Episode 118

How do we solve gun violence in the U.S.? Can the 2nd amendment still stand in a secular society? Only a few days before the publishing of this podcast, California experienced a mass shooting that claimed 13 lives despite its extensive gun control laws. If gun control is not the answer, what is? MD joins us on this episode of the Removing Barriers podcast to discuss these things and more.

Columbine. They got their guns illegally. Straw purchase. The old saying. I mean, I said earlier, it’s a hackneyed saying, but that doesn’t make it any less true. If guns are outlawed, outlaws will have guns.

Thank you for tuning in to the Removing Barriers podcast. I’m Jay. And I’m MCG. And we’re attempting to remove barriers so we can all have a clear view of the cross.

This is episode 118 after removing by barriers. Podcast. And in this episode, we will be sitting down with MD to discuss mass shooting, gun control, and politics. MD, welcome back to the Removing Barriers podcast. Thank you. It’s good to be here. Great.

Another tough topic. You always seem to give me the good ones. I know. Anyway, let’s start with the history of my shooting in the US. Well, when you first brought that topic up, I thought about it and realized that for all my opinions, that’s all they were. I really didn’t have much other than preconceived notions. So I did a little research, probably emphasis on the word little, the phrase little. But I did a Google search on the history of mass shootings. I started with in the United States. I went to the entire world. I really didn’t find anything on the entire world. But one of the interesting things I found was that since so many of the mass shootings we have heard about in the last ten, maybe 20 years have emphasized how recent they are, that there’s no old history, they didn’t happen before the last two decades. Actually, I found that 258 years ago was the first recorded mass shooting in the United States. Four Native Americans invaded a schoolhouse in what is now Greencastle, Pennsylvania, shot the principal and shot either nine or ten of the students in the classrooms, left two survivors. There’s some confusion about how many there actually were total, but that’s 256 years ago.

Now, as it happens, I was 41 years an electronics engineer and I was very well versed in the history of television, which has been blamed for a huge number of the mass shootings software gaming, which didn’t come along until long after television, but DeForest didn’t design and build the first television vacuum tube until the 1940s. Shooting by the Lenape Indians was in 1748. Do you know what motivated the Indians? It was a rebellion. And that’s the only thing I have on the topic. But I do know that back then, indians in Pennsylvania were not well treated, native Americans were not, and they weren’t allowed to go to school. So whether this was related to that or not, I don’t know, but obviously there was a great deal of anger involved. Oh, definitely. And that brings another topic. I have a history of shootings in America. This is a history that actually leaves out anything earlier than 1990. 118, 91, I’m sorry, 1891. And I started going through reading these to the St. Mary’s Parochial School in Newburgh, New York. 1891. Parson Hall School, Liberty, Mississippi. 1891. Cayman Band school massacre. There’s a pattern developing here, and the pattern has to do with school shootings. There were a tremendous number of them, I think probably because I did do a lot of reading on the topics of those various shootings, and they were all anger related. But there was a school principal who invaded his own school and committed a mass shooting. There was a college professor who entered a school and committed a mass shooting. In both of those cases, the men were fired from their jobs. Doesn’t give a reason for the firing, but both were angry about losing their jobs, just going to the employee. Well, they weren’t just going to their employers. They killed their own families first. I have read of a shooting in Asia that occurred because the man was destitute and he did not want his wife and his two daughters to live in destitution. So he killed them and then killed himself. He was angry because he’d lost his job, but he was also terrified of leaving behind family who he couldn’t care for. Is that considered my shooting? Some of the articles I’ve read attempt to create a it’s called a Taxonomy of Shootings. A listing by type, by characteristics. Some of them try to eliminate anything that didn’t involve politics or didn’t involve money, and some of them tried to eliminate anything that involved family in any way. The problem when you do that is that half of the shootings involved someone in the family being killed by the shooter before he went on. He or she went on to create the rest of the shooting. And by and large, almost every one of them was a man who was the shooter. In fact, I don’t remember finding any that involved a woman being the shooter. So if you eliminate family, you’ve eliminated half the mass shootings. And one of the taxonomies says if there are more than four victims, it’s a mass shooting regardless. Well, there are no shootings involved in any of my reading that didn’t involve four or more people. Right.

This is interesting here, because the FBI doesn’t have a definition for a mass shooter. They do have a definition for active shooter, which is what most people will go by in terms of well, not most people. Most people, when they look up FBI data, they will get the active shooter data. And from the data I look at the FBI in 2021, there were, I think, 61 active shooting sitterations, and one of them was female. The other 60 were male. So that brings up a question at what point does an active shooter become historically a mass shooter? That’s a good question. Most folks will describe it as maybe four or more, five or more. That’s why the data is so sketchy, especially when it comes to news outlets and stuff like that. Because you’ll listen to CNN, I will say there have been 105 mass shooting just far for the year. Then you might go to another news organization and they might say there have been 95 mass shootings so far for the year. And it’s all determined on how they are defined in mass shooting. Some of them include the shooter, some of them don’t. Some of them say it’s three or more, some say it’s five or more, whatever. But there’s not a standard definition of my shooting. That’s the problem.

Yeah, I’m with you on that. And in fact, in four articles that I specifically read and brought with me to refer to, the definitions change, and it doesn’t appear to be politically related, although certainly politics comes into it. What are some of those definitions you have? Well, let’s see. This particular article just lists the shootings, and it’s the one that starts with the shooting. In the 17 Hundreds brief History of Violent Crime aims to shed light on how we understand it particularly. Okay. Aims to allow us to learn about how mass shooting incidents are categorized. All right. This one. All right, so the mass shooting is violent crime rates that we witnessed today, particularly those that happen on school property or those related to military or ex military personnel, are seldom a reflection of today’s generation, but reflect hard to explain violent crime dynamics that have existed for a long time. Okay, so that isn’t talking about the definition of and yet it does refer to some defining characteristics. I don’t know that I printed out any of those articles that try to limit what is counted as mass shootings. Yeah, the ones I’ve seen, the definitions that are all over the place. Yeah. And that is a problem. None of these article doesn’t attempt to do that. And I’m thinking, I’ve got another article. I should have a third article here that I brought with me. Otherwise I’m going to what we know about Mass Shootings in the United States and gunmen who carried them out columnbine High School was seen as a watershed moment, the worst mass shooting at a school in the country’s history. Now it ranks fourth. There have been three subsequent to that that were worse. Goodness. And so those, just for reference, are Sandy Hook, Marjorie Stoneman, Douglas and Rob elementary in Uvaldi, Texas. So, taken in order, each one got worse. And that’s one of the most interesting things about that. And it led me to wonder and I don’t know, I’m not going to speculate on whether it would be the case or not, but I wonder if the publication publicization of each one doesn’t lead to the next one being worse.

