DECAYING SOCIAL FABRIC

DECAYING SOCIAL FABRIC AFFECTS ALL
Michael Coren
Sun Media
Saturday, March 12, 2005

Now that at least some of the anger and the pain have subsided, it's time to comment on one aspect of the murder of four of our finest. Let us be direct. The killing of four RCMP officers had nothing to do with any lack of gun control. To suggest that it did, is to miss the point and exploit the suffering.

Indeed gun control is one of the great misnomers of modern times. We cannot control guns and we don't have to, either.

What we have to control is the decaying social fabric of North America and our headlong, happy rush into an ethical vacuum. And this requires more than the easy solution of passing a law or two and then patting ourselves on the back.

Heavens above, this one isn't rocket science. A few fundamentals: Guns are extraordinarily common in Canadian and American rural communities, where the crime rates are often lower than anywhere else in either country.

Farm kids shoot from an early age and are in the company of firearms literally before they can walk. Yet there are very few violent rampages and so-called accidental discharges of weapons.

Guns have existed in very large numbers for more than two centuries. They were common among ordinary families from the 1740s. Children did not kill with them.

After 1945, Canada was flooded with handguns brought home from Europe and Asia by soldiers. Teachers reported up to half of the class bringing dad's shooter to school. These were military weapons, deadly and efficient.

Were there mass outbreaks of shootings? Of course not. But according to some zealots, it's all about registration. So just who are these people so anxious to tell us what to do and how to do it?

Curiously enough, the activists screaming for even more draconian gun control often seem to be the same activists who are calling for a lower age of sexual consent, for more children's rights, for increased funding of daycare (rather than support for families), for the abolition of corporal punishment and for a wholesale dismantling of the society that has served us so well for so long.

If you doubt me, just take a look. It is an almost infallible rule that the more liberal a person on social and moral issues the more in favour they are of strict gun control. It is no coincidence. It is not that such people are sinister, simply that they are wrong. Dangerously wrong. Ignore the disease, misinterpret the diagnoses and then prescribe the wrong medicine.

It's too late for that nonsense now. The patient is dying and we have to operate fast. As for the ailments, they should be obvious.

Single-parent families and the absence of male authority figures. Parents never seeing their kids because both are working and junior is parented by the television. Teachers emasculated and unable to chastise children who instead revel in their thuggery. An obsession with "self-esteem" when kids actually need and want boundaries and borders. Endless discussions about children's feelings, encouraging them to act out their slightest whim.

Constant attacks on the virtues of family, chastity, faith, respect, order and tradition. Television stations that deaden the mind and the sensibilities with graphic violence, grotesque pornography and vacuous pop videos, and then host long discussions wondering why kids are going wrong.

I want, I need, I must have, I know, I am, I rule, I'm cool, I'm everything. You're nothing, you're not me, you don't understand, you suck, you don't matter because you're not me. And I'm the centre of the universe. I know it because I feel it and nobody dares tell me otherwise.

Laugh when Jimmy uses obscene language, believe that Susan can do no wrong even when the cop and the teacher tell you otherwise, decide that your "self-fulfillment" in some job is more important than Jake seeing his mother when he comes home from school and say that you can't control what Brittany watches on television when you haven't even tried.

It isn't about guns and it isn't about any more legislation and social engineering. It's about you. And you, and you. Don't blame mechanics for your own madness.

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Michael Coren is a Toronto-based writer and broadcaster. He can be emailed at info@michaelcoren.com and his web site is michaelcoren.com. Letters to the editor should be sent to: editor@tor.sunpub.com
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