Newtown, Connecticut

Want to make yourself sick? Google the words "false flag" and "Newtown, Connecticut." This prose poem is pretty much the first thing that you'll see.

Comrade obama and his fellow travelers will keepon staging the mass murders of children with guns untilyou capitulate :they tried to elicit gun control sympathy with congresswomangiffords , but the truth is, most americans would liketo see their congressional reps shot anyways.then they tried to elicit gun control sympathy withthe batman colorado theater shootings, but everyoneclocked that right away as an obvious mk-ultra psy-op.then they tried to take advantage of the kansas citynfl football player who didn't want to get punked byhis baby mama girlfriend, shot her, then suicidedhimself - but they failed with the balky attempt bynwo-shill faggot bob costas to force the narrative.then they tried with the mall shooting in the northwest,but americans have become more streetwise and haveadapted to run like heck when an mk-ultra shooter startsspraying bullets, so the nwo failed on getting thebody count they wanted.so, then, what does a man, who fears god, do in theface of such wickedness ?

If you're really a glutton for punishment, Google the words "God" and "Newtown, Connecticut," as in "how could God let this happen?"The word "theodicy," which refers to 'the philosophical attempt to reconcile the paradox of the existence of both an all-powerful, all-just God and Evil,' was coined by Leibniz in the 18th century, who struggled with the problem at book length in Théodicée. Our own philosopher Mike Huckabee dispatched it with a soundbite yesterday, on Fox News:

NEIL CAVUTO (HOST): You know, inevitably people ask after tragedies like this, how could God let this happen?HUCKABEE: Well, you know, it’s an interesting thing. We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage because we’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability? That we’re not just going to have to be accountable to the police, if they catch us. But one day, we will stand before a Holy God in judgment. If we don’t believe that, then we don’t fear that.

Brian Fischer says that God forsook the children of Newtown because "we kicked God out of our public school system. And I think God would say to us, 'Hey, I'll be glad to protect your children but you got to invite me back in your world first. I'm not going to go where I'm not wanted. I'm a gentleman.' When I think back to when I was in elementary school, we had prayer in school and we didn't need guns."I don't know about you, but Fischer's God seems sort of small-minded to me, not like a gentleman at all. But I guess I'm a big part of the problem, being Jewish, a non-believer, and a progressive and all.It's kind of amazing to me how, before anyone knew anything--the identity of the shooter even, never mind what motivated him to act--so many people had all the answers.I looked at a pro gun site this morning, which was reporting the news that the guns used in the killing were legally purchased by the shooter's dead mother. The first comment reads: "Proves that Gun Control efforts are useless."Moreover, many posters seemed to believe that the real cause of the tragedy was that the teachers--the KINDERGARTEN teachers, mind you--weren't armed. "Anytime I see a gun free zone or a state that doesn’t allow it’s citizens to carry oc or cc I see that the anti’s have created a climate that encourages these tragedies." Guns don't kill people, gun free zones do.Someone posted this meme-worthy image:Another anguished poster allowed that he had doubts, but then he wrestled them into submission:

These evil events make me physically ill every time they happen and they do make me question my sincerely held positions. I always ask myself if I am in some way unknowingly contributing to criminal violence. Then I stop and I think about it.I didn’t pull the trigger. Neither did any of my friends. To all of us an act like this is unthinkable and evil in the extreme.We’ve seen these monstrous mass shooting events occur in Norway, Finland, Germany, Britain (2010 taxi driver), etc. with far more restrictive gun laws than we have.We know that the gun laws in this country just fifty years ago were far less restrictive than they are today. Back then we didn’t see these events occur that often or this severely. So what has changed? It’s clearly not the guns that are the problem.

The ATF estimates that 4.5 million guns are sold to private citizens every year--and that there are more than enough guns in circulation in the US to arm pretty much every man, woman, and child. And that's still not enough for them to feel protected?Let's stipulate that guns aren't the root cause of violence. People have been slaughtering each other since long before guns came into world, after all. But if you look at the issue through an epidemiological lens, it's hard to deny that guns actuate and amplify evil impulses.From yesterday's Washington Post, I learned that the US has "four times as many gun-related homicides per capita as do Turkey and Switzerland, which are tied for third....Americans are 20 times as likely to be killed by a gun than is someone from another developed country." (It could be worse, of course. Someone in Mexico is three times more likely to be murdered by a firearm than someone in the US; in Honduras, the odds go up by 20 times.)It seems to me that guns are a lot like cigarettes. Anecdotally, everyone knows of non-smokers who died of cancer and smokers who lived to be 100; even when a smoker does get cancer, it's an open question as to whether it was the cigarettes or something else.Correlation and causation are different things--but correlation absolutely does tell us something meaningful about large populations. Populations that smoke less live longer.From Howard Friedman's The Measure of a Nation: "In a family or intimate assault, death is twelve times more likely if a gun is present than if another weapon is used. Analysis shows that an estimated 41 percent of gun-related homicides and 94 percent of gun-related suicides would not have occurred under the same circumstances had no guns been present....in 2009, firearms were the cause of 67 percent of all homicides in the United States."I'm perfectly willing to leave God and Evil out of the discussion, if it will allow us to hone in on the problem of guns. I'm even willing to assume that the Second Amendment is sacrosanct. But that still leaves an awful lot of room for registration, background checks, assault weapon and cop killer bullet bans, and more. There are gun show loopholes that can easily be closed. Criminal liability can be extended to sellers, especially when there are irregularities in the sales.And where is private enterprise in all this? Do insurance companies take gun ownership into account when they are considering actuarial issues? They should.It's time to talk about all of this and more. Obama won his second term. As a lame duck, he doesn't have to fear the NRA any longer. I like what he said yesterday, "that we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics."I don't know about the "come together" part--Mike Huckabee and Brian Fischer and most Obama voters are never going to come together about this or anything else.But political action is another matter altogether. We won in November. As citizens and voters, we need to see to it that our victory actually means something. This is as good a place to begin as any.