The Nashville Shooting, a Few Thoughts
Over 2,500 years ago, the prophet Isaiah penned the words, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” Isaiah was writing about the collapsing theocracy in Judah in the 7th and 8th centuries B.C., but he could just as easily have been commenting on 21st-century America.
What Isaiah was describing has been termed by some a “satanic inversion.” That is, what is put forth by the devil’s votaries as good is the mirror opposite of what is commanded by God and vice versa. God cannot lie. But when Satan lies, he speaks from his own resources. For lies are his native language.
Lies have become the native language of America’s ruling class. Their daddy is the devil. And by ruling class, I mean not just those in positions of political authority – mayors, governors, senators, judges, presidents – but leaders in business, leaders in the schools, leaders in the universities, leaders in publishing companies, leaders in entertainment, leaders in the media, and, yes, leaders in many churches as well. 24/7, Americans are subject to the most extraordinary propaganda, yet many seem blissfully unaware of it.
Last Monday’s horrible shooting at a Nashville church school and the aftermath is an obvious example of a satanic inversion and one that bears closer examination.
It’s not the Guns
Predictably, the gun grabbers were fighting over who could get to the microphone the fastest to call for the disarming of the American people. Oh, they’ll tell you they just want to keep AR-15s out of peoples’ hands. Why, those are weapons of war!
But of course, the gun grabbers have no intention of stopping with AR-15s. If they get their way, their next target likely will be 9mm pistols. Joe Biden himself signaled this last year when he appeared to call for the banning of 9mm handguns. Said Biden in his garbled way, “So the idea of these high-caliber weapons (9mm handguns) is, uh, there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of thinking about self-protection.”
It’s not surprising that the Roman Catholic, Jesuit-linked Joe Biden would come out against handguns. His Vatican handlers have been pushing for handgun control since at least 1975.
But here’s something to think about. I graduated high school in the mid-1980s. And while younger readers may find this hard to believe, no one was worried about school shootings. The subject just never came up. There were no metal detectors in my high school. There were, as far as I’m aware, no armed resource officers in my high school. The doors were not locked and barred.
And there were guns around in the 1980s. Lots of ‘em.
I don’t say this to suggest everyone at my high school was a perfect angel or that there were no behavior problems. There was a lot of bad stuff happening in the 1980s, including some school shootings. It’s just that if you had used the term “school shooter” in 1980s America, no one would have known what you were talking about. It wasn’t a “thing” at that time.
And school shootings didn’t become a “thing” until two demon-possessed students at Columbine High School went on a shooting spree in 1999 killing 12 other students and one teacher before they killed themselves.
So, if there were guns around in the 1980s and school shootings were rare, then how can guns be the cause of the raft of school shootings we’ve seen since the 1990s?
It’s the people who have changed, not the guns.
An Unbiblical Theory of Criminal Justice
Gun grabbers like Joe Biden espouse an unbiblical view of criminal justice. Biden and others of his ilk believe in crime prevention, not crime punishment, which is the Christian theory of criminal justice.
To be clear, when I say “crime prevention” is unbiblical, I’m not talking about things such as locking your car doors or installing a burglar alarm. What I mean by “crime prevention” is the idea that the innocent must be punished to prevent some future criminal act from occurring. The crime prevention theory of criminal justice is unjust for the very reason that it relies on punishing the innocent.
But it is not the innocent who are to be punished. It’s the guilty.
Grabbing guns from law-abiding Americans is an example of the crime prevention theory of criminal justice. You and I and other Americans who own guns and use them responsibly should not have our God-given, constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms infringed upon because evil men and women commit crimes with firearms. That would be unjust.
Guns Deter Crime
Lost in all the noise from the gun-grabbing media is a statement from Nashville police chief John Drake. During a press conference on Tuesday, March 28, the day after the shooting, Drake commented that “the school shooter had decided against attacking another school because it had ‘too much security.’”
This makes sense. In economics, the basic rule is that the more expensive a good or service is, the fewer people will take of it. That’s why you see more Chevrolets on the road than you do Cadillacs.
A school with better security raises the cost for a potential school shooter compared to a school with less security. It should come as no surprise, then, that schools with better security are less likely to be targets of school shooters.
Last week, Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie got into a heated exchange with Rep. Jamaal Bowman over this very issue. While Bowman was literally screaming for gun control, Massie calmly pointed out that there had never been a school shooting in a school that allowed teachers to carry. You can watch the video of the exchange here. And here’s the research supporting Massie’s assertion.
The Transgender Hoax
The initial report following the death of the Nashville school shooter was that it was a female teenager. Later it came out that the shooter was 28-year-old Audrey Hale, a person who claimed to be a trans-man. If you’re not up on the trans lingo, a trans-man is a woman pretending to be a man.