Yeah, I read that, too. I read that. There’s a lot of copycats, so there’s a lot of folks that old stuff. That’s why the media now is trying to keep the name and stuff like that of the person who actually do it out of the spotlight. But yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah. So this particular database that these come from was compiled by criminologists who study them. Four of them, including the one at Rob elementary, involved a killing at another location, always a family member at a residence. Most recent perpetrator shot his grandmother prior to going to the school in Yuvaldi. Majority of mass school shootings were carried out by a lone gunman with just two columbine. And the 1998 at Westside School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, carried out by two gunmen. In all, some 129 people were killed in the attacks, at least 166 victims injured. The choice of gunmen to describe the perpetrators is accurate. All of the mass school shootings in our database were carried out by men or boys. Average, the age of those involved in carrying out the attacks was 18. I did see that one of the cases involved a shooter who was 48 years old at the time of the shooting. Yeah, I’ve seen the age range range from twelve to 65, and I hadn’t seen 65, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all. That wasn’t mass shooting, that was active shooter for the FBI.

Yeah. The thing that kind of came back to me hauntingly was clear back when I was a teenager, two very wealthy young men, they were, I think, both 17 years old at the time, killed their parents and then went on a cruise, I think. But they killed their parents in order to have the money to be able to go on the cruise. Yeah. Recently, there was a ten year old kid who killed his mum so he can go on her Amazon accountant and buy one of those virtual wanted to buy I think it was an Oculus rift. Right. One of those virtual reality things. Yeah. Interestingly, this article by the Criminologists refers to a military style weapon rather than the much more ubiquitous comment nowadays and assault weapon. Right. The interesting thing about that is that by definition, every long gun is an assault weapon, every sidearm is an assault weapon. Well, that’s true. I mean, you think about what they’re for and you can sugar coat it and say, wow, we hunt with them, we target shoot with them. Yeah, we do that, too, but that isn’t why they were designed and that isn’t what they’re for. And it really is true that if all you were ever going to do was to hunt or target shoot with a weapon, you wouldn’t need born one round. Right.

Well, let me ask you, in your lifetime, when was the first time you heard or were conscious that they were a mass shooting in the US? The first time that I heard of a mass shooting in the US. How old were you, you think, when you first heard that? I probably was overseas in the Navy at the time, so I would have been somewhere between 18 and 27 years old. Well, 18 and 25. I was 25. We came back from Japan which mass shooting was that? Was that columbine? Oh, no. Columbine was long after we came back. This probably would have been one that occurred in California. I’m thinking maybe the Santa Cruz shooting, but I don’t know the details of it. It was sketchy because when we lived overseas, we really didn’t pay a lot of attention to news. Here in the United States, we were busy making a living. It’s kind of representative of conservatives politically that we tend to keep our heads down and keep busy doing our work. So when things like that occur, if they don’t directly affect our work, and mine didn’t. I was working in military intelligence. I wasn’t working in civilian and police criminal intelligence. We just didn’t really connect to them very much. Nowadays it’s much harder not to connect because the daily news cycle, it’s in your news feeds, it’s in your emails. There’s no way to avoid knowing about it now. But understand that when I came back from Japan, we still didn’t have an Internet. I don’t mean we didn’t. I mean the United States really didn’t have an Internet. When I got out of the Navy in 1982, I went to work as a contractor for a military and government contracting organization. We had a mill address email. And in order to get my email, I still had to dial up on a modem from my office to connect, to get email and get email. I didn’t have email. I don’t even know what email was yet at the time. I got my first computer on my desk. And being a computer guy, that wasn’t a big deal because I got a Macintosh computer, an IBM computer and an Apple computer. And within about a month, I’d learned enough about programming to be able to make all three of them talk to each other, which surprised my boss no end. He didn’t know they could do that. He asked me, and I said, that’s why he hired me, because you didn’t know how to do that. But I mean, the point is, they were all having to use dial up modems to get online. We were building a network within our building at the time, but again, it was connected to we talk about dating myself, the DARPA net. Go back in history and find the DARPA net. It’s almost a challenge. You might not find very much information about it called that. It was then called mill net. It was then called oh shoot, I think then it was called the Network. But Linus Torvald still had not written the software to allow people to access it. Tim Berners Lee had built Unix to directly access it, but that was the first time anybody had access. So the news just didn’t get to us. If it wasn’t in the newspaper, if it wasn’t on the radio, we didn’t get it right over in Japan, we didn’t get United States newspapers. So do you think you have gotten worse or just that the news is more prevalent?

Well, looking at these articles and looking at the spread of the mass shootings, I suspect it’s probably more a matter of the combination of the shootings have gotten more prevalent because they’ve gotten more airtime, which resulted in the copycats. But it doesn’t appear that we’ve really added that many. And the one thing that really became clear in reading these articles, looking at history, we’ve decried kids watching too many violent TV programs, playing too many violent games on their computers. You know, it’s all this exposure. No, it’s actually not, because the beginning of this and many of the mass shootings occurred before there even was widespread communications.

Then what is it? How did we get here? What do you think is driving mass shootings? Common issue in every analysis, regardless of the politics of the analyst anger didn’t deal with the anger properly. An overinflated view of one’s self worth didn’t deal with that properly. The first case, one of the articles referred to was an army veteran who went to visit a nightclub that was known for being a gay pickup spot. It didn’t come out until about the fourth or fifth paragraph of the analysis that he was gay. Going to meet a gay partner. You could argue that. Are you talking about Orlando? No, long before this. That was 1949. Oh, wow. Yeah. Not long out of the US army. Not long after the Second World War ended. In fact, not even with the Second World War. Yeah, second World War had ended by then. 44. 45 in Europe. I don’t know whether he served in Asia or in Europe, but the war was over both theaters by then. So the clear common analysis is whether any of them had ever known Jesus Christ as their savior, whether any of them had ever experienced salvation, I don’t know. But they were all in a place that indicates they didn’t they were all in a place that indicates they had a great need in their hearts, had a big hole. Shooting people didn’t fill the hole. Oh, definitely. But since most of them killed themselves or were killed by law enforcement, I don’t notice a lot of the good guy with the gun showing up back then. But it may be just because it wasn’t referred to as a good guy with a gun. Right. But all the shooters died.

So I remember you saying that when you were in school, you guys had, like, a rifle group or something like that, where you actually take your 22 long rifle caliber. That was in high school. High school, yeah. And that was in San Jose, California, which, if anybody knows about Silicon Valley, they know about San Jose, California, before San Jose became Silicon Valley. But it was on the cusp of it. Yeah. And we would leave high school to go to the local range, which was run by a retired military man and it was an armory range. It belonged to San Jose, California. And our guns would be sticking out all the windows of the Volkswagen bus because twelve kids in that Volkswagen bus couldn’t fit their rifles inside the bus with us. We didn’t get any calls about the police coming to check us out. They knew where we were going. Junior school. Dave, did you hear of any mass shooting at schools? Never. But yet you guys were allowed to have technically guns at school. More than technically a 22 long rifle. Firing a 22 long rifle round is effectively deadly out to a mile, although its accuracy is not much beyond 150 yards. Right. But it’s a very small round. Well, sure, it’s a small round, but you get hit in the head by it and you’re going to be dead. You get hit in the heart by it and you’re going to be dead. Yeah, definitely. I mean, there’s no question at all. It’s a lethal round. By the way, the 5.56 millimeter M 16, the 223 round in the AR 15, right, 223 refers to a 22 caliber round that is three 1007 inch larger in its absolute dimension than a plain old 22 long rifle. The round is a 55 grain round and the 22 long rifle round is, I think it’s about 36 believe. Yes, about 36 grains. So 50% more mass, much higher velocity, but no bigger diameter. So it’s effective range is much longer effective being where you can effectively aim it. Right. But as far as it being a 22 caliber round, it’s a 22 caliber round. And the 17 HMR is it’s a 17 caliber round. A BB is a .177. So basically a 17 HMR is a very high speed round of slightly greater mass than a BB. Much better ballistics because of the design of it. But it’s a killing round. It’s its purpose, it’s a hunting round.

