A tragedy that possibly could have been avoided - but not in the way you think.
Monterey Park, California. January 21, 2023. 11 seniors in a dance studio killed by a deranged 72 year old man.
Monterey Park, California
Once again, we are left with the pain of a mentally unstable person ending the lives of innocent people. Doesn’t matter what city, race, economic standing or gender. People died at the hands of a sick, unbalanced mind. Naturally, he decided to take his own life. Whatever was going through his mind wasn’t good. It was pure evil. Maybe that’s why most of these murderers kill themselves in the end. The evil catches up to them. I just wish “evil” made him first on the list instead of last. Save us all the grief.
And once again the calls for more gun control and restrictions of constitutional rights flood the media and all we’re left with is anger, sadness, pain, and the seemingly never-answered question: How do we stop this from happening?
I have a few thoughts on this.
Open our eyes and stop with the “It could never happen here” idealism. There were signs.
The Monterey Park shooter used a legally purchased firearm to murder 11 people and kill himself that he purchased at least 24 years ago. For 24 years the guns weren’t evil until he decided to make them evil.
What nearly all mass shooters over the past 20 years have taught us but we don’t want to acknowledge is that there were signs of what was to come.
Uvalde
Parkland
Virginia Tech
Aurora
Sandy Hook
Sutherland Springs
Now add Monterey Park to the list.
Obvious signs that we chose to ignore either by ignorance, negligence or the sheer delusion that we could somehow “fix” this man or woman through our own human skill. Signs were there. Everyone saw them. Family, friends, teachers, social workers, healthcare workers, psychologists, law enforcement, military personnel. Everyone had an opportunity, no one took it seriously enough to step in. And this was not just hearsay or “I have a feeling…” knowledge. There was tangible, physical evidence that this evil was going to manifest itself somehow in the very near future.
The majority of deranged mass killers gave us warning signs that we chose to ignore.
Huu Can Tran visited the Hemet Police Department, twice in one week, alleging fraud, theft and poisoning attempts on his life by family members 10 - 20 years earlier. Twelve days later this elderly man goes hunting for his wife at a dance hall where he also accused the instructors of “saying evil things about him” - and 11 people died.
Two weeks is a long time to not follow up on the delusional accusations of a troubled old man with guns who had an arrest record from 1990 of illegal possession of a firearm.
There were enough signs to investigate.
Stop putting Band-Aids on broken bones.
We look for the easy way out to solve the problem. There is no easy way. It takes work that’s hard and unpleasant.
We need to identify WHAT turned him into a killer instead of obsessing over the tool that was used, to guard against future incidents.
Chicago is a cesspool of violent, deadly crime. If you could somehow snap your fingers and make every gun in the city disappear you know what you would have? A cesspool of violent, deadly crime… but with knives, pipes, bats, chains, explosives or anything else the people can get their hands on. No matter what deadly tool you choose to eliminate if there is no hope, opportunity to do/be better, poverty, lack of quality education, career choices and training, stable family structure and a pervasive “victim’ culture… nothing will change. Solving these problems is the first step in reducing violence and death. But that takes hard WORK and an acknowledgment that this is the main problem.
People that have a stable home life, two parents, a trade or career that provides them a living, opportunities to better themselves, tend not to commit violent crime. But after decades of ignoring this simple fact the problems have become so huge that it seems impossible to fix. So, it’s easier to find a scapegoat - guns - than it is to tackle the elephant in the room.
We need to acknowledge we have a mental health problem in this country. If we continue to deny this things are only going to get worst.
If I still had a kid in college I’d make him/her major in psychiatry because it’s going to be a growth industry very, very soon.
Mental instability, for a number of reasons, is growing. The mental health of a 72 year old man who made allegations that his family was trying to poison him should not be casually dismissed as confused ramblings of a harmless codger.
