Tag: Parkland shooting

Homegrown ISIS Terrorist Attacks High School: Corrupted youth show that gun legislation will never work

As gun grabbing organizations seek to use the Parkland shooting victims to advocate gun control measures by busing them into Washington D.C. for a rally to satisfy their strategic desires, a teenager in Utah inspired by the terrorist group ISIS attacked his school with a bomb—but nobody seemed to pick up on the story. The teenage kid put a homemade bomb in his backpack and tried to ignite it at Hurricane High School, in Utah in an area that usually contains a lot of people, but the bomb produced only smoke allowing bomb techs to arrive and disarm the device without injury or death. But not before the kid vandalized the school destroying American flags and spray painting “ISIS is coming” on the school’s exterior. That high school got lucky, because if the bomb had worked the death count could have been significantly higher than the Parkland shooting which has inspired the many anti-gun student protests around the country. Yet, the story gained little attention.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/03/07/isis-inspired-utah-teen-tried-to-blow-up-high-school-police-say.html

Obviously, we all know why. The bomb narrative doesn’t fit the anti-gun objectives of the liberalized media culture who desire to exploit every tragedy as a means to advance their progressive agenda. The students trained from nearly birth in those progressive sentiments are simple pawns in the great political game of gun confiscation and a complete rewriting of the Constitution by progressive activists—so they have no desire to deal with real solutions to real problems like the rise of radicalism among violent teenagers either inspired by ISIS propaganda or the psychologically dangerous erosion of values found in the many video games available to them at a young age—games like Grand Theft Auto. More than ever we have lots of young men being raised by single mothers who needed the help of a husband to properly raise aggressive sons. Lacking that firm parental structure some young men like this ISIS follower find their authority figures in radicalism, whether it be Islamic terrorism or anarchy such as the many ANTIFA groups. In the case of a removal of strong males in the home of these growing boys, group affiliations that show power become the substitute, like ISIS, ANTIFA or even Nazi radicalism. After all, we don’t typically see females doing these terrible things, so the primary villain is the son seeking father complex which many suffer from in our modern age.

There wasn’t a single gun involved in this attempted bombing of a Utah school, yet the desire to kill classmates and make a radical attention-getting statement was very much a part of the motive. Banning guns doesn’t stop these kinds of intentions—the desire to hurt others is the real problem and dealing with the cause of that desire. Until that issue is dealt with there will continue to be violence in schools and other public places. An assumption otherwise is to defer blame from the true guilty parties, those same progressive groups who have instigated the destruction of the American family unit, pushed strong men off the map of teaching and assumed that women could do it all by themselves. But even worse, they have assumed that the public education institutions themselves could serve as the primary parent and that group affiliations could replace the desire for individualized instruction. These social failures are at the heart of the very foundations of liberal epistemology. And to the credit of conservatives, we all tried as a country to bring all these different types of thinking together to give it a try. But the destructive results are now way too evident to ignore.

There isn’t any gun legislation that would have prevented this terror attempt, in fact we are likely to discover that the fewer guns there are the bolder these attempts become. In our present society a deranged kid like this Utah bomber doesn’t know how far they may get with some terrorist attempt. The kid obviously thought he’d get away with his actions long enough to create some vandalism prior to discharging his backpack bomb. If guns were to be removed from society at large there would be even a greater zone of no risk to this kid should he be intercepted going to or back from the school on this journey of intended death and destruction. Fewer guns in the world mean even more people like this young ISIS inspired terrorist are emboldened to live out their fantasies of corrupted ideology at the expense of the innocent—and that just isn’t acceptable.

Liberals in spite of considering them part of a debate in the friendly sense of rhetorical discussion are actually insurgents against American ideas and have long ago declared war on traditional founders of North American enterprise. I’m not talking about the nature loving savages of the Indian tribes, but those who brought from Europe the ability to read and manufacture who started their own country out of the ashes of kingdoms from across the Atlantic where kings and religion fought on the carcasses of innocent people just trying to live their lives. Liberals are part of that old-world mysticism where kings claimed themselves divine rods to the gods themselves and the church fought them for that same power for several millennia. When America finally came around to asserting itself we put into our Constitution the right to bear arms so that we wouldn’t have to listen to any kings or any authority figures who would love to rule our minds by force—and that was always the point. Liberals have sought to remove that tool and in so doing they have created an environment that has bred kids like this ISIS terrorist—home grown in the vacuum of destruction liberals imposed on the American family.

