What do people who don’t believe in evil do? They blame inanimate objects. Fire arms.

19 years ago, an unemployed middle-aged taxi driver carrying two milk cartons filled with gasoline entered a South Korean subway and started a fire that killed 192 people.

It wasn’t a milk carton problem. It wasn’t a fuel problem either.

6 years ago, a Muslim terrorist drove a truck into a July 14 event in Nice, France, killing 86 people and injuring over 400 others. Body parts were pulled out of its wheel arches.

It wasn’t a truck problem.

Throughout human history, millions of people were killed long before the invention of firearms, often in cruder and far more brutal ways. At the time, we lacked CNN, but people generally understood that this was not due to the invention of the forge, but to the problem of evil.

The problem with evil is that it forces us to believe in good.

Modern people don’t want to believe in God, so they believe in government instead. And they are convinced that the god of government can fix everything if we give him the power.

The problem is that even if people don’t believe in evil, evil does believe in it a lot.

The gun control debate is a political argument based on fundamental misconceptions about human nature, black markets, and what a malevolent mind bent on hurting people can achieve. Conservatives argue for empowering individuals to stand up to mass shooters while leftists once again chant that if we locked up all guns and gave them to the government, we would be fine.

But if guns are the problem, why aren’t there regular mass shootings in Switzerland and Finland? In Israel, a school shooting is an attack perpetrated by an Islamist terrorist. And it’s dismissed as a “political” act and something entirely different from an obsessive crackpot shooting up an American school because we simply can’t find the common denominator of evil in both.

If guns are the problem, why weren’t there school shootings every few months in a time when guns could be purchased at any hardware store and ordered by mail?

Muggings, carjackings, and gang shootings in Chicago are all attributed to a general social unrest that can be addressed by freeing the criminals and locking up all guns.

As if guns had power and shooters didn’t.

Gun control hasn’t solved any crimes in Chicago, but that’s simply because, like most leftist policies, it hasn’t been implemented comprehensively enough, the argument goes. left.

The problem with gun control is that people have agency. They choose evil.

Leftists don’t believe in Gd or free will. And this is understandable because one is linked to the other. They inhabit a mechanical world in which society is real and people are not. Individual responsibility does not exist in the leftist construction of a world where people are just cogs in a machine reacting to social stimuli based on their genes and upbringing.

The central assumption of left-wing thinking is that if you control society, you can also control the character and conduct of every person brought up in it. All left-wing politics stems from this idea. The government becomes god and can, given political omnipotence, give us utopia.

All we have to do is give up our individuality, our rights and our faith in anything else.

That it doesn’t work is too obvious to need saying after the rotten Soviet Union, Cambodia, Communist China and the lost glories of every failed leftist experiment.

The real question is what is left in the empty spaces of the soul in these leftist machines?

Take away moral responsibility, sense of purpose, and belief in a higher power, and what do you get? Mass shootings every weekend and every other type of atrocity that has been popularized and made viral. The human ego slamming against a society that doesn’t know it’s there.

Or evil.

The malevolent narcissism, violent self-pity and thwarted selfishness of the mass shooter are a familiar phenomenon. They are far more endemic than the availability of firearms. The killers hope to leave a mark on society. They take lives to force us to recognize their uniqueness and what they believe we owe them. The media happily rewards them with their bloody 15 minutes.

There are collectivist movements, like Nazism and Communism, dedicated to this premise, but there are also many individuals inclined to fall into this perverted mindset. These individuals and movements thrive in a time of confusion, when people lack direction and see no future.

The problem of evil is old. It can come from several directions. But our society is particularly vulnerable because its elites can no longer even grasp the concept.

They have created a society in which evil thrives because they are unable to recognize it.

Human dysfunction has been reduced to mechanistic failures of biochemistry, economics, government oversight, legislative policy-making, and society. Everything is blamed except the individuals who actually make the decision to go ahead and kill other people.

But that’s what happens when you believe in governments and don’t believe evil is a tangible reality outside of TV and movies.

Instead of talking about human crimes, we talk about armed violence. The lack of individual moral responsibility only contributes to the next atrocity not by guns, but by individuals.

Evil is a human void. It is the selfish emptiness that remains in the absence of good. To overcome it, it would be necessary to conceive the good. The stories of mass shootings, of crime in general, should be told as a struggle between good and evil. Not so long ago we had a society that could tell this story. These days we are more likely to celebrate evil.

The left believes that the government is god and it conceives of evil as disobedience to the government. The debate over gun control reduces harm to the NRA and all those who do not obey and surrender their guns. “Do you want more children to die?” ask the chief firearms officers.

But good and bad don’t come from a gun. Nor do they come from the government.

The reduction of individual choices to mechanical abstractions, of shootings to guns, of individual acts to society, is the hallmark of elites who want to rule the world but cannot understand people.

There is no formula more likely to convince people that their deeds have no value, their lives have no purpose, and that whatever they do doesn’t matter in the broad sense. And so evil was born.

Tell people that they are morally worthless and that they may end up believing you.

It’s no coincidence that shootings happen so often in schools, where teenagers might hope to gain some sense of morality, and instead are told they’re a bunch of numbers.

In the absence of good, other things will take their place.

Guns are much more real to gun controllers than human souls. But evil doesn’t need a gun. And controlling the location of inanimate objects will not fix the moral foundations of the soul.

{Reposted from FrontPageMag to place}