The tragic and senseless murder of children and adults and the wounding of many more at Annunciation School in Minneapolis is almost too much to process and we grieve with those who have had someone murdered in the most sacred place and during the most sacred act of worship the Catholic Church has.
As a priest who has celebrated so many school Masses, it brings tears to my eyes.
While we grieve with those who have lost loved ones, we also give thanks to God that steps were taken to mitigate against the loss of life. If not for those steps this tragedy would have been on an unbelievable scale perhaps surpassing the horror of Uvalde, Texas!
What were those pro-active steps the parish and school of Annunciation took? They locked the doors of the church once the children had entered for Mass and adults were stationed at the entrance of the church. The shooter was not allowed to enter the church. That meant he had to go around to the side of the building and start shooting blindly through stained glass windows. He could not see who he was shooting or what horror he was inflicting, but he knew to shoot low to hit children and others.
You can see from the photos above, that he could not see who he was shooting through those narrow stained glass windows.
However, if he had been able to get inside, the devastating horror would have been unbelievably greater. We thank God and those who took pro-active steps to prevent a much greater horror than what occurred.
How do we as a church and country take more pro-active steps to mitigate those who have a death wish for themselves and others through sheer hatred for human life and its sanctity?
WE MUST RESTORE A CULTURE OF PROMOTING THE SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE!
1. Our culture of promoting the murder of children on demand through abortion must be stopped by law! No more abortion! No more legal euthanasia! No more legal assisted suicide and make suicide illegal!
2. Our culture that succumbs to the corruption of our children’s moral, spiritual and mental health must be stopped especially the ideological colonization of our children’s morals and bodily integrity by the LGBTQ+++ fanatics.
3. Laws must be enacted that prevents the spiritual, moral, mental and physical abuse of minors by allowing parents or others to determine what gender a child can choose and allowing children to be transvestites and worse undergo chemical and physical castration, and mutilation of genitals. This must be outlawed for minors until a person reaches 21 years old and parents should be prosecuted for allowing children to choose that which they have no right to choose.
4. Common sense laws to prevent the sale of military type long-guns and other automatic weapons must be strengthened and background checks made and perhaps a simple psychiatric test. But let’s face it, just like during prohibition, alcohol was bootlegged, so too automatic weapons.
5. As a society we must address the social and moral morass of our country and how ideological groups, often political in nature, colonize so many away from proper morals and mores in society and promote a culture of death, a rejection of natural law and the marginalization of faith and morals.
12 comments:
Designate the Democratic Party as a terrorist organization would be a good start and then expel Catholic clergy who support it
Father,
I agree with most of your points unconditionally, except this:
"Common sense laws to prevent the sale of military type long-guns and other automatic weapons must be strengthened and background checks made and perhaps a simple psychiatric test."
A couple of points.
One, the sale and possession of automatic weapons is already highly regulated (to the point of being impossible for someone without gobs of money and connections to an already highly-select group of gunowners) under the National Firearms Act. Anyone who wants one must: pay a federal tax; apply for transfer of the gun, including submitting fingerprints and passport photos; and undergo a months-long background check by the ATF. Moreover, the gun itself must have been previously registered with the ATF between 1934 and 1986. States may (and many do) have stricter requirements or outright bans on such weapons.
As to the question of "military type long guns," the picture is more complicated. For starters, most gun homicides--the ones that don't get the headlines--involve other types of weapons, usually handguns. Another difficulty is the definition of "military type"; does this mean ones that have or allow pistol-type grips, muzzle shrouds, certain types of sights... and on, and on. A growing number of "assault weapons" laws fail for simply throwing the dart at the wall of gun modifications/styles and simply picking out the ones that look most scary to low-info voters, such as using too much black plastic. Basically, what I'm getting at is, laws affecting "military type" guns--which means something different to any given person--rarely involves the exercise of common sense. Usually, it involves arbitrary bans and regulations on innocuous features pushed by lobbyists and anti-gun legislators.
Nick
We already have laws that prevent sales of automatic firearms in this country, and we have for decades. None of these shooters are using automatic firearms.
Good point--beyond the already-strict regulation of automatic firearms, I can't think of a single shooting in decades (maybe ever?) in the US using one
Nick
Re: Automatic Firearms - On May 16, hoping most Americans wouldn’t notice, it agreed to a settlement that requires the Department of Justice to “not enforce the machine gun ban against any device that functions like a forced reset trigger.” Forced reset triggers (FRTs) are designed to drastically increase a firearm’s rate of fire by mechanically resetting the trigger after each shot instead of relying on the shooter’s release. The result is a firing rate nearly identical to a machine gun."
Re: Ease of gun sales in Georgia- (Taken from the Cash for Arms Website) Selling a gun in Georgia privately is clearly on the simple side. There are no background checks, purchase permits, and waiting periods to worry about. Private sales are completely legal in Georgia. You can sell directly to other individuals without involving a licensed dealer. You're not required to perform background checks when selling your guns privately in Georgia. You're free to sell any type of gun, including those sometimes categorized as "assault weapons. Georgia doesn't restrict these sales. You're free to sell any type of gun, including those sometimes categorized as "assault weapons." Georgia doesn't restrict these sales. You can only sell handguns to individuals 18 and older when selling privately. There’s no age restriction for rifles and shotguns. You can sell magazines of any capacity. There are no state-imposed limits to worry about.
