When THINGS Can Sin
When THINGS Can Sin
By Jack Kinsella
In 2012, a psychiatric patient hacked an elderly man to death in the French Alps. The psychiatrist was charged with manslaughter for not having the patient committed to a mental hospital. The psychiatrist was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison and fined 8500 euros.
The court determined that Dr. Daniele Canarelli should have requested Gaillard be placed in a specialized medical unit or referred him to another medical team, as one of her colleagues suggested. Her stubborn refusal had equated to a form of “blindness” according to the court.
Do you think her sentence was fair? Frankly, I have mixed feelings. But I find myself in agreement with the French in their attempt to treat the disease, rather than the symptom.
Blaming the psychiatrist doesn’t seem to me to be the best way to deal with the dangerously mentally ill, but it at least brings mental illness into the equation as the responsible party, instead of blaming an inanimate object.
In America, we blame Smith & Wesson and are surprised when disarming innocent people doesn’t protect innocent people.
The Democrats are aghast at the increase in random mass shootings. Their solution?
First, they hold inanimate objects responsible, while simultaneously turning out generations of kids educated in a system that banned any mention of God or eternal accountability.
Secondly, they move to ban the inanimate objects from lawful society. The result is that any nut with a gun can be relatively certain that he is the ONLY one who has one in any public place, like Virginia Tech, Columbine High School, a strip mall in Salt Lake City or Newtown Elementary.
The only people deterred from illegal possession of guns are people who obey the law — there are ALREADY laws that prohibit indiscriminate murder.
Lots of people point to Canada’s restrictive gun laws as the model for the United States. That is a case of comparing apples to oranges.
In Canada, it is not illegal to pray in schools. The Canadian government runs “Merry Christmas” commercials on TV as a public service. Canadian kids who write to Santa Claus get a personal reply from federal volunteers. People are allowed to say “Merry Christmas” without fear of giving offense.
Parents can choose to send their kids to a publicly supported Christian school system. But it has far fewer school shootings.
Canada has a total ban on handguns, but the weapon of choice in most American mass shootings is a rifle. Canada doesn’t ban rifles. It doesn’t even register them.
And where handguns enter the equation in most US shootings is when somebody uses one to STOP a shooting.
In 1997, 16-year-old Luke Woodham entered his high school with a rifle. He shot and killed two people and injured seven others before being stopped by the principal, who had retrieved his .45 from the glovebox in his truck.
In Santa Clarita in 1999, Richard Stevens brought a rifle into a gun shop and herded three employees into a back room where he said he intended to kill them. He didn’t search the employees or he would have found the concealed .45 that shot him first.
In Grundy, Va., a disgruntled student on the verge of his second suspension at Appalachian School of Law shot and killed the dean, a professor, and a fellow student. Two students, both off-duty peace officers, ran to their cars, retrieved their guns and used them to halt the attack.
Former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney David P. Koppel studied gun control for the Cato Institute. Citing a 1979-1985 study by the National Crime Victimization Survey, Koppel found:
“When a robbery victim does not defend himself, the robber succeeds 88 percent of the time, and the victim is injured 25 percent of the time. When a victim resists with a gun, the robbery success rate falls to 30 percent, and the victim injury rate falls to 17 percent. No other response to a robbery – from drawing a knife to shouting for help to fleeing – produces such low rates of victim injury and robbery success.”
“Criminologist Gary Kleck estimates that 2.5 million Americans use guns to defend themselves each year. Out of that number, 400,000 believe that but for their firearms, they would have been dead,” columnist Larry Elder wrote in July, following the shooting tragedy in Aurora, Colo.
“We know from Census Bureau surveys that something beyond 100,000 uses of guns for self-defense occur every year,” adds Professor Emeritus James Q. Wilson, a public policy expert at the University of California-Los Angeles. “We know from smaller surveys of a commercial nature that the number may be as high as two-and-a-half or three million. We don’t know what the right number is, but whatever the right number is, it’s not a trivial number.”
And what we SHOULD know is that an inanimate object cannot sin.
