The mainstream media, and the culture at large, seems to spend a lot more time talking about multiple victim public shootings. But they ignore the times when legally-armed law-abiding citizens defend themselves from criminals. Here’s an example of what that looks like, reported from KHOU Houston local news.
Excerpt:
Investigators said it all started when the man’s wife pulled into their driveway Tuesday night. Then the two armed suspects jumped out and tried to rob her.
First, they took her purse, and then they tried to force her into the house. However, that is when her husband showed up.
He heard the commotion from inside, grabbed his gun and ended up exchanging gunfire with the intruders.
Fortunately, the couple weren’t hit, but one of the suspects was hit in the head, police said. The other suspect took off running.
Police said the injured suspect was taken into surgery.
As for the couple, one can only imagine what was going through their mind when this was all over. Hopefully, they’re able to find some peace of mind this morning, knowing they’re OK.
Now, imagine you are the husband and you wake up to find two armed men in your home, holding your wife hostage. The police are minutes away, even if you could make the phone call while the criminals waited patiently for you to do so. In this situation, what sort of remedy would be offered to you by people who want to confiscate your legally-owned firearms? What could they offer you that would rescue your wife and yourself, and prevent your house from being burglarized? I actually know progressives who hate gun usage so much that they actually don’t believe in an individual’s right to defend himself, his family and his property. There is this strange desire to try to “make peace” by surrendering to the most angry person in the room. Some progressives are really like this. They just don’t believe that violence (or even the threat of violence) is ever the answer to dealing with evil. Progressives want to disarm you, but they don’t want to do a think to make criminal activities harder for criminals.
The truth is that progressives often live in gated communities and have armed security. They want to be safe, but they don’t care about YOUR safety.
Gun ownership up, gun violence down
The peer-reviewed research
Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic books by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.
I think that peer-reviewed studies should be useful for assessing gun control vs gun rights policy. The book by economist John Lott, linked above,compares the crime rates of all U.S. states that have enacted concealed carry laws, and concludes that violent crime rates dropped after law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry legally-owned firearms. That’s the mirror image of Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study, which shows that the 1997 UK gun ban caused violent crime rates to MORE THAN DOUBLE in the four years following the ban. But both studies affirm the same conclusion – more legal firearm ownership means less crime.
One of the common mistakes I see anti-gun advocates making is to use the metric of all “gun-related deaths”. First of all, this completely ignores the effects of hand gun ownership on violent crime, as we’ve seen. Take away the guns from law-abiding people and violent crime skyrockets. But using the “gun-related deaths” number is especially wrong, because it includes suicides committed with guns. This is the majority (about two thirds) of gun related deaths, even in a country like America that has a massive inner-city gun violence problem caused by the epidemic of single motherhood by choice. If you take out the gun-related SUICIDES, then the actual number of gun homicides has decreased as gun ownership has grown.
For a couple of useful graphs related to this point, check out this post over at the American Enterprise Institute.
Kristen Waggoner of Alliance Defending Freedom argued Jack Phillips’ case before the Supreme Court. (Photo: Jeff Malet/The Heritage Foundation)
I was very surprised to see the far-left Washington Post post a balanced article on Alliance Defending Freedom. The ADF is a group of lawyers who do battle in defense of religious liberty and conscience in the Supreme Court. They have won 9 cases at the Supreme Court in the last 7 years, despite having to argue in front of a court that had a 5-4 liberal majority.
Here’s some of the article:
Two days before the announcement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s retirement, a woman who stood to gain from it was on the steps of the Supreme Court once again. Kristen Waggoner’s blond bob was perfectly styled with humidity-fighting paste she’d slicked onto it that morning at the Trump hotel. Her 5-foot frame was heightened by a pair of nude pumps, despite a months-old ankle fracture in need of surgery. On her wrist was a silver bracelet she’d worn nonstop since Dec. 5, 2017, the day she marched up these iconic steps, stood before the justices and argued that a Christian baker could legally refuse to create a cake for a gay couple’s wedding.
Her job was to be the legal mind and public face of Alliance Defending Freedom., an Arizona-based Christian conservative legal nonprofit better known as ADF. Though far from a household name, the results of ADF’s work are well known. Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission was just one of ADF’s cases at the Supreme Court this term. The organization has had nine successful cases before the court in the past seven years, including Burwell v. Hobby Lobby…
I follow very few people on Twitter, only about 27-30. One of those people is Kristen Waggoner. She is the lead counsel in many of these Supreme Court cases. She is the best at what she does.