Common Sense tells me that rifles and shotguns should not be sold to minors.
Common sense tells me that high-capacity magazines should not be sold - period.
Common sense tells me that a Law Enforcement background check on a gun purchaser would be a pretty good idea. This would help in establishing a common sense waiting period.
These are not "arbitrary" regulations. A high-capacity magazine is not an "innocuous feature."
The FRT settlement had to do with a Supreme Court case that previously decided that the ATF could not create a regulation that was outside its Congressionally-mandated scope. The ATF had effectively amended the statutory definition of "machinegun" in a way that is not permissible since it is Congress, and not executive branch agencies, that get to create these definitions. So, the administration had to settle because the Supreme Court's decision made the case non-viable.
Rifles and shotguns cannot legally be sold to minors.
It is illegal to sell automatic firearms unless the very strict laws on such sales are met, even among private individuals.
"Assault weapons" is a meaningless phrase lacking a definition. So, it makes sense that there are no regulations on such sales. There are, however, regulations depending of the type of weapon involved -- see above.
High-capacity magazine is generally defined as one with a greater than 15-round capacity. Some firearms come from the manufacturer with a magazine meeting that definition.
I'm not a gun person, but I am a lawyer who works with the gun laws every day at the federal level. So, my take is that most of what you're saying is already the law. And those things don't seem to deter bad actors because such people are not dissuaded by illegality and regulation in the first place.
"The result is a firing rate nearly identical to a machine gun."
Gun control advocates state that FRTs allow a rate of fire of up to 15 rounds per second. Machine guns fire anywhere from hundreds to over a thousand rounds per minute. "Common Sense" whispers in my ear that those two numbers are not "nearly identical."
Moreover, FRTs still require an individual trigger pull per round, intrinsically limiting the rate of fire a semiautomatic firearm equipped with such a trigger.
"Common Sense tells me that rifles and shotguns should not be sold to minors."
Is this legal in Georgia? If so, it's unique nationwide. =
As with many matters of policy, so-called "common sense" varies from person to person.
It's worth noting that a politician voting to keep high-capacity magazines legal does not support an intrinsic evil, while a politician voting to keep or expand the legality of abortions does. The former is not barred from Communion; the latter, with due process of canon law, is.
"Common sense tells me that a Law Enforcement background check on a gun purchaser would be a pretty good idea. This would help in establishing a common sense waiting period."
It would not, because almost all gun-purchase background checks take approximately a few minutes.
I don't think I trust what this "Common Sense" tells you about this subject.
Nick
My mistake: I did the math wrong in comparing the RPM of machine guns and rounds per second of a forced reset trigger. While many machine guns exceed the rate of fire that can be achieved by a FRT, some are comparable to what a FRT can theoretically achieve. That being said, an FRT still requires an individual trigger-pull to fire each round. I can't find any data on whether an individual can, or can learn, to move their finger with sufficient force to pull a gun's trigger up to the stated fifteen times a second.
As for whether Giffords.org is an objective source on this subject, I won't comment.
Nick
Thank you Marc for your most COMMONSENSE approach to this and clarity. Those in the clergy and others who think that gun laws alone will stop a man man hell bent on killing people, are taking a political position. The key is to create respect for human life, marginalize and outlaw special interest groups trying to corrupt our youth with godless ideologies, such as the corruption of our youth with the LGBTQ++++ ideologies. Strict laws on protecting minors from predators who want to allow them to change the sex or whatever are needed. Abortion needs to be outlawed. Euthanasia needs to be outlawed, Assisted suicide needs to be outlawed. Our constitution does not allow the purchase of all weapons and we have to deal with that and also the black market that procures and sells weapons illegally and now 3-D printers, which can manufacture weapons for whoever has one and knows how to use it.
Guns are lethal and access / use should be restricted in any civilised society. The modern USA is not much different to the Wild West!
In addition to this is the media, traditional and now social and the dark web that corrupt the morals the young and old, radicalize the young and old and cover sick tragedies, live as they happen and then with live commentary for hours and days. A sick person sees all of this and envies those who have their few minutes of fame even if the commit suicide or are taken out by law enforcement or those who have a weapon to protect others.
big benny,
Access to and use of firearms are restricted, and have always been, to some degree. The burning questions are "how much," "when," "where," "whom," etc. Some say more, less often, fewer places, and so on; others say the opposite.
Turning that conversation into one of glib observations and self-supported assertions that only one side has decency, reason, and so on is just self-defeating.
In my state, Democrats got a compromise legislation package passed a few years ago and every proposal since then has been DOA, as the voters and their representatives have made it clear that "that's enough for now." It's just the political process, and one that seems almost quaint after Trump has broken the brains of many on both sides of the American political spectrum.
Nick
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