In this case the question came from a young person, and they can be forgiven the crudity of their curiosity, even if it is backloaded with tired assumptions force fed by bad television, video games, abysmal schools, and that grandest of American traditions: the full criminal embrace. While the characterization of cops has migrated from the Officer Friendly types on Adam 12 to masked bogeymen in “tanks” fiendishly no-knocking the wrong house, outlaws and very bad people enjoy the fruits of selective judgment.
Civil Disobedience
If you are one of those rarified Americans who still believe, as this space fervently does, that natural rights are bequeathed to us by our creator, rather than granted to us by government masters, you will perhaps appreciate the gift of Robert Francis O’Rourke.
Our Predator Problem
The common denominator in school killings isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t guns, and it isn’t mental illness. The only common denominator in mass school killings is long-term, dissasociative exposure to violent media.
Whether its violence in films, violent lyrics, violent television shows, violent novels, violence depicted across social media, or the endless flood of violent imagery in first-person shooter video games, those countless hours steeped in images of interpersonal violence are damaging the minds of our nation’s children.
Presumption Of Guilt
The presumption of innocence is a cornerstone of the American criminal justice system. It is also a cornerstone of the American republican ideal. It is the fundamental difference between being a citizen and being a subject. A citizen has rights that are not subject to abridgement even if a majority wills it; rights that exist by “natural law” and outside the […]
Misdirection In The Motte & Bailey
If you feel like your values and your very nature are under assault — they are. Two things happened on the same day last week that provide ample evidence that values and life-ways we cleave to here at Running Iron Report are under concerted and deliberate attack. The American Psychological Association has released new guidelines for […]
The Great American Freak-Out
If the now ubiquitous American Freak Out is evidence of anything, perhaps it is a symptom of our lives on the new frontier. Maybe it’s happening because we are culturally marooned, neither here nor there just yet, but rather groaning through the death agonies of the old myths that once sustained us, while fighting savagely over the invention and control of the new myths we will eventually live by.
A Relic Of The 18th Century
“…Demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.” — Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens I have been naïve. My temperament has always bent toward seeking common ground — the Willie Nelson ethic of bringing the cowboys and the hippies together. I have opined multiple times […]
Come and Take It
A bill disarming citizens is precisely the kind of nonsense one would expect to be issued from a group of people whose own solutions have been ineffectual since their inception, whose entire history is steeped in fraudulent claims of divinity, by unconscionable wars, slavery, and assassinations, and whose only real purpose from the outset has been to control the minds, bodies, and coffers of others by the precise application of fear backed by the threat of annihilation or eternal damnation.
First Person Shooter, Act Two
For long-term thinkers, the most alarming part of our failure to have the right conversation about the causes of predatory mass killings is that our civil liberties are put at risk. The seductive anodynes put forth by short-term thinkers require that law-abiding citizens sacrifice their own freedoms in a well-meaning but clearly improbable effort to stuff the predator genie back into the bottle.
