Tag Archives: Children

News

Armed guard stops school shooting in Atlanta

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A report from The Blaze.

Excerpt:

A student opened fire at his middle school Thursday afternoon, wounding a 14-year-old in the neck before an armed officer working at the school was able to get the gun away, police said.

[…]The armed resource officer who took the gun away was off-duty and at the school, but police didn’t release details on him or whether he is regularly at Price. Since 20 children and six adults were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December, calls for armed officers in every school have resonated across the country.

Although it’s very clear what actually works to prevent/contain school shootings, you won’t hear the media or the Democrats (but I repeat myself) calling for what works.

In fact, Obama’s daughters go to a school with 11 armed security guards. When Obama says that guns don’t make anyone safer, he is a liar. And he knows he is lying, because in real life, he does the complete opposite of what he reads off the teleprompter in speeches.

Here’s another case from just yesterday where guns were used to stop a crime.

A home invasion suspect was arrested at a hospital after a mother shot him during the crime at a Montgomery County home, deputies said Wednesday.

Erin, who asked to be identified only by her first name, told Local 2 she was putting her 6-year-old son to bed when she heard a loud noise coming from her bedroom on Mink Lake Drive Friday night…

Erin said she turned around and saw three masked men, pointing a gun right at her…

“Somehow the way it happened, as they were going down the hallway, I told them sometimes I keep money under the mattress, which is not true. But I needed to get to where my gun was,” she said.

The men followed her to her bedroom.

“I was pretending to move the mattress. It’s really heavy, so I was trying to move their attention to the mattress because they wouldn’t take their eyes off of me. I needed a split second for them to take their eyes off of me. I said, ‘It might be under here.’ They started talking to each other in Spanish and then a roll of duct tape came out,” said Erin…

“They all turned around and looked. I grabbed my gun, cocked it, I turned and shot him right in the stomach,” said Erin.

But have no fear, the Department of Homeland Security has a better idea than armed guards.

Look:

The federal government recommends you bring scissors to a gunfight.

The Department of Homeland Security offers Americans tips on how to survive an attack by an “active shooter,” including “throw[ing] items” and grabbing a pair of scissors.

DHS recommends Americans either “evacuate” the building or “hide out” depending on the situation, according to a 2008 handbook and “pocket card.”

But the third option, “take action,” is considered a “last resort” by the government.

One can “attempt to incapacitate the shooter” by “act[ing] with physical aggression and throw[ing] items at the active shooter,” suggests DHS.

A web video released by DHS in January says, “you might consider trying to overpower the shooter” as a last resort, “with whatever means are available.”

The clip shows an office worker grabbing a pair of scissors for the purpose of “trying to overpower the shooter.”

Surprise! People on the left care as much about born children as they do about unborn children. That’s the truth. That’s the truth.

Commentary

Christian homeschooling mom recommends teaching kids to think through policies

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Here is a neat post from Lydia McGrew, Ph.D, a homeschooling mom.

Excerpt:

As we Protestant conservatives view with great dismay what seems to us the hair-tearing foolishness of a new generation of young, “emergent” evangelicals spouting the platitudes of the left and getting their priorities all messed up, either abandoning or downplaying the pro-life movement, voting Democrat, and embracing left-wing economics, we need to think of something that cannot be said too often: What the left wants is not what is best for the poor, the weak, the little guy. In fact, we can sometimes even go farther: The left does not want what is best for the poor and the weak. Viz. the Obama administration’s willingness to shut down Catholic hospitals, Catholic charities, and anyone else who won’t toe the line on his HHS mandate. Viz. the Obama administration’s cutting off the Catholic bishops’ funding for anti-trafficking, because they wouldn’t refer for abortions. Viz. the left’s shut-down of adoption agencies that won’t place children with homosexual couples. The list goes on and on.

And there is more: The actual economic policies advocated by the left mean fewer jobs, higher prices, and small businesses pushed out by high regulatory costs, all of which is very bad for the people who need jobs the most. We’re seeing this right now with the economic burden of Obamacare, but that’s only one example. The actual environmental policies advocated by the left are radically anti-human and will result in grave economic harm both to our own country and, even more, to developing countries. I have just been reading a book I hope to write more about later, Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin. In it he chronicles case after case after case of leftist policies that have harmed the poorest of the poor in Third-World countries, from coercive population control to crackdowns forcing Third-World countries to eschew the advantages of more nutritious modified grains.

