As conservatives, we aren’t oblivious to the heart-wrenching reality that mass shootings are occurring too frequently. In a perfect world, they wouldn’t be happening at all. But the number of them may actually increase. We can predict this because the culprit is hiding in plain sight. The foundation for it was laid when the decades-old movement in which godlessness, cultural depravity and political correctness became the new standard. A standard that justifies all kinds of outrageous behavior. This is the reality, the disease, that leftists refuse to acknowledge. And the worse it gets, the more injurious the symptoms.

Conservatives understand that social, cultural and religious rebellion is at the root of the issue. That’s one reason gun control and other useless efforts to regulate evil are so strongly opposed. But it’s also deeper than that. Conservatives don’t view the government as the solution because history offers bloody proof that evil is maximized via statist tyranny, which rebellion inevitably begets. And without a defense mechanism — firearms — we are nothing more than sheep guarded by wolves.

The result? We know mass shootings will continue. But with it will come more clarion calls for gun confiscation from leftists who won’t turn from their rebellious ways. They believe the government — the enforcer of moral relativism — is the only way to right this ship. The ship they took in the wrong direction. They want to replace the rudder with another one that points the same way. Which is the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot. Only in this case everyone suffers.

The Boston Globe’s David Scharfenberg, for example, penned a recent piece forthrightly titled, “Hand over your weapons.” In it, he grumbles that commonly cited gun control measures don’t go far enough. “Congress can ban assault weapons,” Scharfenberg writes, “but they account for just a tiny sliver of the country’s 33,000 annual firearm deaths. And tighter background checks will do nothing to cut down on the 310 million guns already in circulation.”

Notwithstanding the fact that two-thirds of those firearm deaths are due to suicides (which the Left never wants to talk about), the author ends his piece by opining, “Ultimately, if gun-control advocates really want to stanch the blood, there’s no way around it: They’ll have to persuade more people of the need to confiscate millions of those firearms, as radical as that idea may now seem.” Amusingly, Scharfenberg invokes and lauds Australia’s gun confiscation but does concede: “The trouble with all of this is that America is not Australia.” Exactly. The Left wants to import foreign nations’ practices to our unique land of Liberty.

In the end, the violence will continue, and the push for greater and more extreme measures — like gun confiscation — will also continue absent a reawakening. We can throw all kinds of statistics at the Left, and rightly so. But rebellious leftists will simply explain it away, just like they do everything else, until they cure the blindness in their hearts. A blindness in which this observation from Thomas Jefferson is ignored: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”