Her silver bracelet is engraved with a famous passage that I think has inspired many Christian women of courage. It’s from the book of Esther. The bracelet says “For Such A Time As This”. It’s a phrase that is taken from Mordecai’s warning to Esther that God is sovereign over her life, and that he has put her into a position to defend her whole nation from threats.
6 So Hathak went out to Mordecai in the open square of the city in front of the king’s gate.
7 Mordecai told him everything that had happened to him, including the exact amount of money Haman had promised to pay into the royal treasury for the destruction of the Jews.
8 He also gave him a copy of the text of the edict for their annihilation, which had been published in Susa, to show to Esther and explain it to her, and he told him to instruct her to go into the king’s presence to beg for mercy and plead with him for her people.
9 Hathak went back and reported to Esther what Mordecai had said.
10 Then she instructed him to say to Mordecai,
11 “All the king’s officials and the people of the royal provinces know that for any man or woman who approaches the king in the inner court without being summoned the king has but one law: that they be put to death unless the king extends the gold scepter to them and spares their lives. But thirty days have passed since I was called to go to the king.”
12 When Esther’s words were reported to Mordecai,
13 he sent back this answer: “Do not think that because you are in the king’s house you alone of all the Jews will escape.
14 For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”
15 Then Esther sent this reply to Mordecai:
16 “Go, gather together all the Jews who are in Susa, and fast for me. Do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my attendants will fast as you do. When this is done, I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish.”
17 So Mordecai went away and carried out all of Esther’s instructions.
Kristen Waggoner is our Esther. She actually has much better character and abilities than the real Esther .
Kristen K. Waggoner serves as senior vice president of U.S. legal division and communications with Alliance Defending Freedom. In this role, Waggoner oversees the U.S. legal division, a team of 100 attorneys and staff who engage in litigation, public advocacy, and legislative support. Since she assumed this role, ADF has prevailed as lead counsel in eight U.S. Supreme Court victories, including Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which she argued at the Supreme Court and won. She continues as lead counsel in Arlene’s Flowers v. State of Washington, which the Supreme Court remanded to the lower courts. She also served as counsel for the free speech victory that the Supreme Court handed down in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra.
I consider it amazing that more Christians don’t know who she is. Christians tend to admire famous celebrities, athletes, artists. And prosperity gospel preachers. But these people merely entertain us. Kristen Waggoner is not an entertainer, she is a warrior. She goes into the most dangerous places and fights for the liberty of every one of us. She’s become a sheep dog in order to protect the sheep. Right now, we are facing challenges from people who are trying to use the law like a weapon to bully and silence anyone who tries to live out an authentic Christian life. Powerful people are trying to say that when a Christian’s liberty makes them FEEL BAD, that means that the Christian’s liberty needs to be suppressed. The ADF is there to make sure that they don’t succeed.
Whenever the ADF goes out to battle, I make sure to write about their cases on this blog. We should all be informed and give respect to Kristen Waggoner and everyone who works for the ADF. They are some of the most effective and influential Christians, and they deserve our gratitude and our respect.
More about her background
One of the other groups I like a lot is the Heritage Foundation, my favorite think tank. I have similar admiration and respect for the people who work there, such as Genevieve Wood and Jennifer Marshall. The Daily Signal, a news site operated by the Heritage Foundation, has posted a story about Kristen Waggoner’s background.
It says:
Waggoner grew up as Kristen Kellie Behrends in Longview, Washington, about two hours south of Seattle and an hour north of Portland.
What she treasures most about her upbringing, Waggoner says, is that she was steeped in consistent values at home, church, and school that shaped her worldview without sheltering her.
Her father taught her from Scripture about “being an Esther, being a Deborah, used by God,” she says, and that “joy and fulfillment come from having a purpose that’s bigger than ourselves.”
“It’s not about us, we’re a part of a bigger story that has to do with helping human flourishing. And that just shaped my whole life, even now.”
[…]Once a teacher in public schools, today her father is a licensed minister in the Assemblies of God denomination. He is associate pastor of Cedar Park Church in Bothell, Washington, and superintendent of an affiliated school system.
Young Kristen would go to the principal’s office to visit her father three or four times a day, sometimes because she got into trouble. In these encounters, he urged her to find and develop her talents, and apply them in a way that would honor God.
And one day, Waggoner recalls, she saw clearly that defending ministries and religious freedom should be her path.
[…]“The right of conscience is critical to the existence of the country and is the first freedom that our other civil liberties are directly connected with,” Waggoner says. “I wanted to be a part of that—that fight to preserve it for my children and my grandchildren.”
