Whitlock: We should focus on Salvador Ramos’ motivation rather than his mechanism for destruction

I would rather live with guns than with unchallenged wickedness. I would rather fight the demons that provoked Salvador Ramos’ killing spree than disarm our citizenry.

The right to bear arms is the primary protector of American freedom. I don’t love guns. I love what they guarantee. They’re the lone defense against a government’s natural instinct to seize power and exercise control.

In the immediate aftermath of Salvador Ramos’ horrific rampage at a Texas elementary school, America’s seekers of power and control focused on the teenage mass murderer’s mechanism and ignored his motivation. The gun is the bad guy, not the demonic forces that radicalized an 18-year-old to gun down second-, third-, and fourth-graders.

Our current leadership elite prescribed a secular solution for an obvious spiritual problem. They believe the mechanism (gun) trumps the motivation (evil). They would rather live with unchallenged wickedness than with guns.

President Joe Biden said he reflected on the Texas tragedy during his 17-hour flight back from Asia. He compared America to the rest of the world.

“These kinds of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world. Why?” the president asked. “They have mental health problems. They have domestic disputes in other countries. They have people who are lost, but these kind of mass shootings never happen with the kind of frequency they happen in America. Why? Why are we willing to live with this carnage?”

Part of it might be that American citizens enjoy a form and level of freedom the rest of the world does not. That freedom is a byproduct of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The price of freedom is extremely high. No one wants to see 18 schoolchildren slaughtered. Many of us believe there are measures that can be taken to reduce mass shootings that don’t infringe upon the country’s founding principles.

Before Biden spoke, Vice President Kamala Harris cajoled her political peers to take action.

“Enough is enough,” she said. “As a nation, we have to have the courage to take action and understand the nexus between what makes for reasonable and sensible public policy to ensure something like this never happens again.”

The trade she is suggesting is one politicians have asked Americans repeatedly to make in the last 25 years. Trade your constitutionally guaranteed freedom for safety and surveillance. We made that trade after 9/11. It was a really bad trade. Political elites on both sides of the political spectrum think we’re dumb enough to do it again.

Freedom is the mechanism. The seekers of power and control, the self-appointed gods of the universe and new world order, view freedom as the root of all evil. Freedom must be stamped out, and that means guns must be controlled.

Just ask Steve Kerr, the famous basketball coach for the Golden State Warriors. Before Tuesday night’s Western Conference finals playoff game, Kerr threw a tantrum and claimed that politicians who oppose limits on the Second Amendment do so to retain political power.

“So I ask you, Mitch McConnell, I ask all of you senators who refuse to do anything about the violence and school shootings and supermarket shootings,” Kerr ranted. “I ask you: Are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children and our elderly and our churchgoers? Because that’s what it looks like. It’s what we do every week.”

The Mechanism vs. the Motivation.

That explains the divide. I used to demonize the mechanism. Seven or eight years ago, I was staunchly anti-gun. I argued the Second Amendment had outlived its usefulness. I did not believe American politicians were capable of forcefully stripping citizens of freedoms I took for granted.

I thought all Americans agreed on the essentialness of free speech and free thought and the importance of objective truth. Big Tech, Silicon Valley, and social media apps awakened me from that fantasy. By the time corporations started mandating experimental vaccines, I fully understood why the founders wrote the Second Amendment. Governments seek and abuse power when they have no fear of the governed.

No guns, no fear.

“As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” Biden asked Tuesday night. “When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”

My gut says we need to boldly challenge the wickedness running wild in America. Salvador Ramos is a manifestation of our unchecked wickedness. He’s a neglected and abused child. He lived with the grandmother he tried to kill. At the moment, we don’t know much about his parents.

His former school friends said his personality turned dark, “emo,” and “alternative” about two years ago, about the time we decided kids needed to isolate themselves to protect unhealthy people from COVID. Ramos spent the last two years of his life in the masked, isolated world we constructed out of fear. We sacrificed the mental and emotional wellness of young people for the benefit of old people controlled by fear and a lack of religious faith. According to his friends, Ramos loved playing the violent video game "Call of Duty" on Xbox. His friendships were no longer intimate and real. He communicated and connected via Instagram direct message. He hinted about his rampage in a direct message string with a girl in California, a girl he would never meet or talk to.

Ramos existed inside Big Tech’s lonely, wicked, and divisive matrix.

We’re comfortable with computers, video games, televisions, and smartphones seducing and babysitting young people because America has reduced children to a choice. They’re no longer our greatest responsibility, our greatest gift from God. They’re a choice made by a woman while she carries him or her in the womb. After birth, they’re a burden that stands in the way of our search for our true selves, our goal of groundbreaking career success, and financial reward.

We don’t value family, the nurturing, connective, and healthy bonds developed and shared between man, woman, and child. We want to disrupt the nuclear family, God’s natural order. We think a village can raise a child.

A village motivates monsters. Monsters turn to drugs, sex, and violence for relief. Far more kids will die of a drug overdose this year than from gun violence. The seekers of power and control support the drug mechanism. A drug haze makes the loss of freedom palatable.

I’d rather live with guns than with wickedness.