Relativistic America: Neither safe nor free

The Florida mass shooting, which even a minimally competent state could have prevented, is a window on a relativistic America that is neither safe nor free. For decades, gun-control liberals, who corrupted civil society and called it “progress,” have proposed more government and less morality. But all that produces is an out-of-control society in which responsibility lessens everywhere. It has given us broken homes, broken schools, and broken government.

All of the hasty gun-control proposals under discussion amount to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. If a country’s culture is sick, it doesn’t matter what legislation passes. The people won’t follow the law and a corrupt and incompetent government won’t enforce it.

A discussion that is presented as a trade-off between security and liberty isn’t. It is just one more step toward a future without either. The least emotionally satisfying “fix” to the problem of gun violence — because it sounds so abstract and musty, and because it would require uprooting the moral relativism of the last fifty years or so — is the only real one: restoring civil society. As it disintegrated, America went from fewer laws and less violence to more laws and more violence.

Relativism and totalitarianism, which combine to form much of the thrust of modern politics, reinforce each other. Decades of moral relativism have sapped civil society, causing a spike in terror and disorder. Aspiring totalitarians then point to those horrors and call for bigger and bigger government. Gun-control liberalism rests on that reinforcing paradox — the permissive society giving birth to the Leviathan.

In that vision lies the realization of the founding fathers’ worst fears. They didn’t want less morality and more government but more morality and less government — the Ten Commandments, not ten new gun laws after every shooting.