On this blog, I put a lot of emphasis on Christians being careful about what they study in school, what jobs they take, how they manage their money, and who they choose to marry. The goal of all this is to make sure that young Christians are thoughtful about having a vision for their lives, and pursuing that vision in a way that minimizes wildness, fun and thrills. Becoming a hero doesn’t happen by accident, it takes planning and execution. There is no path to success that involves doing whatever feels good moment-by-moment. In order to make a difference, we need to be careful about doing what works, not pursuing fun and thrills in the moment.
Killing patients is an easy way to keep costs down
Canada has a pure single-payer health care system. That means that Canadians are taxed (average family pays $12,057 per year), and then the government decides who will get health care. As you might expect, when health care is free, the demand for it goes up. In order to cut costs, Canada decided to stop treating the elderly.
Canadians were asked in 2016 to accept what is now called Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) as standard practice in the health-care system. But as the second anniversary of the federal law sanctioning assisted suicide passes this month, ambiguities embedded in the new regulatory regime are turning end-of-life care into a troubling leap of faith for doctors and patients alike.
Even the Collège des Médicins in Quebec, which sped ahead with its own statute in advance of Ottawa’s Bill C-14, has sounded a strong warning note about patients “choosing” medical assistance in dying purely because their preference for palliative care isn’t available.
That’s Quebec, but there’s more patient-killing going on at the other end of the country in British Columbia:
At the other end of the country in British Columbia, an active proponent of MAiD, acknowledges that she, too, struggled to adapt to the vagueness of the federal law. Dr. Ellen Wiebe says she ultimately concluded she would have to rely on her personal best judgment about whether or not to administer death.
Although there is a shortage of funding for palliative care in Canada, there’s lots of money available for abortions, sex changes, IVF, etc.
I was able to find out about Dr. Wiebe’s worldview from another earlier 2016 article in the far-left Maclean’s magazine:
Much of Wiebe’s 40-year career as a family physician she has spent doing abortions, including at Vancouver’s first abortion clinic, as well as patient advocacy and pioneering abortion drug research.
[…]She was raised in a Mennonite family in Abbotsford, B.C., and Wiebe says,“I know my Bible pretty well. I could quote it, no problem.” Her mother was a homemaker, and her father was a teacher who worked for the Canadian International Development Agency, which meant Wiebe and her three siblings spent parts of their childhood in Asia and Africa with them. They were “wonderful people who loved life,” says Wiebe of her parents, and their Christian beliefs were an “important part of their lives for everything and anything.” But as Wiebe moved through adolescence—precociously so, finishing high school at 15—she abandoned her faith. “I lost all my religiosity by the age of 17,” says Wiebe. “It was just part of being in university, questioning and wondering and learning who you are.”
Looks like her parents were more focused on doing good things for the poor in foreign countries, than on teaching their own child apologetics. Abbotsford is a very conservative and beautiful part of Canada. She must have had an ideal childhood.
The Heritage Foundation notes that in the Netherlands, voluntary euthanasia has already turned into involuntary euthanasia:
For example, euthanasia is often promoted by its champions as a last resort to alleviate suffering, but the Netherlands already has moved “from assisted suicide to euthanasia, from euthanasia for the terminally ill to euthanasia for the chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for psychological distress and from voluntary euthanasia to nonvoluntary and involuntary euthanasia.” Such “termination without request or consent” has been applied to Dutch infants as well. The concern has been that public health system rationing may exert pressure not just to limit spending on certain individuals, but also, either subtly or overtly, to coerce them to be euthanized.
And I’ve already blogged about how the UK’s government-run NHS system pays hospitals bounties for putting patient on an end-of-life track. The new guidelines are even worse, as the UK Telegraph reports:
New NHS guidelines on “end of life” care are worse than the Liverpool Care Pathway and could push more patients to an early grave, a leading doctor has warned.
Prof Patrick Pullicino, one of the first medics to raise concerns over the pathway, said the national proposals would encourage hospital staff to guess who was dying, in the absence of any clear evidence, and to take steps which could hasten patients’ death.
The Liverpool Care Pathway – which meant fluids and treatment could be withdrawn, and sedation given to the dying – was officially phased out last year, on the orders of ministers.
It followed concern that under the protocols, thirsty patients had been denied water and left desperately sucking at sponges.
There’s government run health care for you.
I’m writing about this patient-killing issue today because I think it’s interesting to think about what health care is like in a country that is basically run by atheists, like Canada is. I personally would not like to be forced to pay taxes to pay the salary of a someone like Wiebe, and let her be in charge of my life.