And to defer that blame liberals are attacking guns so that by the time we all as a society figure out who is really to blame for all the carnage we are experiencing, that we might not have the ability to take back our government from the people who have screwed it up. So they have no problem using children to perpetuate their erosion on American rights. They don’t care about those rights, they only want what they want using a philosophy that is not conducive to the way of life of what traditional America has always represented. And in that former understanding, there weren’t kids like this Utah terrorist being bred right out in the open, they were getting their asses kicked by a dedicated father who taught them better. Instead of those kids finding that needed authority figure in ISIS they had their sons at the kitchen tables telling them to do their chores or else. And those kids didn’t rush out into the night to tear down American flags and burn efficiencies against our nation, they were learning to love our country through the discipline of tough love—which a lot of young males needed to hold together a method of productivity into their own futures. Without it they become their own worst enemies.

It was those same guilty parties who sought to provide 24 hour a day coverage of the Parkland shooting and the Vegas massacre that gave almost no airtime to this bombing attempt in Utah. And that was because it didn’t fit their narrative. After all, it’s not the news they were after, it was the ability to use hurt feelings to drive an anti-gun agenda that liberals all share together. They did it because they fear Americans with guns because it’s quickly becoming obvious who is really to blame for all these national tragedies. It’s certainly not traditional thinking Americans waving red white and blue flags in the streets who are NRA members who are causing all these problems. It is the troubled youth of progressive creation who have turned into monsters that we now must all contend with. And its only getting worse.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Video Games are to Blame for the Parkland Shooting: A neighbor reported that Nikolas Cruz played online shooters 15 hours per day

Gun confiscation is a goal of the political left, but in regard to these school shootings any gun control measure will have little effect because as I’d argue, there is a new element to our society that is much more to blame. About twenty years ago a video game called Goldeneye, based on the recent James Bond movie of the same name hit the Nintendo 64 home video game console. It was considered the first real “first person shooter” game which changed the industry forever. For the first-time players could play multiplayer death matches in the way that is common today with poplar games like Call of Duty, Battlefront, and even Grand Theft Auto. Two years after Goldeneye was released, there was the infamous Columbine School shooting in Colorado—and there have been occasional mass school shootings since. The connection to the video game industry is much more guilt associated than with the gun industry because there were guns before all this happened. What was new and different was the ability of young people to shoot guns in the world of computer gaming where the typical skills of learning to shoot and the consequences that were once taught to young people have been removed. These modern video games are slick, and fast. The guns fire ballistically in a very similar fashion. I used to tell my daughters who grew up on the next generation of that Goldeneye game experience, Perfect Dark, that what they shot on video games was the cheapest shooting that they’d ever do. And for most kids, they can handle it—but they love to shoot at each other in first person shooters. I’d say that there is an intellectual need people have to play this way. But for a kid that is just a little crazy, it is far too tempting to live out the fantasy created in the video game culture of gunning down lots of people, because for a fleeting bit of moments, it makes them infinitely powerful. And for some kids trading that moment of power for their lives either in jail or in death is a worthy one.

We learned from USA Today that the shooter in Parkland, Florida was a heavy video game player. A neighbor of accused shooter Nikolas Cruz told the Miami Herald that Cruz “escaped his misery” by playing video games for as much as 15 hours a day. “It was kill, kill, kill, blow up something, and kill some more, all day,” he said. Well, that really hasn’t been talked about in the news—the only line of thought that has been this proposal to confiscate guns. The biggest problem with that besides it being flat-out unconstitutional is it’s also not relevant to solving the problem. What is even worse, the way the media used those kids from the Parkland shooting to advance their liberal gun agenda, in the same way that Michael Moore did when he released the film Bowling for Columbine hoping to press the nation into a gun confiscation policy similar to Australia—the media completely ignored the video game problem. Most of the kids they were parading out in front of the cameras were shooters themselves in the world of video games. Because these days, most kids are. Most young people don’t learn about guns from their grandpa or their fathers anymore where they really feel the gun shoot, understand the recoil, and the expense of firing a lead projectile at a target—they only see them in video games under the new social world of online multiplayer battles—which are as common as the milkshake was to teenage kids in the 1950s at the local car hoop. Talk to just about any high school kid and they are playing games online at home.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/02/20/after-parkland-video-games-back-critics-crosshairs/356654002/

I know a little bit about this world because I am still very much a part of it. I have always played lots of video games and I’ve watched this evolution, and personally I love it. The PlayStation network for which I’m a member reported to me the following stats for the year of 2017. I was a little shocked by them because as people know, I am a very busy guy. I work professionally 60 to 70 hors per week. I read at least one book every week. I shoot real guns often as well as fulfil many interests that I have. In addition I spend a lot of personal time with my family so I didn’t think it was possible to play as many hours as my PlayStation gamer tag said I did last year. Here’s a bit of the report:

Over the months of 2017, you played
768 hours

over 17 different games, while making the most progress in November with 118 hours of gameplay.
The average PlayStation gamer played for
218 hours

The most-active month in 2017 for PlayStation gamers was July with 1.13 billion hours.