And I personally know of a man up in Pennsylvania who hunts woodchucks. Actually not woodchucks, he hunts groundhogs. Groundhogs hit is about the size of tennis ball. The longest range shot I know of that he took on a groundhog and he had that one toxidermied and mounted with witnesses from seven different people, some family members and some not. On the shot he took was at 1736 yards, that’s almost a mile and the head of a groundhog about the size of a tennis ball. And the round weighed in one ear and out the other. It was a hand loaded 17 HMR round. So you talk about scary big rounds and scary small rounds and if you’re really afraid of them, you ought to be afraid of anything. Well, I’ve seen YouTube videos where people hunt wild hogs with air rifles. Yeah. They just aim for the head. Sure, sure.

Well, seemingly, according to the media and to even the FBI report act active shooter or active shooter situation has increased, and I think from 2020 to 2021, it was like a 50% increase or something like that. So why do you think we have seemingly seen more of these things? Is it mental health issues or the removal of God from school or the removal of religion? From the culture you alluded to video games, the lack of human to human interactions that we have seen now, or even evolutionary teachings. Why do you think you see the increase here? What’s going on with kids today, especially because you’re seeing a lot of 18 year olds. They talk about Yugealdi and also Buffalo, New York, and a lot of others are done by young men. And then, according to the FPS assistant, there were even a twelve year old in the mix there as well. In terms of active shooting, there just seems to be young men especially, that something is happening and they’re snapping. Is it fatherless homes? What, in your opinion, you think is going on that we have seen or seemingly seeing more active shooting, more mass shooting situations? I think as soon as we start trying to peg it to mechanical external factors such as video games, basically ignore that. Forget about the beginning of that statement and think about, as you alluded to a godless home, a godless society, a godless school. Absolutely lack of an effective father in the household, but in many cases, lack of an effective mother in the household also, but go back again to know God. I found it really interesting when I was driving buses for the church that we all attend. One of the routes I drove had 54 people who rode my bus pretty regularly, and the oldest one of them was a lady we called Miss Hazel. She was 87 years old. And, oh, by the way, I’m the only white guy out of the whole 55 people on that bus. And they ranged in age from five year old kids to Miss Hazel. But when Miss Hazel was on that bus, those kids and the adults behaved. When Ms. Hazel wasn’t on that bus, there was a teenage girl who stepped up, but they didn’t all pay attention to her. So we’re talking about no men at all on the bus, but the girl who stepped up, she and her brother who was on the bus were pretty well behaved, but her brother was somewhat of a problem child. No men anywhere in any of the families. And these were kids who were attending church regularly. And when we didn’t go to pick them up, they called us to ask why not the next day they wanted to be there. When Miss Hazel couldn’t be there, it was because of her health. That was pretty rare. But none of them, to my knowledge, ever went on or even thought about going on, to even have a fistfight with someone, let alone shoot someone over a real or imagined slight. And I would say it was early exposure, continuous exposure to the gospel to the love of God. Whether they accepted him personally or not, it had an impact on their lives. I would say that the impact would have been much greater had they had a father in their lives, but they didn’t.

So you think it’s more lack of Godly principles to remove a God from a society where people no longer have a value place on human life? Or would you say maybe more like what the secular news organizations are saying is probably mental health? A lot of these guys tend to be bullied. They tend to be quiet and reclusive and a lot of times they tend to be characterized as being weird. And that weird is mostly manifest itself in mental health or mental disabilities. If it’s mental health in the long run, I think it’s caused by a lack of proper perspective in their upbringing. I can’t help but believe that to be true. I’m reminded of the crowd I hung out with in high school, none of whom were Christians, as far as I know. I was the only 127 of us who were more or less misfits in the entire school in a school of 5000. Some of us were bullied and some of us weren’t. None of us were violent. I’ve been in touch with one of the guys who was a part of that crowd as recently as ten years ago and he still lives in San Jose, California, where we went to high school. And he told me about the histories of some of us. I’m the only one who went in the military and I wasn’t in an active shooting part of the military, interestingly enough, because I went expecting to be. But none of us, despite the fact of being bullied, none of us, despite the fact of some of us having no father in the house, none of us ever became a shooter, none of us ever went after anyone. But we all had some concept of God. And I remember having a fairly lengthy and fairly heated discussion with a number of people in the military about the history of moral law in our law and they tried to say that God had nothing to do with our laws. So I asked him then who says it’s wrong to murder someone? Well, we just came up with that idea on our own. Oh really? Do you think about Cain and Abel? You know anything about Pharaoh in Egypt and all the babies he wanted to murder? How about more recently, Pol Pot, Cambodia, 10 million Cambodians well murdered under his control. How about Ho Chi Minh? How about the Castros in Cuba? What’s common about all of those is that they were deliberately and codifiedly Godless societies. And murder is fine, but murder is not fine in America because our founding fathers said a nation without God is a nation with no future. Now we are determined to become a nation without God. And what are we finding mass shootings, mass murders. Don’t go to San Francisco, California or Sacramento, California. Don’t go to Washington DC. Because so many murderers are walking down the street within hours of being apprehended because our das in so many places are saying, well, we didn’t believe in God in the first place. We don’t have a moral foundation. We don’t believe we should have a moral foundation.

I’m sorry I’m ranting, but I feel very strongly on this topic because on every case that in that conversation that I had with those men in the military when I said where did that law come from? Well, it came from our own views. It was evolved really. Did you ever read the Bible and look at what the commandments in the Bible have to say? Did you ever look at what the wisdom of the Bible, regardless of the commandments, had to say about how man lives with man? Because the Bible is rife with that information and our laws were founded on it. So fast forward to now take God out of our society and what’s left for an anchor? We don’t have one. There is no anchor. So we get a lot of places where it’s not even safe to live anymore and where the only temporal safety we have is mess with me and you get a 40 between the eyes and that’s not safety.