Hale’s trans identity led to a lot of confusion and some awkward apologies from mainstream media outlets that initially reported Hale was a woman but later retracted their statements and began using calling Hale a “he”.
Audrey Hale was a woman. A very disturbed woman, but a woman nonetheless.
The bottom line is that people do not have a gender, which is a term from grammar, they have a sex. And that sex, male or female, is immutable.
The Cover-up
Given the massive official lying that is characteristic of our day, it should come as no surprise that the government and the media are doing their best to cover up the fact that the Nashville shooter was a trans man.
The Nashville police have noted that the shooter had left a manifesto. But oddly, they refuse to release it to the public. This seems to be the result of pressure brought by trans activists who are afraid that releasing the manifesto will damage their movement. They are, of course, right about this. But that’s no reason for lack of transparency. In fact, that’s a good reason to release it.
The entire LGBTQ movement is a case study of suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. They don’t want to be confronted with the truth of their evil ideas, preferring instead to suppress the facts that expose them.
Transgender Violence
On March 23, 2023, Tucker Carlson ran a segment called “You can’t have guns, but faithful servants of the Democratic Party can!” As someone who follows current events closely, I’m not often surprised by stories, but this one did surprise me. Carlson talked about a recent piece on NPR that essentially urged transgenders to buy guns and learn to use them. Carlson played several minutes of the NPR article, playing back segments and commenting on them. One trans person interviewed on the NPR segment commented, “If the world is dangerous, then you have to be dangerous back.”
Really? As Tucker Carlson pointed out, NPR certainly wouldn’t want normal Americans to have this right. Indeed, NPR has been one of the leading voices for gun control for years. But when it comes to its favorite groups, NPR is all in for guns.
Worth noting is that just two weeks ago, there were advertisements on Twitter for “Trans Day of Vengeance” to be held in Washington D.C. on April 1st. Some suggest that it was an April Fool’s Day joke. Given all the talk about violence from trans activists themselves, there’s good reason to take it seriously.
Bolstering the noting that trans activists are prone to violence is an article from Not the Bee titled “Trans activists are calling for more blood after the Nashville shooting. Here’s how Christians should respond.” It’s mostly a good article and provides numerous helpful examples of threats of violence from various trans activists.
The one weakness of the article is in the section “So what are we to do?” There, the author makes the case that Christians are to defend the lives of others, but bizarrely seems to suggest that Christians have no right to self-defense. To reach this conclusion, the author cites Jesus' well-known sayings about turning the other cheek and loving one’s enemies. But these are not examples of facing a threat of deadly violence. These are examples of suffering insults patiently.
The command not to murder implies that Christians have a right to prevent their own murder. Exodus 22:2 certainly implies the right to self-defense. It reads, “If the thief is found breaking in, and he is struck so that he dies, there shall be no guilt for his bloodshed.” This passage says does not make the right to kill a thief breaking into your home depend on whether you have a family. The fact that he’s breaking into your home is sufficient.
Transgender Insurrections
There have been several recent cases of trans activists seeking to shut down state legislatures that were in the process of voting on bills designed to protect children. In Kentucky, 19 people were arrested while attempting to prevent the Kentucky Legislature from overturning Gov. Steve Beshear’s veto of a bill banning transgender procedures for minors, allowing for the restriction of bathroom use based on biological gender, prohibiting instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, and empowering teaches to decline to use a student’s preferred pronouns.
Something similar took place last week in Texas as protesters gathered at the state capitol to stand against a bill much like that passed recently in Tennessee which prohibits drag shows on public property or anywhere a child could see it.
The laws passed in Kentucky and Tennessee and being considered in Texas are all examples of civil magistrates actually doing their job of punishing those who practice evil and rewarding the good. Naturally, those pushing sexual perversion are against that. They push for the satanic inversion of the law of God.
Christianity and Transgenderism, an Unbridgeable Gap
Many have long thought, and this writer is among them, that if serious anti-Christian persecution ever were to come to America, it likely would be over the LGTBQ issue.
The reason for this is simple. There is no third way. Christians do not have the option of going AWOL in this fight. If you believe the Word of God, you must oppose the entire LGBTQ agenda, including the transgender agenda which has garnered most of the spotlight in recent years. Christians can’t punt. They can’t opt-out. They can try to run and hide like Jonah, but that’s not going to work either.
There is an unbridgeable gap between transgenderism and Christianity. There’s no way to finesse it. And as Christians, we must face this fact head-on.
Know this: If you’re a Christian, you are hated, deeply hated, by those pushing the ungodly transgender movement. And no amount of winsomeness is going to change this.
Of course, as Christians, we don’t hate them back. But we do disagree with them and call transgender individuals, on the authority of the Word of God, to repentance toward God and faith in Jesus Christ.
As is the case for all of us sinners, Jesus Christ is the only hope those caught up in the lie of transgenderism have in this life and the next.