Mass murder is a problem of evil

 Daniel Greenfield:

What do people who don’t believe in evil do? They blame inanimate objects. Guns.

19 years ago, a middle-aged unemployed taxi driver carrying two milk cartons full of gasoline walked onto a South Korean subway and started a fire that killed 192 people.

That was not a milk carton problem. Nor was it a gasoline problem.

6 years ago, a Muslim terrorist drove a truck into a Bastille Day event in Nice, France killing 86 and wounding over 400 other people. Body parts were being pried out of his wheel wells.

That was not a truck problem.

Across the long stretch of human history, millions of people were killed long before the invention of firearms, in often cruder and far more brutal ways. Back then we lacked CNN, but people generally understood that this was not due to the invention of smithing, but the problem of evil.

The problem with evil is that it requires us to believe in good.

Modern people are unwilling to believe in G-d, and so they believe instead in government. And they are convinced that the god of government can fix everything if we only give it the power.

The trouble is that while people may not believe in evil, evil very much believes in them.

The gun control debate is a policy argument based on fundamental fallacies about human nature, black markets, and what a malicious mind bent on hurting people can accomplish. Conservatives argue for empowering individuals to resist mass shooters while leftists once again chant that if we locked up all the guns and gave them to the government, it would be fine.

But if guns are the problem, why aren’t there regular mass shootings in Switzerland and Finland? In Israel, a school shooting is an attack carried out by an Islamic terrorist. And that’s dismissed as a “political” act and something utterly different than an obsessive weirdo shooting up an American school because we can’t simply find the common evil denominator in both.

If guns are the problem, why weren’t there school shootings every few months during an era when guns could be bought at every hardware store and ordered through the mail?

Muggings, carjackings, and gangland shootings in Chicago are all attributed to some general social malaise that can be solved by freeing the criminals and locking up all the guns.

As if the guns have agency and the shooters do not.
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 History demonstrates that locking up all the weapons does not stop mass murder.  The Nazis did it and then killed millions who had no weapons.  Stalin was even more successful at mass-murdering those without weapons.  If evil people get the power they will kill more than random shooters.