Right? So I hear what you’re saying, dear. So taking God out of the society. But a lot of kids growing up today tend to be more reclusive. They tend to be more indoors and they tend to be more glued to some sort of screen. So human to human interaction is not there anymore. They probably don’t know how to solve their own problems. They don’t know how to react properly to certain things that come in their lives because maybe whatever, it’s parenting or whatever and we in a society today that if you don’t agree with people, it’s hatred. Don’t you think that would have played a role in it as well? What I’m trying to get out here is that is what the news organizations are feeding us. Does it even have some merit in the cause of mass shooting? I’m going to sound like an old fogey, so let me say first, I’m only 68 years old and I don’t consider myself old, but I grew up in small towns in northern California and in Oregon in areas where small towns meant 200 people in 1500 square mile area. My sister and I, for a notable period of our lives in many of the places we lived, were the only two friends we had because in one particular case we had to go 33 miles over the mountain to get to school. And we went to school, no question. And we didn’t walk uphill both ways in waste deep snow, barefoot. That’s not the story. But we did have to go a long ways to get to. School and we didn’t have any kids we played with it was my sister and I and frankly sometimes, and she would agree with this, we didn’t want to play with each other. We were pretty reclusive. Didn’t have a TV, okay, didn’t have a computer, they didn’t exist then. Okay, got all that. But our father was there. So did we ever have to deal with kids in school and fights? Oh yeah. Did we learn how to deal with them? Oh yeah. Who did we learn it from? Our father. Where did our father get his education? Well, it happens he was a Baptist preacher, he knew the Bible and he took us to the Bible and we talked to our mother about it. She took us to the Bible, we talked to the teachers in our schools about it. Oh gasp of incredulity. They took us to the Bible and they didn’t get in trouble for doing it. And we didn’t pick up a gun to solve our problems even when we got bullied. And when we moved to Sacramento, California, we only lived there six months and I literally do not remember a single day of school until the day that I finally panicked and hit the kid who was chasing me. I don’t remember a single day of school and I didn’t get chased home by a bully. But I do remember very clearly when a time period when he was not in the school, when another kid picked up and bullied me just as badly. And I never had any inclination to even pick up a weapon to fight with someone, nor did anybody else in the school. That wasn’t how we dealt with our problems and that was some pretty severe bullying. So I don’t think we can excuse well, he became a mass shooter because he was reclusive and he was bullied. He doesn’t excuse it. It may explain it in modern society, but it begs the description because it ignores the fact that in all probability he didn’t have a father in the house or he didn’t have an effective father in the house, he didn’t have an effective mother guiding him and he didn’t have God. And there isn’t any reason why we can’t have God even when we are reclusive, secluded in the basement, on the computer. Because clear back in Jesus Christ day when he was asked about shutting up some children who were extolling his virtues, he said if you shut them up, even the rocks will cry out to the glory of God. He’s there, you have to willingly ignore Him. And that comes back to the person.

All right, well, you’re listening to the Removing Barriers podcast. We are sitting down with MD and we are discussing mass shooting, gun control and politics. We’ll be right back.

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The question now is can mass shootings be prevented? Because the left has a laundry list of things that they believe will help us prevent circumvent mass shootings. All of the gun control legislation that has been introduced has been aimed toward that goal. That is to include red flag laws, people that might have some sort of mental issue, if you see something, say something type of thing, tell on your neighbor before they have the possibility of going off to kill people. And on the right side. When I say right side, I mean people on the right of the argument, or conservatives would say that, well, the solution to mass shootings is, as you referenced before, a good guy with a gun, or you can harden the target or things of that nature, do away with all of the gun control laws so that people can be free or equipped to defend themselves. In the instance of someone who obviously is determined to take their lives, what do you think should be done can be done in order to prevent mass shootings? When I was in high school, I was in a debate class, and it wasn’t something I like. I don’t like to debate. That’s not something I want to do. Obviously, I don’t mind talking. I just don’t like sitting an organized, rule driven debate. But we were in a debate class, and we were assigned a discussion, but not our position on the discussion. And the discussion I was assigned was the effectiveness of capital punishment, particularly the death penalty. And one of the girls in the school, who was very liberal and always willing to pick up a liberal argument, and this was clear back in 1970, stood up to make her point. She said, I would argue that capital punishment, the death penalty, has never been effective in limiting criminals and murders. Well, when it came my turn to speak, I stood up and I said, I would argue that once you lay hands on the murderer, if the death penalty is applied without any regard for external arguments, he’s found guilty by a jury of his peers. He’s executed. Recidivism will be zero because dead people don’t do it again. That’s a pretty crude way to put it, but it nonetheless is true.

I don’t think it’s possible to completely eliminate mass shootings, but some of the mass shooters don’t die in the process. They don’t die because the police don’t kill them. They don’t die because they don’t kill themselves. In history, there have been a few who have successfully thrown their weapon down and said, I surrender, and then claimed that they were insane. There have been one or two cases, I believe I remember, out in places like California. I won’t say it was California. It’d be unfair to Californians. It’s hard to be unfair to Californians, but it would be. But there have been one or two cases where the judge himself entered an insanity plea on behalf of the shooter, then let him out later on, and it wasn’t a mass shooting. But John Hinckley, who tried to kill President Reagan in order to get the attention of an actress whose name I can’t even remember, was just recently let out of prison because he is cured based on the fact that he never did it again. No duh. He was in prison that whole time. How do you do it again when you’re in prison? The problem we have is that we don’t apply the laws that we have.

We don’t need more laws until we try the ones we have, use them, see whether they work. If they don’t work, fine, I’ll go for more laws. But until we apply the ones we have, until we eliminate the draconian reactions of people whose only drive to create a new law is their emotions, I’m not willing to give them that much power or that much control. As far as the ability to stop mass shootings, I don’t know if it can be stopped beforehand, but they certainly can be stopped if the shooter is never alive to do it again. They certainly can be stopped. As was the case in the Mall up in New England not too long ago, up in the middle States not too long ago, where a young man who had willingly taken on handgun training extensive on his own saw a man with a long gun walk out of the bathroom in a mall 40 yards from where he was, and in 14 seconds, he put nine out of ten rounds of 40 caliber into the gunman. I think he got off one shot. I think the gunman got off one shot. And it wasn’t even an aimed shot. That was pretty effective. It certainly stopped a mass shooting. And in fact, the local law enforcement said it stopped a mass shooting. They knew the guy’s intent. It’s a complex issue. It’s a very complex issue. It always will be a complex issue. And as long as we take God out of it, we make it more complex to go back to the topic.

So my question for you would be then, so why would gun control not work? Because the problem with it here for me is this I can avoid inner city violence by simply not going to the inner city. True. By simply not going to downtown Chicago or DC or Baltimore or La. I can pretty much avoid those areas. I live in a pretty nice area. I’m not going to go to other areas. I can avoid gang violence. I can avoid all the nonsense of going into those cities. What we have seen by shooting in our churches, in our schools, in our grocery stores, at our concerts, out in the open fields, name it, where everybody goes. These are regular people. They’re just going about their daily stuff. You’re in a grocery store, you’re at an amusement park with your kids, and all of a sudden someone starts shooting. Or one case that came to mind while I was considering these questions earlier the shooter, the sniper not too many years ago, for whom there was absolutely no apparent logic to his choice of targets. Right? So why wouldn’t gun control work? Why is it that if I decide I’m going to take or prevent folks from getting guns, or prevent folks from getting certain types of gun, why would that not work? There is an almost hack need statement. When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. I firmly believe that to be true. But leaving that aside, thinking in terms of murder by any method, some of the most strict gun laws in the world are in places like Japan, where a man with a knife walked into a school and stabbed 13 people to death just three or four years ago. They don’t have laws against knives in Japan. They have laws against knives in the UK. You can’t have a knife longer than extends across the palm of your hand. And if a bobby looks at it, and I was told by a bobby in England, if he looks at it, he says, your knife is too long, and you argue with him, he will take you to jail. Or wait for a law, wait for a judge, won’t do anything. It’s his word. And I said, who makes that decision? He said, I do. He was dead serious. It’s absolutely the case in British law. It hasn’t stopped people from making and carrying swords.

