President Joe Biden responded to the Uvalde school shooting with many questions prefaced with “when in God’s name.”
But he didn’t ask the key questions: “When in God’s name will American adolescents be taught the fifth of the Ten Commandments, ‘Thou shalt not kill’?”
“When in God’s name will they be taught to fear God, to respect and to honor their creator and the creator’s laws?”
The new disordered morality sweeping the United States is doing catastrophic damage, especially among young people. The official embrace of godlessness in schools has exacerbated the new appetite for lawlessness.
Following this latest school shooting, many politicians are renewing demands for more to be done to reduce gun violence. Media reports are awash with calls for gun control. Few, however, have touched on the much greater priority — the need for parents and schools to teach self-control.
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We need to provide genuine moral training in our schools and our homes. Only firm moral values based on the founding principle of “in God we trust” can avert the repetition of shootings like this.
Why can’t we agree on moral training?
There are still two great forces in our world: love and fear — love of God and our fellow human beings together with fear of God and fear of evil.
When a killer has no love and no fear of God or man, he becomes the most dangerous force on this earth. The rule of law is rendered toothless. Legal retribution is impossible.
Is a lack of moral education to blame for mass shootings?
For an atheist killer who wants to be killed, there can be no fear of punishment — by either human or divine law — here or in the hereafter. He wants to be caught. He wants to die. He wants to exit in a blaze of inglorious infamy, with lights, cameras, action and public shock and horror.
For, above all, he wants to be remembered.
So what can we do?
First, we can put a ban on publicizing the names of these killers. We can initiate a media and social media blackout policy. We can thwart the suicidal killer’s ambition to have his name immortalized.
Second, we need to reform the education system to provide the core moral training vital to leading a good life. Children need clear moral instruction to develop a conscience that will enable them to distinguish good from evil.
Self-control is the best form of gun control.
We all learn self-control best when we are young. We learn best as children real concern for the good of every human being. Consciences need to be trained, moral conduct needs to be praised and immoral conduct identified and resisted.
Instead, a new moral crookedness is rife. Moral chaos is being sold as an exciting new freedom.
Amused toleration is being extended today to organized smash-and-grab looters, with only mild consequences for the few arrested. We are overwhelmed with images of opportunistic adults indulging in looting as a new and lucrative sport.
District attorneys in many blue states have decided such behavior is not worth the trouble of prosecuting. There is little concern for the message they are sending to children.
Need for better moral education in schools
Basic law and order in schools is deteriorating.
Can’t we be honest and admit that we need more training in the timeless universality of the Ten Commandments and less in the transitory nonsense of wokeism and critical race theory?
Surely to safeguard schools and communities, children need a better moral education than they are getting today.
They need clear direction in learning to tell what is morally right from what is morally wrong. They need to be taught to discern not just what is good for them personally, but what is good for their family, their community and their country as a whole.
Need for long-view education
Good citizens need a coherent education in civic and moral duty. Too many students, even at the college level, are too distracted these days to be truly educated. Their intellectual capacities have been diminished by the newest superficialities and entertainments.
The moral values of the Bible have fallen out of fashion, replaced by the woke values of Black Lives Matter and antifa that were popularized during the infamous 2020 “Summer of Love” — the 121 days of lethal violence, looting, arson and rioting. The vast majority of these abominations were glorified rather than prosecuted. Amorality set in.
Our students need real education to set their world right again. They need to be rescued from woke brainwashing, from their total immersion in internet addictions and experimental ideologies.
To be truly moral human beings, we all need to be equipped with a long view. From a young age, our students should be encouraged to research and take pride in their own family history and the history of their nation.
It is in understanding the tragedies and the hardships of our past that we can develop the courage and good sense to face our troubles, present and future.
Moral discipline and virtue are necessary to avoid “corruption of the public mind.”
Some 210 years ago, James Kent gave some good advice about our responsibilities during periods of great moral upheaval. Appointed chief justice of the New York Supreme Court in 1804, Kent understood the crucial role of moral discipline and virtue in maintaining good order in a cohesive society. He warned against the “corruption of the public mind”:
“We stand equally in need, now as formerly, of all the moral discipline, and of those principles of virtue, which help to bind society together.”
The Founders understood that a free people must discipline themselves.
John Adams insisted, “Public virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private Virtue, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.”
Adams warned also that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Right here and now, our inadequacy as a moral and religious people is, I’m afraid, woefully apparent.
We can change that. We must change it — for our children’s sake.
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