So I played roughly three times more gaming on PlayStation than the average video gamer. And as seen by their own stats, people play about 1 billion hours a month in online gaming, most of which are first person shooters like Call of Duty. My thing is Star Wars: Battlefront. Now consider that these stats are just for PlayStation. Xbox has an equally vibrant following as does Nintendo. Presently in our house we have both the PlayStation and the new Nintendo Switch which get tremendous workouts all hours of the day. Video games are the number one past time of young people these days so if any reforms should be tackled, it is in what happens in the world of online shooters. That is the first place to start.

A gun ban will do nothing to curb the violence because the desire to violence is nurtured in online gaming. The need for a human being to decimate other live players is something very inherent in us all, which is what first person shooters are all about. Until that desire is eliminated from all human beings, there will be mass violence occurring. For well over 99% of the population they can play these games and not go out into the world and engage in mass violence. But for some the temptation to do in real life what they can do in the video game world is just too enticing—so they carry out the fantasy like Nikolas Cruz did in Parkland.

These video games are a global phenomenon, people are playing them in Europe and Asia as well, in live time. Guns aren’t so easy to get in those places so the killings that occur are other methods, knives, cars, bombs—whatever terrorists can get their hands on. I would be willing to bet that if most ISIS terrorists were tracked down to their gamer tags, we’d find that they play all these video games religiously in their countries of origin. I’m sure PlayStation and Xbox know who is playing what and how often. If they are tracking me, they are tracking everyone. And you can bet the NSA and the FBI have profiles on certain players and their online abilities and connections.

In real life one of the measurement systems I use to make multimillion dollar assessments of something is the lean manufacturing technique of Gage R&R which is a type of MSA—Measurement System Analysis. Gage R&R (repeatability and reproducibility) are typically only 30% to 50% accurate even with the best inputs that can be acquired so getting the best information to collect is of utmost importance. If I were to run a Gage R&R on mass school shootings putting all the data into a nice big beautiful spreadsheet taking into account the age of the shooter, the back ground of the shooters, the types of guns used, the social circumstances for which they functioned, the political beliefs, the amount of times they had sex with females—was their a father in the home, etc., we’d find that it was none of those elements that would point us to the obvious problem of what causes school shootings. What they’d all have in common to some degree or another was the direct result of the video game industry and the romance that gun violence has been perpetuated by the Hollywood product. Even the music industry would show up on our Gage R&R to show a repeatable influence over the last two decades for desensitizing people to the realities of the world and encouraging violence to instigate social change. The fault of school shootings statistically speaking have nothing to do with gun manufacturers or the NRA—it has everything to do with Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox. The MSA analysis points only to the video game industry followed closely by movies and television as the prime drivers of social violence. Even if all guns were confiscated and the NRA were out of existence today, mass killings would still occur because the cause of the violence has not been yet dealt with. The desire to kill lots of people can be done with a gun or a car, but it’s the problem of our modern society that such desires are there to begin with—and video games assist that desire with a role-playing element that makes the weakest and less disciplined of us seek out that sensation in real life.

You will never hear from me to ban video games. I love them too much and I am willing to put up with the occasional violence that we see because I think there are benefits to what video games bring to people. Violence is a byproduct, but so is the thinking that goes on which is changing us as a species and allowing us to process information so much faster than we ever did before. There is much more good about video games than bad. But if there is something to blame for the Parkland school shooting, it was video games that Nikolas Cruz played which likely pushed him over the edge. If you are harboring resentments in an aggressive setting and losing grips with reality—killing hundreds of people a day online is likely to create the fantasy of doing it in real life. Most of us know how to turn off that switch and to only keep that desire in the video game reality. Obviously, Cruz didn’t have that switch. But if people really want to solve the problem of school shootings, you have to start with the video game industry. Because there are a lot of Nikolas Cruz kids out there just waiting to snap. I think we are headed for a period over the next two decades where there will be many more killing attempts—because kids like Cruz play kill so much online that they want to try it in real life. And because they don’t have strong fathers to hold them together, or a family structure, a church, or even good media influences to look up to, there is nothing to keep them from testing themselves in reality once they have grown tired of killing in the world of video games. Not being able to buy a gun at Dick’s sporting goods or the Kroger stores won’t prevent them from some other method. If they want to kill, they are going to find some way to do it, and when they do, we have to be ready for them.

