Guns & More Nephite Disease (by Anonymous D)

Sharing my ideas for tonight's post, Anonymous D emailed me with some of his thoughts. He has such a great way of getting to the core of things. Take it away, D!

Well there is hope, if but slim. The whole business is so sad it brings you almost to tears, then to anger. I’m still a little flabbergasted by the general culture of Utah, its flirtation with fanaticism, nay outright love of it. I just finished the Joseph Smith Biography again [Bushman], and then Turner’s Brigham Young. I’m starting the Leonard Arrington Brigham Young Bio. I understand why they turned to what seems fanatical to us, having endured the mobs of Missouri, and Nauvoo having been hunted and driven and many killed it’s understandable. But our current fanaticism? Could it be a persecution complex? The need to divine every political movement through the lens of the coming apocalypse? Whenever the end comes I’m sure it will take us completely off guard. The Nephites had been warned and yet it seems were clueless when they were actually destroyed.

The recent mourning over the loss of “The Iron Lady” have brought to mind, given the current situation in both the United Kingdom and the United States, the central fact that Reagan and Thatcher were not only wrong about most things, but dangerously wrong. I can’t help but think of the current economic situation, and the ever growing problems in the Middle East, or at least the continued existence of groups which until recently we tried to prop-up.

Still, it’s nice to be able to pawn the ills of society off on others. My apprehensions regarding new gun laws aren’t necessarily that they won’t work, but a question of applying a metric to their success? There is no way of knowing about possible crimes or suicides which have not happened because of some law, but what happens after legislation has been passed and the inevitable happens and there is another massacre somewhere? When do we start addressing the culture of violence and greed and sex? We are awash in it, glorify it. When do we take mental health issues seriously and provide as a society adequate funding and support for the mentally ill and their families? It seems a few billion dollars meager in exchange for the real possibility of getting these people help. Certainly the families of victims of violence would think so. How much would we spend to recover the life of a loved one? How much do we spend to make sure that we can dispatch someone else’s loved one as efficiently as possible?

The Church is correct, there is nothing so sacred as the Family, nothing so basic and necessary, nothing we should take pains to protect more. Our very existence as a culture and a people depend upon it.