As you know by now, there was another horrific school shooting Wednesday, this time in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen people were killed. Our hearts and prayers go out to all those affected by the evil acts of this maniac.

As always happens after events like this, there is a lot of speculation. I don’t want to repeat what is being stated over and over again in the media.

What is clear, however, is that the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was a very troubled person. He had been expelled repeatedly. Students darkly joked that if anyone was going to shoot up the school it was him.

Family friends say he was taking medication for psychological issues. His social media postings and the websites he visited were described as “very disturbing” and “gruesome.”

Once again, we are left grappling with the complexities of mental illness and what appropriate actions can be taken to make events like this less likely.

To me an obvious thing is for schools to have armed and trained security guards. It is not unusual to see armed security guards at banks because we don’t want someone taking our money. Aren’t our children more valuable?

Instead, we “protect” them with “Gun-Free Zone” signs.

It makes absolutely no sense for our children’s safety to depend entirely on whether or not a maniac wakes up in the morning and decides to kill children in a “gun free zone.”

Guess what? Once the killer steps onto the campus of that school, it is no longer a “gun-free zone,” and the only armed individual is the criminal.

Why is this so controversial to the Left? Sadly, it is easier for a murderer to walk into a school with a gun than it is for a student to walk in with a Bible and attempt to give it away.

The default position of progressives is to attack the Second Amendment and the availability of guns. Yet the percentage of households with guns has been declining for decades. Fewer Americans hunt today than did several decades ago. In fact, many schools used to have gun clubs on campus. Yet school shootings were rare.

Logic suggests that something else explains this shocking trend.

Our Coarsening Culture

When a person has bad health, a lot of different things start going wrong. Together those things often result in their death.

I would argue that the health of America’s culture and society has been declining day by day, year by year, decade by decade. The combination of things contributing to that decline is coming together and results in what we are seeing today, like a typical weekend in Chicago.

To begin with, the exposure to graphic entertainment is one problem. The extreme violence that is so readily available today in movies, video games and online has a desensitizing effect.

The bigger problem, in my view, has been the systematic campaign to purge Judeo-Christian values from our schools and our culture.

These values undergird our society. It is not just that they teach the basic things a healthy society needs, it also teaches children that we are all made in the image of God, and that every child has dignity.

I was pleased to hear President Trump touch on this in his address to the nation when he said:

“We must also work together to create a culture in our country that embraces the dignity of life, that creates deep and meaningful human connections, and that turns classmates and colleagues into friends and neighbors.”

Today, our children are regularly taught that they are a cosmic accident, and that after millions of years of evolution we ended up as hairless apes. They are taught that human life is disposable, that “unwanted pregnancies” can be easily aborted.

We have entertained a massive social experiment in the breakdown of the family to see if a society can raise good kids without fathers, or if mothers and fathers even matter at all.

Sadly, almost everything I have listed here is completely off-limits for debate in our politically correct culture today.

It is ironic that there are entire organizations dedicated to ensuring that kids do not see the Ten Commandments in their school or in a park or on a courthouse wall. This hostility to faith has gone so far that people are mocking Christians for praying for the victims, for suggesting that an imaginary god has any influence in our society.

I guarantee you that plenty of parents and kids in Parkland, Florida, were praying Wednesady.

Yesterday on social media I expressed my sympathy and offered my prayers for the victims and their families, and immediately I was attacked. My friends, do not allow these radical atheists to deter you from praying to the God who declared:

“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.”

Of Gangs & Garbage

I’m not a fan of street gangs and Senate gangs aren’t much better. A new “Gang of 16” — which is laughably calling itself the “Common Sense Coalition” — is serving up the same garbage we have gotten in the past when it comes to immigration reform debates.

President Trump was very clear about his expectations. He called for legislation that addresses the “four pillars” of the Grassley bill, based on a plan the White House outlined recently.

Predictably, the “Gang of 16” plan does not get close to what the president asked for. In fact, Lindsey Graham even joked that it is more of a “two pillar plan.”

The Department of Homeland Security blasted the “gang of 16” plan Thursday morning, saying its DACA expansion would allow illegal immigrants who are 42 years old “TODAY … to apply for DACA now — these are not children and haven’t been for some time." 

DHS summed up this so-called "commonsense plan” by saying it “would effectively make the United States a Sanctuary Nation where ignoring the rule of law is encouraged.”

This is the kind of massive amnesty I would expect from the Left, and the White House threatened to veto the “gang of 16” bill.

Shame on the Republican senators involved in this sellout. They are: Alexander (R-TN), Collins (R-ME), Flake (R-AZ), Gardner (R-CO), Graham (R-SC), Isakson (R-GA), Murkowski (R-AK) and Rounds (R-SD).