Trans confusion and the shooting of children.

Each of us lives in fear of these school shootings. Fear of the news, fear of the deaths and suffering, fear of what it portends. Any reflection runs the risk of appearing to show insufficient respect in the face of tragic and unnecessary death.. but we have to reflect.

Much of the reflection is buried in political rhetoric as one side (always the democrats in these cases) tries to make as much political capital our of the tragedy as possible.

The rhetoric always follows the same pattern. The left says, “look at this execrable tragedy. If we did not have guns in our society, these shootings could not happen.” To which the Right always replies “these guns don’t shoot themselves. It’s the shooters that are the cause not the guns.”

This is sadly a sterile argument. There is some right on both sides of the argument. It is an argument which in its political playground form hides the fact that there are either more complex issues at work.

But there is a framework in which this tedious argument it set which is not often reflected on. It has to do with why the Left hates the guns so much and uses every opportunity to blame gun ownership for whatever tragedy has taken place.

Obviously at one level we might agree with the Left – guns have indeed been the instruments that have allowed killers to murder their victims.

But equally obviously, we can’t blame the guns as if they were to some degree animate. Or pretend that human and violence, madness and evil could not erupt without access to ammunition.

They guns argument is really about the symptoms of a different struggle that does not often break surface, as least in its true form. It is the struggle between the state with totalitarian ambitions and the resistance of individuals or communities to those statist ambitions.

Why does this matter to Catholics?

It was not long ago, only a matter of a couple of years under President Biden that the FBI were spying on conservative Catholics, having designated them as threats to the state.

Last month Congress heard that a “ report reveals that contrary to testimony from former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray, the 2023 Richmond memorandum that derisively labeled traditional Catholics as “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” was not an isolated incident”…. “New documents obtained by the Committee show that the Biden-Wray FBI put more federal law-enforcement resources into surveilling Catholics than previously known. The Richmond Field Office’s targeting of Catholics extended to surveilling a priest by coordinating with other field offices nationally and internationally, including FBI Headquarters and the FBI’s London Office. In addition, several internal FBI documents used derogatory terms like “radical traditionalist catholic” or “Radical-Traditionalist Catholic” between 2009 and 2023. An FBI internal database contained at least 13 documents, including the Richmond memorandum, that used these terms—all of which cited the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)”

So not just American Catholics then. Perhaps you and me? Setting aside our own tender capacities for paranoia (except that it’s not paranoia when they are actually out to get you) this makes Catholics enemies of the left leaning American administration.

Catholics are used to being treated as an enemy of the state. Nevertheless this goes some way to explaining the relief of Catholics in America and elsewhere that JD Vance is one, and under any regime he is part of we will not be treated as enemies of the state.

Meanwhile, the Biden FBI designations of traditional Catholics as radical Catholics, as if we were political extremists, is indicative of how thin the ice is.

Boiled down what this suggests is that the Left do not like guns because the Left is more likely for dogmatic reasons to want to develop a degree of statist control over its citizens than the Right is.

(The Left deny this of course, but that doesn’t make it untrue.)

So what this infers is that the guns debate that has erupted (as always) after the shooting has little to do with the tragic deaths of the children; or indeed any real proposal to deal with the phenomenon of mass killings in the States,-neither in schools or elsewhere); but are their debate is instead the continuation of a political struggle the Left sees as far more important even that the deaths of children, and that is the ambition to exercise administrative and governmental control over its citizens.

My American friends often reflect on conversation, “what are you going to do in teh UK when the Labour Government turns the screw one more time over thought crime and censorship and you find yourself living in a fully fledged totalitarian state.

Because you have no arms.

Indeed we don’t. Gun control for the Left is a pre-requisite for ensuring that the citizenship have no means of defending themselves when the state turns hostile.

So if gun control is about statist ambition for a more authoritarian government perhaps that is the context in which the debate should take place.

What if we discussed the tragedy of school shootings without being diverted by gun control?

We might find ourselves giving our attention to that deeply demanding area of the cross over between mental illness and evil.

Gun control is much easier to wrangle over. Especially since it is a diversion. Interpreting the subtle and multi layered gradations between mental distress and dysfunction, and the reality of metaphysical evil is much harder.

We have politicised gender dysphoria and in so doing have removed it form the category of mental illness where it belonged, into the contested arena of human rights and victimhood. Part of the ethical and metaphysical analysis of the church is that suffering from being mentally unwell makes the task of holding a defence against the subtleties of evil and the ethically disguised whispers of temptation to destroy our neighbors, so much more difficult that when one is sane and well balanced.

So perhaps it is no surprise that six of the recent shooting of innocents tragédies have involved perpetrators four of whom were ‘trans’, with one cross-dresser and one non-binary.

We are not trying to blame any class of persons, but only observe that the mentally ill are less defended against the temptation to succumb to rage, bittterness, a misplaced sense of injustice, and kill their innocent neighbours.

What is the Catholic response to this? Read it all at Gavin Ashenden