And while we were visiting England a few years back, we read about three college students walking down a street in London who were set upon by four we won’t talk about their politics, but they were very politically motivated. They’re actually religiously motivated men who stabbed the three college students to death. One of the college students landed a lucky punch on one of the assailants and his corpse was charged by the police for violence. What? But the four people who were known to the locals, they specified who it was. They told the police who it was. The police went and verified who it was, were never arrested. Why? Never did know. I never did know. But the point is, no guns were involved in either of those cases. So will gun control work? Sure. So let’s ban all edged weapons, too. The Bible doesn’t recount what Cain used to kill Abel, but he killed his brother. It wasn’t a gun. It could have been an edged weapon. It might have been a rock, and you might have just snapped his neck when he wasn’t paying attention. There’s no way to know. The point is, you can ban any weapon of violence in the world, and it will make no difference to violent people. They’ll still be violent. It is the sinful nature of man to deal with problems without God because they don’t have God.

Are you in agreement with red flag laws? No. Why? I don’t know of any way that you can fix this issue with red flag laws, but laws of that nature are way too easily used against people who just happened to rub you wrong ballot pine and I don’t see that as being in any way effective against gun violence. Well, think about it this way. What about if, for instance, my neighbors and I noticed my neighbors may have a tendency of leaning towards anger or something, or a tendency of mental lapse that result in poor judgment. Why is it a combination of red flag laws and gun control would not work? Also ignoring the fact that red flag laws are probably unconstitutional because they ignored due process, but let’s ignore that for now. Why would that not work? If you came to my house right? Let’s assume that I’m the person you’re talking about who’s emotionally unstable, tense toward being angry, whatever. If you came to my house and you ignored the potential for gun ownership, you could walk into my shop and you could find no fewer just a fast inventory in my own mind. You could find no fewer than 90 different ways to kill a human being. They’d be messy, they’d be ugly, but the person would be dead nonetheless. And I could take many of them and wade out into a crowd and kill a whole raft of people before anybody could do a thing to stop me. That’s common life. That’s the way life is a lot of places. And we’re talking about carpentry tools, we’re talking about metalworking tools, we’re talking about automobile repair tools. I’ve got tools for nearly every kind of work you want to do because I do all that kind of work. What are you going to do? Take away my ability to fix my world because you’re afraid of me? Are you going to call the police and say, he’s got anger control issues and they’re going to come and they’re going to render me absolutely ineffective in taking care of the things that I’m required to take care of for the welfare of my family because you’re scared of me. I don’t think it’s effective. I don’t think red flag laws answer the problem at all, not even a little bit.

Banning AR 15, that’s a silly idea. I don’t even own an AR 15, but I own a rifle with a scope on it that I can tell you for a fact, because I have made one inch groups at 200 yards with it is fully capable. And I don’t put that many rounds down range as fast as a semiautomatic because it happens to be a lever action. Used to have, but I got rid of because I didn’t really like it very much. A semiauto that could do the same thing. Just as accurate. I would argue that the only way you get that accuracy is if you practice with it, and it’s the shooter that makes it that accurate. I had a friend who was a retired Marine Corps sniper. You’ll like this part. We took a rifle with open iron sights on 100 yard range, and he put all his rounds in one round. Oh, by the way, it was an AR 15. He was never inclined to shoot anybody with that. And he used to be a Marine Corps sniper. Didn’t ever ask him how many times when he was in the Marine Corps he had to actually hit a target that was human. I’m certain that’s why the Marine Corps trained him. But that was a topic for conversation. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t inclined to do that. And I don’t think red flag laws are going to ban AR 15. I don’t think banning AR Fifteens is going to have any real effect on anything. I think the only thing that banning AR 15s would serve to do is to render the population defenseless against a tyrannical government. It wouldn’t even accomplish that. I could take black iron pipe and make some very, very effective firearms, and I could make my own powder. And the ammunition that black iron pipe would fire would range from gravel to nuts, bolts and washers to you could any military veteran probably could figure out very quickly how to do any of that.

So then, is this a red herring, then? So the left generally, I should say there are people on the left who like guns, but generally on the left there’s this militant gun control advocacy, and people on the right, of course, respond in kind, you know, to counter it. And so we’re over here squabbling about gun control and gun rights. Meanwhile, nothing is genuinely being done to address the problem, which in this case is mass shootings. So then it seems like everything under the gun control umbrella, banning red flag laws, all those sorts of things seem to be a red herring. It just seems to be ancillary to the actual issue at hand. How do we stop Godless violent people from walking into our schools, our grocery stores, our concerts, our churches, and lighting everyone up because we may not have kids in school, let’s say if you home school, but these are still people in our community. This is still people that we live next to, people in our cities. These are still our people. How do we prevent getting caught up in the red herring conversations and identify some real solutions? It seems like we can’t even do that because we can’t even decide. We don’t even have the terminology right. We’re over here totten words like what do they call it? Assault weapon and all these different things that don’t mean anything because it only serves to display how much they don’t know about guns. And so we react, of course, and we’re going back and forth with them. Meanwhile, the problem remains unsolved.

I’m not a politician, and I don’t even play one on TV. I won’t ever be a politician. I wouldn’t be one if someone wanted to pay me to be one. So I don’t know in the political arena how to deal with things like this except to say, you want to make a law? You the left. Prove to me that I can trust you to make that law only to solve that problem and not to expand on the power that law gives you. That’s the first thing I would say. But that doesn’t begin to answer the issue of how do you stop the gun violence, how do you stop violence that uses any weapon? How do you stop mass shootings? How do you stop the anger? How do you control any of that? That doesn’t begin to answer that, because politics can’t do it, right? God can. It all comes back to that. And in our society nowadays, that’s not a popular view, but you know, that’s not a popular view yourselves as Christians, as very avid witnesses for God. You know the kind of responses you get. And anyone who reads the press, anyone who knows what happens in the halls of Congress, anyone who knows what happens in our schools. Anyone who knows what happens in Loudon County with the school board in Prince William County, in Fairfax County with the school board anyone who knows what happened with Governor Newsom, anyone who knows what happens anywhere in government nowadays knows that God has been removed. And the pushback against bringing him back. It’s massive. But our God is bigger. Our God is the creator of all. And the problems aren’t God’s creation. They’re man’s creation. They’re what we did when we allowed God to be removed from our society. They’re what we did when we decided we didn’t want God in our society. And I’m speaking of the greater we here. I doubt that any of the three of us ever said that. But the problems we have come about because we’ve removed God from our society. And the interesting thing now is that so many people who are finding themselves in dire straits are calling on God. And my question for them is, if you kicked Him out of your life, why do you think he would come back now? It kind of reminds me of a conversation between I don’t remember who he was the CEO of, but one of the social media platforms who hasn’t Twitter account. And Elon Musk is so much in the news right now because of what he’s doing with Twitter, and I think he’s doing a lot of great things. Oh, no. It was a congressman who wanted Elon Musk to come to his defense. He’s a liberal Democrat. Congressman. And Elon Musk said, it’s really bad if that happened to you. Sorry. Another congressman, a congressman who was a Republican, was called upon by the CEO of a company to come to his defense, and he said, sorry that happened to you. Good luck. Well, I kind of wonder if God isn’t reaching that point with our society. I don’t think he has. I’m not one of those who says God has totally rejected us and there is no hope. I don’t believe I’m ever willing to say of God that there’s no hope. But I think if we’re not on our knees praying, those of us who understand prayer and standing up and proclaiming his name, we can’t really ask for a whole lot better than what we’ve got.

