Uvalde: Limited Government Is Essential For The Common Good
While the political opportunists scream in an attempt to score points for their shallowly naive and uneducated positions on “gun control” regarding the Uvalde school shooting, the tragedy – and that’s what it is, a tragedy – spotlights some points. If we were a wise society – a wise electorate – we would learn from these points and make the appropriate changes through the ballot box. But that question remains.
Before I begin I wish to express my heartfelt condolences to those who lost lives on that fateful day in Uvalde. I also want to express my heartfelt support for those first responders whose duty it was to respond to that carnage. Both are scarred for life in different ways by the same event. The truly sad thing about it all is that it is an event that didn’t have to happen.
The False-Flag ‘Gun Control’ Juggernaut
To clarify my position on the issue of “gun control” and the Second Amendment. I firmly believe that inanimate objects don’t kill people. People using inanimate objects kill people. Immoral and nefarious people have used everything from stones, sticks, knives, swords, cars, explosives, ropes, and even their bare hands – in addition to guns – to murder people throughout the ages. Remove guns and those seeking to execute crimes (or acts of demented rage) will simply revert to other prior existing methods and tools.
So, I make no apologies when I say that I believe removing a law-abiding citizen’s access to firearms – of any kind – in the name of reducing or stopping the increasingly horrific criminal acts of lethal violence in our urban areas or tragic events the likes of Uvalde – executed rage at the hands of the mentally ill and the societally dysfunctional – is an incredibly stupid idea for even the stupidest among us.
Only the politically disingenuous and the clandestinely power-hungry (the latter the more dangerous of the two) believe making it harder for law-abiding citizens to own firearms will control the level of violent crimes committed by criminals who unlawfully possess firearms. Criminals don’t obey laws and those who obey laws aren’t a threat to society.
And while some amongst the partially educated demographic insist that our country has changed since the precarious political situation that existed at its genesis, a situation that warranted Second Amendment rights to provide a forceful retort to governmental tyranny, I would ask what has actually changed for the better since that time where governmental tyrannies are concerned? Does the government have more or less control over you? Are taxes fair and assessed in an equitable manner? Is there anything the government touches that doesn’t become more complicated, that isn’t more skewed to special interests, that doesn’t tax the people more, or that actually serves people’s freedoms better? Give it some thought. I’ll wait...
The Mrs. Kravits Media Needs To Be Tamed
The gotcha game played by today’s mainstream media complex is one based mostly on sensationalism with practically no deference to the facts, accuracy in reporting, or a genuine affinity for informing the public. It is a zero-sum game of getting the story first no matter how inaccurate the reporting (they can always ignore the dysinformation and contradict their reporting without consequence as they hide their irresponsibility behind the First Amendment).
To that end, we must all realize that in small towns like Uvalde – and in fact most small- and middle-sized towns, villages, and municipalities – government apparatus – and especially law enforcement – may have a designated spokesperson to engage the media when tragedy strikes, but most often those “spokespeople” or “media liaisons” are those from within the apparatus who are good at the mouth. They are not journalists or media specialists and many times they know very little about the finer points of public speaking and especially about taking loaded, agendized questions from a bloodthirsty, jackal-like media.
A great example of this comes in the “outrage” story produced by CNN that centered on words only a journalist could twist into a story.
Wolf Blitzer, usually an artist in the sensationalistic, offered a rare question of cogency in asking if “current best practices” mandate officers responding to an active shooter incident disable a shooter as quickly as possible regardless of how many officers are on scene.
Texas Department of Public Safety state police spokesman Lt. Chris Olivarez offered this ham-handed statement:
“The active shooter situation – you want to stop the killing. You want to preserve life. But also one thing that, of course, the American people need to understand is that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is. They are hearing gunshots, they are receiving gunshots. At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where this suspect was at, they could have been shot – they could have been killed. And at that point, that gunman would have the opportunity to kill other people inside that school.”
Any probationary first responder will explain that what the Lieutenant was trying to say was that while achieving the mission is the mission, scene safety – “safety first” – is paramount in the quest to achieve that goal. A dead police officer, firefighter, or paramedic does no one any good and creates another victim; someone else to “save.” The officers had a responsibility to both others of unknown number still in the school, to those who may have been still being held at gunpoint by the mentally ill Salvador Ramos, and to their fellow officers not to stampede into the building without gleaning intelligence (read: finding our everything they could about the shooter’s location) in order to minimize an already sickening loss of life.
But the mainstream media’s addiction to “information now, even before the facts are determined” resulted in the inaccurate explanation of standard operating procedure which has led to fickle, opportunistic elected officials feigning outrage and promising investigations in a wrong-headed push to find someone to blame...that is someone besides the shooter himself and society’s failure on the issue of mental health.
It needs to be noted here that, according to The Washington Examiner:
“Three officers initially breached the school through the same door as the shooter, where he said officers were ‘taking gunfire.’ At that point, they called for tactical teams and additional backup ‘that could arrive to assist not only with the situation but also to assist in evacuating students and teachers’...
“Eventually, backup did arrive. A member of a Border Patrol tactical unit that arrived later on has been credited with killing the shooter, identified by authorities as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, after breaching the classroom in which he was barricaded...they were assisted by local officers who arrived with ballistic shields and noted that at least one Border Patrol agent received minor injuries in the raid.”