As a society, fear and anxiety seem to consume us and social media fans the flames. The “American Dream“ starts at $600K. Unemployment is just an email/text away. Crushing debt that people can’t seem to get out from under. Fear of another pandemic around the corner. We have a hard time deciding what bathrooms to use. Educated professionals believe that 5 year olds are capable of choosing their own gender. Cancel Culture that has people watching their every word for fear of losing friend, status or even employment? Guilt for what your ancestors did centuries ago? Guilt for what they didn’t do? Guilt for getting all of the entitlements your specific systemic oppression entitles you to but still not getting any further ahead and there’s no more cards left to play? The regret and anger a man is going to feel when he realizes that hacking off his penis and a life of slavery to female hormones still isn’t making him a woman in the eyes of society is going to hit like a ton of bricks. That we are actually debating whether or not it’s acceptable for a 14 year old girl to self-mutilate because she “feels” that she’s really a boy deep down inside should give us a clue as to how mentally unstable we will be in 20 years. The fear of not being “liked”. We are becoming more anxiety-filled but with less ways and skills to cope. Yes, mental illness is a huge problem and it’s not going away.
This truth will not sit well with a lot of people… we can’t stop violence. Especially when we choose to separate it into neat little categories to serve an agenda.
The stated goal of gun control advocates (even the most well intentioned ones) is to “Stop gun violence”. There is not a 2A supporter on the planet that doesn’t want to prevent gun violence. The problem is that they have made it sound as if once they finally have all the bans, registrations and government oversight they deem prudent in place, gun violence will cease to exist. The media, the politicians, celebrities, intellectuals have convinced society that eliminating guns will stop “gun violence” and we will be a safer country. They have put so much emphasis on the “gun” that they have ignored the root cause of it all.
Evil exists. We can’t legislate it out of existence. We don’t have a pill to prescribe to end it. There will always be bad people doing bad things.
We live in a fallen world. Evil is alive and well. Sin has a stranglehold on the people of this world. Wicked and vile thoughts that become actions are not on the decrease, they are increasing and rapidly picking up steam. The only thing holding it back is the Holy Spirit working in the lives of God’s people. If you think things are bad now I guarantee you will not want to be around when we’re gone. Evil will not be vanquished from God’s creation until Christ returns and makes all things new. Until then, this is the world we live in.
But is does not mean we can do nothing.
It just means that when listening to people spout man-made solutions as the “only thing that will prevent gun violence”, bear in mind that man-made solutions only go so far. When that solution doesn’t make all the world a perfect utopia of “zero evil”, the anxiety of failure will force them into another knee-jerk solution which will be as odorous as the previous one. Then the next thing you know we’re looking in the mirror and 1939 is staring right back at us.
I believe anti-2A people hold on so tightly to this myopic belief that peaceful utopia will be achieved once all the guns are gone because the truth is too much for them to handle.
Acknowledging that there will always be evil in our midst also means acknowledging that good people must always have the tools necessary to defend themselves from this evil.
There is so much more we should really be concentrating on to curb violence in our country. Because we can’t outlaw evil we should have every right and ability to defend ourselves from it. Restricting or banning the legal, lawful ownership of a tool because some criminal used it to kill 7 people is, in itself, criminal. We have the ability to stop much of this before it even gets started. The evil we can’t stop, we should have the ability to defend against it without hindrance.
Focusing on the tool that evil uses instead of guarding against evil itself doesn’t protect us, it just makes us easier victims. The longer we ignore the root causes of preventable violence the harder it is to get to the root problem. It becomes a part of society that we become conditioned to live with.
When a drunk idiot kills a family in a minivan, a couple of kids out on a date, a mom with a stroller in a crosswalk, we don’t blame the car, or the six tequila shots. We blame the drunk. No one looks to ban alcohol (we tried that). We don’t find Toyota complicit in the crime for building the “machine of death”. We don’t keep tabs on how many bottles of bourbon someone bought. Because the majority of Americans drink alcoholic beverages we accept the deaths by rightfully blaming the user, not the drink.
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