The liberal ethos eschews personal responsibility, because the “other” is always to blame. It’s a translation of social Marxist political principles into a perverse ethic. The perpetual conflicts between classes is moralized into the liberal doctrine of ubiquitous victimhood. That’s why liberals (spelled democrat) will invariably blame the tool of the mass shooter and not the perpetrator of the act. They’ll do anything to avoid placing responsibility on their institutions, politics, or values. That’s why liberals never get this terrible phenomena right. They’re responsible, politically and socially, for its very existence. You can easily test the proposition. Just present a liberal with a Biblically based argument for school shootings and watch them recoil like a wriggling adder.
It’s also why liberals lionize criminals and murders like Luigi Mangione, the bungling assassin of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The killer isn’t a loathsome degenerate, but a victim of corporatist oppression. It’s the Marxist dialectic in operation.
Liberals like former FBI Agent Frank Figliuzzi or disgraced former FBI Agent Andrew McCabe predictably advocate for more gun control, because the liberal value system is willfully blind to the real causes of mass shootings at schools and elsewhere. They refuse to recognize, much less admit, the truth because it shatters the lie that liberalism is compassionate and virtuous. Certainly, for Figliuzzi and McCabe, there are also purely mercantile concerns at work. They’re committed to an MSNBC constituency that promises rewards based on liberal purity. And, there are books to sell.
But, nearly lost to history is America’s most deadly school massacre. It occurred at the Bath Consolidated School in Bath Charter Township, Michigan. On May 18, 1927, Andrew Kehoe murdered his wife, set fire to his farm, then traveled to the school and detonated surplus dynamite he’d planted in the basement. Kehoe was killed in the blast, along with 36 children and six adults. The death toll could have been much higher had the second emplacement of dynamite exploded. As R. Lee Ermey’s character in Full Metal Jacket, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, famously said,”Your rifle is only a tool. It is a hard heart that kills.”
Since the beginning of time, it has always been the heart that guides the fate of man. It’s no different in our vaunted modernity. Human nature is not subject to modification. It bears the stain of the curse. We ignore that reality to our peril.
Liberalism is the value system of the murderer, the totalitarian, and the liar. It’s the diabolical amorality of someone who Christ excoriated, “Ye are of your father the devil and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” (John 8:44)
It’s no coincidence that the uniform of the school shooter tends to be black, their eyes windows of emptiness. One of the last photographs posted by Rupnow shows her dressed predominantly in black. It is said that everyone wears a uniform. That is an absolutely true statement. When our young adopt the dark uniform of hopelessness, and their faces are drawn in the heavy lines of the liberal zeitgeist, those closest to them should take notice and offer a balm of Divine manufacture.
Rupnow’s 9mm pistol is an irrelevancy. She could have perpetrated her heinous crime in a multitude of ways with a plethora of tools. Liberals want you to focus on the shiny object and forget the evil they have wrought in our midst. There is a war for the minds and souls of our children afoot, and we’re losing it to the purveyors of cultural rot in politics, Hollywood, and education. We’ve no one to blame but ourselves. It’s time, as a nation, that we take responsibility for the destruction of our youth and return to the God of our forefathers.