Rich Hoffman

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The Answer to Sam Zeil’s White House Question: Why we can buy “weapons of war” at the local store

I was impressed with the 18-year-old Sam Zeif who spoke at the White House after the Parkland, Florida school shooting. He lost his best friend and was very sad about it. He spoke very intelligently and was extremely articulate. But he asked a question that deserves an answer, and a lot of people who don’t shoot much, or understand the philosophic premise of the Second Amendment are asking the same question. Young Zeif said it a couple of times, he wanted to know why he could still buy “weapons of war” at the store and suggested that we’d all be better off if America adopted a similar policy as Australia—and had a general gun confiscation policy. I heard that and a natural tension went up my spine wanting to defend the basic assumption. However, I don’t blame the kids so much for not understanding the scope of the situation, they have learned it in their schools and in the temperament of their intuitional interaction. Yet most gun owners know and understand otherwise, and that knowledge is often traditionally transferred from generation to generation for a reason that is specific to American culture and is why we can go to the store and buy weapons of war. Young Sam apparently has not had the benefit of this generational exchange, so I’ll offer it here for him and those of a like mind.

Whenever I buy a new gun it is always a magical experience. I love every single new one and the thrill of it never stops. Guns always represent power and strength and the bigger and meaner the better. Being weapons of war is a very foundational way to look at them, but what they represent is aggression and defense. Yet ultimately, they stand for freedom, freedom from aggression, freedom from authoritarian rule, freedom from any sinister forces that might want to steer your life in a direction of their choosing, not yours. Having big, mean, powerful guns means you are on equal terms with even the most vicious aggressor out there in the world that may have ill intentions toward you, and having an option against those forces brings about freedom that only a gun can yield.

The world that many rock stars have sung about, and what Sam Zeif by default articulated does not exist. There is no institution in the world that is completely trustworthy, especially with our lives. We may wish for that to be the case, but even in the Parkland school shooting there were so many hired people who failed from the institutional point of view that no reasonable argument in their defense can be made. We would be fools to trust completely that the FBI would do their jobs 100% of the time. We’d be idiots to assume that local law enforcement will get it right in every circumstance. In the Parkland shooting there are reports now that up to four officers near the incident failed to confront the shooter, so even those officially sanctioned to use guns get it wrong a lot of the time—more than is acceptable. That doesn’t mean we should scrap our society into anarchy, but it does mean that we need another layer of security in our lives that is individually driven. We should leave it to the professionals—those we pay to worry about security and the laws we make as a society, but we should always look to ourselves first.

To assume that if all the guns in the world were confiscated that we would all by default fall into a society of peace is just ridiculous. Human beings probably have at least 100,000 more years of evolution before the basic natures of our existences change for the better, where aggression isn’t part of our interaction with each other. People are always competing with one another, there are always bigger people, smarter people, faster people, better looking people, etc., who will leverage their talents and abilities against others to acquire what they think they need to live. It was only through the invention of the gun and the general distribution of reading through the printing press that freedom from static institutions began to falter and the cultures of individuality began to spring up around the world, most notably in the early American colonies for which our Constitution was written. Before people could read things for themselves and defend what they acquired through that knowledge with personal defense, societies were strung together through kingships and nobility. The gun freed us all from that enslavement.