Assessment
As we get close to the end of this present age, one can see the spiritual madness coming upon the whole world. It is as real as that moment when you start to see somebody’s medication is starting to wear off.
Once the Church embraces the false doctrine that a thing can be responsible for evil, is it not incumbent upon good Christians to stamp out evil? Stamping out evil is certainly a good thing for Christians to do, yes? Even if they have to bend the Scriptures to do it?
And if money is the root of all evil, then it isn’t too far a stretch to argue that Christians shouldn’t mind if the government takes most of it and distributes it to the poor.
It’s the social Gospel: “What would Jesus do?” Jesus certainly wouldn’t associate with evil. That’s why He turned over the money-changers tables in the Temple, they say. Because money is the root of all evil.
Do you see it? The thing becomes the sin. The Bible really says the love of money is the root of all evil but having once accepted as doctrine that a thing can be evil, there’s no backing away.
Now it becomes an issue of what society considers a social evil. Once society decides, the church will follow.
Gun control operates on the principle that guns kill people, not on the obvious principle that people with guns kill people. The shooter in Newtown tried to buy a gun and was refused under existing gun laws. The law worked. But it didn’t stop him.
Instead, he shot and killed his mother and used her guns. By my count, the shooter broke forty existing laws, starting with using a gun to murder his mother. If Connecticut had enacted one more gun law, he would have broken forty-one.
But it wouldn’t have stopped him. The only thing that stopped him was another gun. When he heard the police coming, he shot himself.
The logic behind responding to a gun murder by disarming the law-abiding escapes me. Some people should never drink. Some people shouldn’t own guns. Some people shouldn’t smoke. (Heck, nobody should smoke.)
But when advancing a doctrine that isn’t there, no matter how noble the purpose, it always turns out the way it did the first time. God told Eve not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Eve added her own spin before offering a bite to Adam.
God didn’t ban fruit and move on. He dealt with the sin and the sinner, not the fruit.
Prohibition was an effort to stamp out sin by banning alcohol. The result was the Roaring 20’s, speakeasy clubs, flappers, bathtub gin, Treasury raids, bootleggers, Al Capone and the rackets.
The Brady Bill was an effort to stamp out gun violence by banning private gun ownership. The result was an increase in violent crime against newly-disarmed citizens by criminals that logic says wouldn’t obey gun laws anyway.
I don’t believe that there shouldn’t be any restrictions on gun ownership — of course there should be.
We register cars. We license drivers. We restrict alcohol consumption. But we don’t ban cars to prevent drunk drivers and we already saw what happens when we try to ban alcohol.
On the same day as the Newtown massacre, a man in China went berserk and slashed twenty-two kids with a knife before being subdued. None of the kids died, although they were all slashed about the head and neck, leaving horrible scars, both visible and invisible.
To my knowledge, China didn’t attempt to ban knives. But I read where Facebook is banning the accounts of people who take the politically incorrect position of blaming the perpetrator instead of the weapon.
Political correctness is nothing less than mass delusion. George Orwell used the concept of PC speak as the main plotline of his science-fiction classic, “1984” about a society totally controlled by ‘Big Brother’ by being constantly bombarded by what Orwell called ‘double-speak’.
The Apostle Paul spoke of mass delusion in the last days under the ultimate tyrant of human history — the antichrist. The Apostle John says the antichrist and false prophet;
“deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.” (Revelation 13:14)
What is today the tyranny of the stupid is really the tyranny of the Big Lie in its infant form. With every passing day, the pieces of the puzzle for the last days come into clearer focus.
The prophet Daniel, when he was given his vision of the last days, was told by the revealing Angel;
“Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till THE TIME OF THE END.” The Angel continued; “Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried; but the wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but THE WISE SHALL UNDERSTAND.” (Daniel 12:9-10)
The seals have been broken and Daniel’s vision and prophecy are no longer ‘closed up’ as they’ve been for the past twenty-five hundred years.
The wicked continue to do wickedly, and as the gun-control debate rages on, those who DO understand are censored.
This Letter was written by Jack Kinsella on December 19, 2012.