Let’s touch on that a little bit, because there are things that we can do individually as Christians to reach people who have gotten to a point of radicalization where they’re willing to pick up a weapon and completely massacre untold numbers of people. These people generally have I know that we said that it’s not just because they’re secluded or they’ve withdrawn, but we also have to take into account the effect of how am I trying to say this? Okay, so in two Corinthians, chapter three, I think it’s verse 16, maybe 17. Let me look and see here. No. 18, 2nd Corinthians 3:18 says, but we all with open face, beholding as in a glass. The glory of the Lord are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. When we behold Christ, when we are looking into His Word and just beholding Him, meditating upon Him, drinking in the Word, allowing it to become a part of us, allowing it to transform us and mold us, we are transformed by that. I think perhaps in many ways the inverse is true when you replace Christ with whatever you put in his place. And in this particular instance, perhaps these kids are beholding. Only the Lord knows what they’re beholding through their phones, through their music, through what they read, through the people that they idolize or that they look up to, or that they’ve learned about, and they transform and become these things. Obviously, whatever you’re beholding will ultimately enslave you and transform you into some sort of monster, because anything that is not, God will do that to you. So what if Christians made the concerted effort, as you said, because there’s been an active effort to remove God from our society? What if Christians made that active effort to individually reach out and pull people toward the gospel by not just the power of our testimony, the power of loving on them as Christ would, but ultimately by the power of God drawing them? The Bible says that he’s given us the ministry of reconciliation in order to deradicalise them from becoming that mass shooter or becoming that murderer, becoming that fill in the blank that we’re talking about here. If the world, if our country has actively sought to take Christ out of the country, out of the pillars of our nation, we should be actively, perhaps militantly seeking to bring him back. But what I mean by that is doing that very much on an individual level. Yes, we should be going out with our church to witness door to door, open air preaching however your church decides to do organized evangelism. But in our individual lives, looking about in our communities, in our schools, to find anyone who will come in order to bring them into the fold, disciple them, teach them, give them the gospel, and perhaps in doing that, we can influence the culture to such that we can turn this thing around. You have a testimony of reaching out to people who are without your family and bringing them in as though they were your own. Off the top of my head, I know three people who would point to you and say, oh yeah, that guy MD. He and his family reached out to me, loved on me, and for years and things of that nature. Perhaps that’s what we should all be doing, actively seeking to do so that who knows? If we draw in that one kid that might be on the precipice of feeling that nothing matters anymore, he’s given up to post millennial, sort of that hopeless mindset. Who knows if we can pull him off the precipice of becoming the next mass shooter or the next murderer or the next whatever the case is. I hope I made sense with that somewhere. I think you made a huge amount of sense with that.

And I grew up in a time when evangelization almost always involved going out and passing out tracks. Billy Graham crusades not to take anything away from Billy Graham crusades, from the mass crusades. But as I got older, I began to realize that I really never saw a lot of change in anyone’s life because there was no follow up. There was no evangelization, there was no teaching. It just didn’t exist. And I’m sure you’ve noticed I don’t go out on visitation from the church very often, but I have a neighbor who he and his fiancee, his two sons, different ages, his fiancee’s daughter, don’t know the Lord. They need the Lord badly. Very much and we’ve had opportunity to witness to them. But it hasn’t been anything that we’ve done that we would take credit for. And yet when we first met them, we tried to talk to Him about the Lord and he categorically said, you’re not talking about God around me at all, period. God saw differently. And as a result of a whole series of events in his life, he’s taken to calling me and asking me to come pray with Him. He’s taken to telling me where he’s reading in his Bible and discussing with me the things that he doesn’t understand and the things that he does understand. And Rachel and I joke about it because we know Him real well. We know him and his fiance. We know his whole family real well. We joke about who are you and what have you done with my friend? Well, it’s not who are you and what have you done with my friend? It’s. Praise God. He’s having an effect on this man in his life, on his whole family. I agree absolutely. It devolves upon us to take at personal risk maybe only of being disliked, maybe only of being disrespected, maybe of being even physically attacked. It devolves upon us as Christians to go and give the Gospel. And I realized a number of years ago, god kind of forced it on me that for a long time I was almost speaking apologetically of being a Christian. And all of a sudden it dawned on me I don’t need to apologize for because in the first place, I didn’t have anything to do with me becoming a Christian. I didn’t save me. I couldn’t earn salvation. I was as bad a sinner as any other sinner in the entire world. And in God’s eyes, that’s as bad as it can get. But God saved me. God did it. He did a miracle. He changed my heart. He changed the way I think. Yes, he gave me a good set of parents. Yes, he gave me a good background. Yes, I grew up in a different time than we are in now, but God didn’t change. He’s still the same god. And we as Christians owe it to Him to speak of Him as factual. He is God. He is the Creator. He is the answer. And if you need the answer, I know where to get to you telling you about it.