When our young people are growing up we Christians and conservatives often teach them biblical principles, and that is very good. But we also need to teach them economic principles. We need to teach them that there is no free lunch. We need to have them read books like Zubrin’s and like Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed. We need to talk through with them the ways that policies that sound oh-so-kind to “make things free” or “force employers to pay more” or “give health insurance to everyone” actually harm the people they are meant to help. We need to expose to them the viciously anti-human underside of the environmental movement, as well as its empirical fecklessness.

This one is a must-read! Please click through and read the whole thing, especially if you have Christian children.

Lydia’s group blog “What’s Wrong With the World?” is also good reading.

News

Does abortion produce fewer out-of-wedlock births, less child abuse, and lower crime rates?

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Here’s an article that commenter Scott sent me from the Public Discourse.

Topic snippet:

In the 1960s and 1970s, abortion advocates used a variety of arguments to advance their cause. Some emphasized women’s liberty and autonomy. Others tried to persuade people that easy access to abortion would benefit society as a whole. Consider just two representative quotations:

“A policy that makes contraception and abortion freely available will greatly reduce the number of unwanted children, and thereby curb the tragic rise of child abuse in our country.” (NARAL, 1978)

“The impact of the abortion revolution may be too vast to assess immediately. It should usher in an era when every child will be wanted, loved, and properly cared for.” (NARAL co-founder Larry Lader, 1974)

Legal abortion, advocates argued, would result in fewer out-of-wedlock births and less child abuse, and would ensure that every child was wanted. Over time, these arguments lost credibility because neither out-of-wedlock births nor child abuse was decreasing.

In the early 2000s, academics Steven Levitt (University of Chicago) and John Donohue (Yale University) published a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, titled “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime,” claiming that legal abortion unexpectedly lowered crime rates in many American cities during the 1990s. Groups supporting abortion rights generally distanced themselves from this argument, fearing its eugenic implications. Though the findings have received some widespread credibility because of Levitt’s popular book Freakonomics, they have been much criticized by other academics.

In this essay I show that easy access to abortion during the past forty years has not benefited society as a whole. Legal abortion has not reduced out-of-wedlock births, child abuse, or crime rates.

And here’s a sample: (I chose one that I haven’t posted about before)

Abortion advocates frequently argued that legal abortion would decrease child abuse. Children who were wanted, they claimed, would be less likely to suffer from abuse than those who were unwanted. But social science data suggest that this logic is flawed. A landmark study of 674 abused children by Edward Lenoski (University of Southern California) found that 91 percent of the parents admitted that they wanted the child they had abused.  A 2005 study by Priscilla Coleman (Bowling Green University) showed that women who obtained abortions were 144 percent more likely to abuse their own children.

At a more theoretical level, Dr. Philip G. Ney, head of the Department of Psychiatry at Royal Jubilee Hospital in Canada, has outlined why abortion can lead directly to child abuse.

  1. Abortion decreases an individual’s instinctual restraint against the occasional rage felt toward those dependent on his or her care.
  2. Permissive abortion diminishes the taboo against aggressing [against] the defenseless.
  3. Abortion increases the hostility between the generations.
  4. Abortion has devalued children, thus diminishing the value of caring for children.
  5. Abortion increases guilt and self-hatred, which the parent takes out on the child.
  6. Abortion increases hostile frustration, intensifying the battle of the sexes, for which children are scapegoated.
  7. Abortion cuts the developing mother-infant bond, thereby diminishing her future mothering capability.

Overall, American statistics paint a clear picture. Legal abortion did not reduce child abuse. In fact, the exact opposite happened. The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect has reported that child abuse has increased more than 1,000 percent since the legalization of abortion in 1973. According to data from the US Statistical Abstract, deaths due to child abuse continued to rise after the Roe v. Wade decision and increased by 400 percent between 1972 and 1990. Obviously, child abuse is caused by a variety of complicated factors. Still, our experience in the United States provides no evidence that legal abortion reduces child abuse.

This is a good one to bookmark, I’ll bet you will be able to use it in a debate. By the way, if you want more of a rebuttal of Freaknomics, you can check out John Lott’s book “Freedomnomics“. It has a whole section on abortion and crime.