But go to any corporate environment and you will see the same primitive mechanisms at work, people using whatever skills of superiority they have over others to acquire advantages for themselves. War is a trait of human beings, even two nicely mannered women will fight over who has the best flower bed, the best pie, or even the largest diamond ring. It is in the nature of human beings to be competitive, even if the foundations are rooted in destruction. But when a person has a gun and they are smaller than another person with a gun, they are both suddenly equal. Guns are the ultimate equalizers, having guns puts everyone on the same footing essentially making firearms a major contributor to the furtherance of a human species working toward objectives that supersede the typical primitive motivations of past millennia. Many of the advancements made in America are because of the gun, not in spite of them. People who might in any other society be pushed to the back of the pecking order line were able to profess their ideas about things knowing that they wouldn’t be gunned down in the street for professing them, because everyone is armed and retaliation is always a possibility. For the first time in the history of the world, individuals had power over the institutions so they could contribute to the nature of existence. If the threat of retaliation is not present, such as a big person being tempted to abuse a person of smaller stature, too often with humans an abuse of that relationship will take place because the larger person can, then the smaller person will find themselves in a weak position individually. If the smaller person has a gun, suddenly the size of the other person no longer gives them an advantage and a more equal exchange of information is possible leading to a better relationship.

Owning weapons of war even though nobody of a right mind ever thinks of using them for a destination of violence eases a mind that may always be concerned that the size of institutions may inhibit their options in life. Having big scary weapons in personal possession means that the big scary authorities who have lots of weapons of war will think twice before kicking down your door in the middle of the night to abuse their authority—just because they can. When there are people out in the world carrying around big scary weapons to prevent terrorists from attacking the foundations of our society there must also be checks in place to keep law enforcement from using that power to abuse their authority to take the possessions of people they are supposed to be watching over. We all hear of cases where traffic cops pull over a car full of girls and have forced them to perform sex acts to get out of expensive fines. Or cops detain an attractive woman and force them into a state of undress accusing them of carrying dangerous weapons just so they can have the power to strip down a beautiful woman. It happens much more than it should. The people we pay to protect us are much less prone to abuse that relationship if they have to worry that people might shoot back if they abuse their authority. We’d hope that such a thing might never happen but just looking at the abuse of the FBI against the Trump administration tells us that even at the highest levels of our government that trust is only as deep as the threat of danger that might come back at the perpetrators. Without that threat, abuse often happens in any relationship.

Ironically weapons of war are the foundations to a civil society. You will never see a lot of pushing and shoving going on at gun events where everyone is armed with a gun. Big people, small people, smart people and dumb people all treat each other respectfully because in those meetings everyone is truly equal because it’s not the biological gifts that we have which make us that way, it is the invention of the gun that takes over and puts everyone on equal footing. By taking away the temptation for aggression it forces everyone to treat each other fairly and with great respect. That’s why you don’t see mass shootings at gun shows or NRA events—and why those people tend to be very polite and respectful. The gun is an invention of equality and it works wonderfully.

So to answer Sam’s question, why can he go to the store to buy weapons of war, well, because those weapons are needed to keep human beings on an equal playing field. Institutions by themselves cannot be trusted, they often do abuse their power and so long as that is the case, which isn’t necessarily a learned behavior, but a biological one, equality must be achieved between people through an inventive process. The beauty of a fine weapon that is big and scary is that it gives the owner the ability to function in life with a level of equality that has never been possible prior to the invention of the firearm. Having that firearm forces others to deal with you at a level of respect that is unmistakable and takes away the temptations to abuse relationships for the gain of a one-sided exchange. If young women had more guns in an open carry part of their fashion, they would get harassed sexually a lot less. Because the natural relationship between a large man of 250 pounds is to show superiority over the 120-pound woman. But when she has on her hip a nice Glock or a Smith & Wesson revolver, the large man will treat the woman differently because his size and strength are no longer assets that he can claim superiority over. She is just as strong as he is just because she has a gun. If he has a gun as well, then the two are truly equal.

Traditionally when a father or grandfather gave a young man his first gun, the gift wasn’t just a weapon of war, it was an assignment of equality that let the youth engage with the world on an equal footing—even among his parental peers. For instance, the implication of the dad to the son, “you are now as strong as I am and I trust you enough to give you this gun.” Many such people never use their guns in any kind of aggressive manner, but they know if they needed to, they could and that leads to a society of greater respect in personal exchanges. If the behavior of Nickolas Cruz, the shooter in the Parkland massacre, were to be studied correctly it would be revealed that the kid was small, had been picked on for much of his life and his parents failed to give him a good philosophic foundation to live with. So he turned to the gun to become superior to his oppressors. If people at the school also had guns, then Cruz would not have such a claim to superiority that he had on the day of the shooting. But taking guns away doesn’t solve the problem—Cruz was still a kid who was picked on for being such a small person, humans are always looking for leverage over one another. Only in an equally armed society do we actually have the basis for a proper interaction based on fairness. That is why we have weapons of war for sale at an area store. They are essential to a proper and justice-based society.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.