Yeah. I think Christians and I don’t know if this is deliberate or if this is just fear, but like you’re saying, speaking apologetically about God, I’ve seen oftentimes where Christians will approach someone with the Gospel, almost with a, well, if you really would you like to hear about this? If you don’t, that’s okay because there are many other ways. And that sort of idea, instead of presenting it with the certainty and the reality and the forcefulness that accompanies the truth that God is going to do everything he ever said. He is absolutely everything he ever said that he is and that he does everything he’s ever said that he’s going to do. And that’s a frightful thing. Let’s take the example of the rainbow. People look at the sky and they think a rainbow. People on the left have taken that rainbow to make it mean something else. But when most people look at a rainbow, perhaps even Christians, they look in the sky and they think, oh, that’s a promise that God is not going to destroy the world with the flood any longer. But then they don’t realize that in Second Peter, it also describes that rainbow as a promise that he will not destroy the Earth any longer with the flood, but next time it’s going to be with fire. And so Christians, someone us like we’re stepping on eggshells. Like we don’t want to present the gospel because we don’t want to offend and we don’t want to be called a bigot, we don’t want to be called this, that, or the other. And yet the world is literally dying around us for lack of it. Can you imagine walking into a very, very busy Starbucks and talking to the baristas about God? Can you imagine doing that here’s? A Starbucks that I probably spend too much money at. Starbucks isn’t cheap, but I consider the baristas to be my friends all four shifts. And some of them have moved on to other stores and they come back and they see me and they still remember what I drink on a regular basis. They still remember me fondly. Some of them, I hug them when I see them. Some of them, I hug them when I see them and they’re not at the Starbucks. And all of them have heard me tell them about God. Now, I may not have gotten a chance to give them the full gospel, the full salvation message, but they know they can get it because I’m not afraid to tell them and I’m not special. There’s a lot of people from our church that go to that same Starbucks. I see them there. They do the same thing. It’s a necessity. Doc made a comment years ago to me that there are a lot of programs that our church puts on that we put them on because others who don’t hear the gospel would never, ever come to church to hear a sermon. But they’ll come, for example, to eat dinner at a banquet and sit and listen to the speaker who gives them the gospel. There’s many, many avenues, but absolutely none of them involve, well, I’m only going to go talk to 500 people or more. All the avenues involve if I don’t go and talk to the individual who lives next door to me, I’m missing the best opportunities in the world. So we know pretty much where all of our neighbors stand with respect to salvation, except for a couple that are brand new. We’ve never had a chance to ask them yet. Funny thing is, none of them has ever gotten angry at us for asking. One rejected us. He’s probably the best friend I have out there now, and he’s the one who asked me to come pray with him when he’s got problems. God’s doing the work. It’s not us, right? It’s always God’s doing the work. But the problem is most people don’t ever hear that because we won’t go tell them.

And Jay, you’re absolutely right. We have to go speak to them personally, lovingly, kindly. I think you two both probably heard the minister who is visiting our church not too long back who said, most of the people we’re going to run into don’t understand the words we use because they have no concept. As some of my neighbors, some of them might be really careful how I phrase it, not because I’m going to offend them, because they’re going to look at me and they’re just going to blow me off because they don’t understand what I’m talking about. I’m using words that don’t make any sense to them. So I have to think about that. And I thought that was really a seminal moment in my life, hearing a preacher say that, because I was so used to I mean, I grew up with those terminology. I grew up with that terminology so that everybody understood it, even if they didn’t really understand it the same way I did. Sorry, we don’t live in that world anymore.

MCG says that all the time. Perhaps people in the church are still behaving as though the United States is in Acts chapter two culture, where everyone has a basic understanding of God. We understand basic terminology, scriptural terminology, not realizing that we’ve been in Acts 17 culture for quite some time now. And the way that we reach people needs to reflect that. So if we want to stop mass shootings, if we want to stop this evil that generally can be said to be judgment upon a nation whose God is no longer the Lord, if we want to affect change, we have to be serious and busy and militant even. I don’t even think that’s an over exaggeration militant about reaching not just our Jerusalem, but also our nation and our world for Christ. These people who have allowed themselves to get to that point, to where they would pick up a gun and shoot a bunch of people, I don’t want to say they’ve been pushed to that point because they’re actively participating in their own depravity. Maybe that’s the best way to put it. So I don’t want to say that we’re secluded and they’re hurt, they’re bullied. No, they’re actively participating in their choice. Well, it’s a choice, absolutely. So in reaching them and in saturating our culture with the gospel, perhaps the Lord will have mercy and the tide will turn for our nation, because the way that it is right now it’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen if we lay back and rest on our laurels. Because when they go for help, who do they go to? They go to maybe someone on the Internet. Or they might go to a psychologist who has no fear of God and will not point them to the things of God, will not teach them how to deal with their problems. Like you said, the anger, the feeling like they’ve been cheated somehow, that they’re a lot greater than they are. All of that can be dealt with scripturally. But if they’re going to some yojo I won’t say Yojo, some secular psychologist, they’re not going to point that out. They’re always going to point back to how they were affected and how your upbringing was and why do you feel so devalued and this or the other. It’s self esteem. It’s a self esteem thing. And MCG and I recently had an episode where we were warning Christians about confusing their conservatism with their Christianity. Because if you were to ask a conservative why these mass shootings are happening, they will fall short of telling you about the country turning from God. And they will say things along the lines of, oh, well, these men are being trampled by the feminists and made to be felt like nothing. And there’s this whole attack on manhood. They’ll talk about the attack on manhood, which is true, but it’s only a question is what is the underlying cause of that attack? Absolutely. And conservatism cannot answer that question. Absolutely true.

So we are, as Christians, just perfectly poised to tackle this problem. The problem is it’s going to cost us. It’s going to cost us time, it’s going to cost us effort, it’s going to cost us money, it’s going to cost us opening our homes, it’s going to cost us investing in people. We’re going to take risk take risk like you do, and we’re going to trust the God who gave us the job. So two things come to mind as a result of what you just said. One is we call God Lord. We do. We call him our Lord. What does Lordship imply in our relationship? Anything he wants to do with me to glorify himself is okay, then it just be okay with me. It’s okay. So I take a risk. And I know, as Paul knew in his day, I may die taking that risk. I have to be willing because he’s my Lord. We had a friend in Guam who his wife was Vietnamese, and she had been married to a Vietnamese military man who had died in service in Vietnam. TRA married Jack Helton, who was A-U-S. Military man. TRA was a Christian. Jack was a Christian. Jack was in the Air Force. We were in Guam together. Jack died preparing his house for a typhoon. He was electrocuted by a tool he was working with. He had invited all 400 people in his air wing to come to church with him at one time or another, and they gave testimony of never ever coming or being interested at his funeral. Our pastor preached a salvation message and all 400 people in his air wing came to his funeral. Truss said at his funeral, if my husband had to die for God to get the message across to this air wing, it was worth losing my husband. That was her second husband she’d lost. I was a lady who was dedicated and was willing, I dare say, that Jack would have been willing to because God was glorified. And that’s what we have to be willing to do. Whatever God wants to do with me, I have to be willing to let God do that. And that’s a big thing. I’ve said that to people before who didn’t really know the Lord or didn’t know him very well, or weren’t very strong Christians or whatever their reason may have been. And they’ve looked at me and they’ve said, man, that takes a lot of trust. Well, where am I going when I die? I had a friend who was threatened by a guy with a knife for telling him about the Bible, about God. And he looked at him and the guy who was threatening him was bigger than he was. And I was backing up because I was looking at my friend and I was thinking, boy, I wouldn’t have said that to him. But he looked at the guy with a knife and the guy had a twelve inch knife in his hand and he said, you really think you can threaten me with heaven? That man’s been a missionary in England for 35 years. He’s faced a lot of hostility in England because the English people, the British people, can get pretty hostile on a personal basis about gospel. It had slowed him down. It hadn’t slowed him down at all.

