Gun Laws Will Not Fix a Problem of Culture and Spirit

Once again, the nation has witnessed a horrible, pointless act of violence, with innocent children the victims.

And, once again, we hear from liberals that the answer is gun control.

If we look at what generally characterizes the mindset of those — generally young men — who commit these acts, we see what generally characterizes the mindset that has taken hold of our whole culture.

Victimhood, blame and denial of personal responsibility.

Can this be an accident?

Kudos to The Wall Street Journal for having the courage to point to these incidents as signs of a “social and spiritual” problem in the country. “The rise of family dysfunction and the decline of mediating institutions such as churches and social clubs have consequences.”

The signs of a society that is sick are all around us: the collapse of family, the collapse of interest in marriage and having children.

In 2021, 107,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, an all-time high and a 15% increase over the previous year.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the suicide rate in the U.S. increased 35.2% from 1999 to 2018.

A characteristic common to suicides and mass killings is that the perpetrators are disproportionately men.

Men — generally young men — commit indiscriminate mass murder, and men take their own lives at a rate almost four times higher than women.

So, men demonstrate in a most unpleasant way another truth that our liberal friends want to deny. Men are different from women — not just in physical makeup but also in spiritual, psychological makeup.

For whatever reason, our increasingly Godless, materialistic, morally empty culture seems to take a particularly heavy toll on men.

According to American Enterprise Institute scholar Nick Eberstadt, the total number of NILF men (not in the labor force) held steady in the 1940s and 1950s at around 1 million. Then in the late 1960s it exploded. There are now 7 million prime-age men who have withdrawn from the workforce.

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