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THE FEDERALIST®
The Internet's Conservative Journal of Record
Federalist # 99-16

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Last week, The Federalist reported a noteworthy development: "The families of three teenagers murdered in a Paducah, Kentucky school shooting are suing the entertainment industry for $100 million in damages, claiming the violence the industry produces influenced the young man who murdered their children."

This week, there was yet another government school bloodbath perpetrated by "Clinton Culture Kids." Why "Clinton," you ask? All of the recent school murder sprees -- Paducah, Kentucky; Edinboro, Pennsylvania; Pearl, Mississippi; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Springfield, Oregon; and now, Littleton, Colorado, have been committed by kids who "came of age" on Bill Clinton's watch. That is certainly not to say Mr. Clinton is personally responsible for these atrocities, but it is to say that the liberal government and social policies he advocates contribute to such "behavior."

In Littleton, the violence reached a new threshold as two teenagers killed 13 other teenagers, booby-trapped the building with 30 explosive devices, and then killed themselves. Criminologist Bill Resiman says, "...every time, [the violence] has escalated, the kids have learned from the previous one."

The television media have only the inclination to spin these tragedies into microanalysis sound-bites, the most popular being, "It's a gun problem." But the question, "What has given rise to this horrendous genre of antisocial behavior?" can only be answered through macroanalysis, as the causal origins span two generations.

Contemporary liberal politicians are masters of sound-bites as well. They also blame inanimate objects (guns) for the cultural ills created by 30 years of misguided government policies and court decisions -- from Johnson's "Great Society" to Clinton's "New Covenant." Godless, fatherless sociopaths are the disenfranchised effluents of such policies and decisions.

For two generations, modern liberals have endeavored to re-frame the notion of human equality in the transience of man's relativist laws and institutions. They discarded our Founder's original framing of human equality in the timeless "laws of nature and of nature's God" as referenced in the Declaration of Independence. In other words, enduring truths have been supplanted with contemporary relativism, thus turning the natural order of man on end.

"Relativism" as a new foundation for culture, has adulterated, as Claremont's Larry Arnn says, our "recognition that human beings have a common nature, that they are able to understand that nature by use of their reason, and that they are able to deduce from it common rules of morality." The net result is the dawning of social chaos -- and its tragic symptoms like Littleton. That is to say, this is an emerging cultural phenomenon that is destined to become much worse unless we start aggressive reforms to restore enduring truths.

Kevin Ryan, director of Boston's Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character, says of liberal relativism, "There was a time when a school was a place where...society's values [guided policy]. We've tried to make our schools all things to all people, and we've let kids create the culture and the moral system of the school. And now we're just reaping what we've sown."

This brings us back to Bill Clinton.... Arguably, he is as much a reflection of contemporary culture as it is of him. And what does he reflect? His election was funded, and transition team directed, by Hollywood elites (the same folks spewing the gratuitous violence that indoctrinates sociopathic teens who kill their classmates). He is the most vociferous opponent of the sanctity of human life in U.S. history, and demonstrates no virtues of honesty and personal responsibility. He is the ultimate relativist, a president perfectly matched to build a bridge to the demise of the great experiment.

And for the sound-bite artists who want to dodge the tough cultural questions generated by horrendous examples of social entropy and individual sociopathy by using the bodies of slain children as a political stage to lament the "gun problem," we offer the following retort. Obviously the phenomenon of sociopaths who kill kids with bullets is no more a "gun problem" than those who kill kids with pipe bombs is a "plumbing problem." This phenomenon is a cultural problem, the result of 30 years of "Socialism Lite." The reason liberals don't want to blame culture is that most of the culture to blame is of their own making.

To counter the "gun problem" smokes screen, provide the partisans of such nonsense with a few facts. In South Africa, which in recent years had the highest per-capita murder rate in the world, the weapon of choice is the machete. Does South Africa have a "machete problem"? On the other hand, the society with the highest accessibility to assault weapons, Switzerland (with its armed public militias), has one of the lowest murder rates in the world.

It's not a "gun problem."

It's the culture, stupid!

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