So I look at that and I think, yes, we need to trust God, and because we trust God, we need to be willing to take the risk. What are we going to lose? What does it matter? Because if we lose everything we own, we still have God and he still owns everything. So if we lose everything we own, we lose it because it glorifies God in some way we might not even understand. So in between Christians firing up to evangelize and to reach people in their circle, in their neighborhoods from that point all the way up until we can do something about this mass shooting problem, do you think that it’s? A good idea for us to make it more difficult for potential mass shooters to have access to guns, whether it’s by gun control or whether I already know how you feel about gun control or red flag logs. But any measure that they would suggest? Well, in the first place, I’m not going to trust politicians who don’t know God to make a suggestion. That’s the first thing. But the second thing is I don’t have any idea how you do that. I truly don’t. Because I made the comment earlier and they don’t either. No, I know they don’t. I know they don’t. But I made the comment earlier that if they outlawed all guns, it wouldn’t slow down any of us who could make our own. And we don’t have to make 3D printed guns. That whole concept of 3D printed ghost guns and cardboard guns and whatever. No, I’m talking about Black iron Pipe. I want a gun that if I fire around from it, I can reload it and fire it again in and again and again and again and again. Because if I need a gun, I want it to do the job. But it’s just a tool. And how you keep the guns out of the hands of potential mass shooters, I don’t know. I don’t think you can look at the Columbine shooters. Their guns were acquired through a straw purchase. They had someone else purchase the guns and give it to them. But in all these articles I read, almost every gun owner got their guns completely and totally legally. What would you say to the person that says, well, there’s the problem. If you can legally access a firearm that can be used to create these terrible situations? Mash, columbine, columbine. They got their guns illegally. Straw purchase. The old saying. I mean, I said earlier, it’s a hackneyed saying, but that doesn’t make it any less true. If guns are outlawed, outlaws will have guns. And by definition, anyone who kills someone with a gun is an outlaw. Take away their guns, it won’t matter. Australia has a law about ownership of guns. They are extremely tight on their laws about ownership of guns. And we’re talking about on sheep stations, cattle stations that are like 50,000 acres in the outback. And the only way in and out of them is in a plane. If you get a visitor, you can by definition, say, if I didn’t know he was coming, he’s not a good guy, and they can’t have a gun to defend themselves. And about nine years ago, Australia was considering a law, outlawing swords, because a guy landed in a plane who had no business being on the cattle station he was on and he slaughtered the family there with a sword. He never gun, no guns were allowed to have guns. He had a sword. So, okay, outlaw swords.

You go back to the mass murderer in Japan who took a knife into a school and killed a whole raft of people. So outlaw knives, take them away. You’re not allowed to cut your meat anymore. You can’t even cut up your own steak. You’re not allowed to I guess you buy bite sized steaks now. I mean, I don’t know what you do in that case. Certainly those of us who slaughter our own food are not going to be able to do that if we don’t have knives. Oh, please. You’re just being a bigot go vegan. Yeah, right. No, I’m a farmer. I’m a farmer. I know about meat. I raise meat, and I eat deer, by the way. They had a terrible thing eating deer. Oh, my horrible. Cherish the thought. And I raise rabbits to eat them, too. And when my chickens stop laying eggs, guess where they’re going? Well, that’s the point, right? They want to present all of these different laws in order to push us toward that ideal. Whatever they’ve got in their mind, everyone is vegan and everyone cares about the climate, and everyone is in a pod, in a box, eating cricket somewhere. Klaus Schmidt at the World Economic Forum said just two months ago, and it was published by someone who was at the World Economic Forum who probably has a target on his forehead now. Sure. Because they didn’t want that said. Klaus Schmidt said that we’re going to run the world, and you are going to own nothing and you’re going to be happy about it. Yeah. You will own nothing and be happy. No, not happening. I’m going to live in a cave and Claus Schmidt, you’re not going to have anything to do with my cave. And if you show up in the mouth of my cave, who knows what’s going to happen? But be prepared. It’s just that kind of a stupid statement.

I mean, you’re absolutely right. It is what they’re trying to push us to, but it’s because they don’t understand what they’re dealing with at all. And it’s not Christians that are going to be the problem. Do you think that unsaved people are going to be any happier to be slaves of the World Economic Forum? Not likely. I’d like to be optimistic and say not likely, but when I saw how many people were readily willing to bend the knee when it came to vaccine mandates and passports and things of that nature yeah, I think there are a lot more authoritarians walking around than we’d like to think. Perhaps all the more reason we should be a little more ordinary when it comes to our leaders, our government that would use something as serious, for example, as a mass shooting and use a sleight of hand in order to push their agenda. I know that’s not necessarily the focus of this particular podcast, because we’re talking about how we might be able to contribute and solve a legitimate thing that’s happening. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a mom and to have to pick up your child in a morgue somewhere. So it seems to me that something absolutely should be done. Of course, the question is what? Which is what we’re trying to address in this podcast here today.

Yeah. The political left. We have said a lot of the things that they propose. I think the political right have proposed stuff like had in your schools and the good guy with a gun concept and stuff like that. And I guess physically some of those things will work. Does make sense. If you can’t prevent it, you might as well make it as difficult as possible for the person who wants to carry it out. If you can’t get into the schools or make it harder for them to get in, then that buys law enforcement more time to get there to neutralize the threat. Yuvaldi is a really good example of yeah, law enforcement had lots of time, they were there and they wouldn’t do anything to fix the problem. Yeah. They even hindered those who would. Yeah, that’s one example. But they got in. He got in. So if he wasn’t able to get in, maybe that would be a different outcome. Sure. Maybe if one of the many teachers that would at least one or a couple of them had a gun, maybe they will be able to slow him down. You know, usually when bullets start coming back at the shooter, it seems to be enough to at least divert them or give them a different thought. Throw his aim off any. Right. Something you know is a completely different thing when the target is shooting back then when the target is standing still. I don’t remember the name of the movie, but I remember, I think it was maybe what is his name, bruce Lee or one of these movies where one guy was beating up on one of these training sticks and Bruce Lee said to him, sticks don’t fight back. Yeah. So it’s the same thing here. We have created sit in ducks. Basically. We have made all these gunvones out of sporting arenas. In some states, aka New York, you can’t take a weapon to a place of worship. We have made schools gun free zoned. We have made even government bills and gun free zoned. We have made some businesses gun free zone. And to a lot of criminals that’s your welcome in here with your gun. If you remember when I was kind of scanning through that timeline of shootings, I said there’s a pattern here. And the pattern was every one of those early shootings you’re reading it, it’s a school, a school, a school, a school, a school. And this was before they were even gun free zones. How much more inviting are they now? So yeah, you’re absolutely correct. But you’re still not going to change the heart of the guy who decides he wants to do it anyway.

So let’s go there then. How do we change the heart? Let’s wrap it up and how do we change that heart? I think you guys alluded to it, but in a nutshell, most succinctly, how can we change that heart? Take the personal risk and go and tell people who have no hope that there is hope, but that hope is in God and show him how he changed your life personally. Give them your personal testimony. They’re still free to reject it if they want to. They can still get violent with you if they want to. But as a Christian, as I said earlier, if God is our Lord, he will protect us until it’s to his glory to allow them to become violent with us. I would say that’s not real likely to happen. But Paul suffered a lot in the New Testament, and he went on to serve God anyway. And look at how much he got done because of his testimony. But they don’t get your testimony if you don’t give it to Him. What they’ll know you as is a religious person. What they need to know you personally as is a Christian who has some answers from the God he serves.

All right, MD thank you very much for joining us on the Removing barriers podcast. Thank you. Appreciate being here, right? Sounds good.

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