Imagine The Level Of Training That Could Be Afforded...
Before I get to the point I want to make in this section I would like to say that speaking as a former professional first responder (firefighter/paramedic), I can attest to the fact that every department spends countless hours training. I was lucky enough to serve in a community that had the resources to train its law enforcement, firefighters, and EMS personnel to the levels of the elite. Because of that, we were trained to be prepared to execute in the face of adversity.
But, law enforcement officers, firefighters, and EMS personnel are human beings and, therefore, must always face the test that a “baptism by fire” affords in real-life situations such as Uvalde. Even the best training in the world cannot prepare you for the raw confrontation of an actual event. You train to gain knowledge and experience and as a professional you condition yourself to rely on that training. But no amount of training in simulation can prepare you for the real deal.
That understood, government’s original and paramount purpose is public safety; making sure our private property and our persons are safe and secure. Everything else exists under that social compact priority. Public safety comes before roads, parks, social services, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, public transportation, and anything else held in municipal, county, state, and federal budgets. Just like first responders, governments are also tasked with “safety first.”
Uvalde, like most municipalities of varying sizes – from large to small – spends about 40 percent of its annual budget on Emergency Services including law enforcement. The other 60 percent is allocated to other budget items down the line from the mandate of public safety, the only true mandate of government.
For a moment, consider all of the “services” our elected officials have co-opted into government budgets. Some, we can all agree, truly serve the common good: roads, sanitation, utilities, the things we need established to use as conduits to public safety. Understanding the government’s public safety mandate explains why, in the beginning, education was left to the community; why school districts are independent taxing bodies for the most part.
But our governmental budgets have become bloated with emotion-based and politically opportune items that before their being co-opted into the purview of government existed in the private sector and, specifically, in the charitable private sector. These “budget items” are detached from a direct line to “safety and security.” And when you add the fact that government at every level is now contributing to school board budgets (as a means to have a seat at the curriculum “input” table) you can see just how convoluted that direct line to “safety and security” has become.
In a more general way to couch this, imagine how much better trained our first responders could be in every location across the country if narcissistic, fringe special interest groups weren’t demanding and brow-beating the elected classes into facilitating their ideology into unnecessary training mandates (example: diversity and critical race theory “training”).
Imagine how many active shooter training exercises could be funded and how many of those training sessions could facilitate the coordination of first responder resources if our elected leaders weren’t addicted to spending taxpayer dollars on items like tattoo removal programs in California, the creation of virtual space exhibitions in Texas, and water taxi services in Pleasure Beach, Connecticut, or doling out $15 billion to “save” the entertainment industry, $22.7 billion for colleges and universities (which glean revenue through government-subsidized tuition and mega grants), $10 million for “gender programs” in Pakistan, and $15 million to Ireland for, well, “just because,” just to mention a few of the thousands of pork projects government deems within the boundaries of the “common good.”
My point is this. The special interest spending that the elected class has legislated into their purview does not – in any way, shape, or form – equate to the “common good” and, in fact, it is taking away from the critical mandate of public safety. The government – at all levels – had and has no right to use taxpayer dollars for anything not directly related to public safety and security.
And don’t get me started on the opportunistic, special interest, false flag operation that was the “Defund the Police” movement. Uvalde should bury that stupidity in a paupers grave reserved for the terminally stupid.
You’ll notice we aren’t hearing much from those charlatans and their sycophantic idiot followers.
It Takes A Trigger-Finger To Slaughter A Village
Lost in all the emotion-based manipulation emanating from the fascist and opportunistic Left is the fact that while they rail on about how we must establish government programs to “minister” to the least among us, they have done nothing to promote a benevolent engagement with the mentally ill.
It is clear that Salvador Ramos was a troubled individual. His background proves this without a doubt. But in a culture where the powers that be sanction the inane perspective that biological males can “identify” as doorknobs and the pedestrianism of 22 different sexual orientations, championing anything that addresses mental health is a political minefield not to be transversed for the “victimization” Left.
How does an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez support addressing the mental health issue in the United States without needing to also support at least a generic definition of acceptable behavior, especially in the age of being able to “identify” as a race or a gender of preference?
It is for this reason the Left consistently avoids the issue of mental health in our country. They would rather mandate health insurance coverage that allows for a biological male to receive treatment for pregnancy than engage in something that would tapper their ability to Balkanize society for their narcissistic political purposes.
And, so, the Salvador Ramos’s of the United States will continue to kill and the disingenuous, opportunistic Left will continue to say it is the fault of the inanimate object, all while the charlatan mainstream media complex continues to blame law enforcement and law-abiding citizens.
But, just for a moment, imagine how potently law enforcement could respond to incidents like the mass shooting in Uvalde if we only spent tax dollars on budget items directly related to the public’s safety and security, as it was at the beginning of our Great American Experiment.
Maybe we can talk about it at a cafe in San Franciso between homeless people defecating on the sidewalks.
Today’s Headlines
Nancy Pelosi's Husband Ignored Stop Sign Before Vehicle Crash, DUI Arrest
Biden Administration Worked ‘Under the Radar’ to Give WHO More Power
Landmark Supreme Court Ruling On NY's Concealed Carry Restrictions Coming
Massive New Mexico Wildfire Traced To US Forest Service Planned Burns
