Sheriff Billy Woods of Marion County, Florida, holds that children who commit violent crimes need to be held accountable and calls for parents and schools to take more responsibility in raising children. He criticized “society,” “school districts,” and gun law rhetoric after announcing the arrests of two juveniles, one of whom is 12 years old, in connection with the killings of three teenagers in Marion County between March 30 and April 1, 2023. (A third was later arrested.) The victims were left for dead miles apart in the sheriff’s jurisdiction.
The suspects in the triple homicide were members of a burglary and robbery ring and stole their firearms from cars, Sheriff Woods said. He explained that the dead teens were also involved in the crimes. He had criticism as well for the vocal elements in social media and the news media who put the blame on guns after a shooting has happened. There are people out there “…who want to blame the one thing that has no ability… to commit the crime itself, and that’s the gun,” the sheriff said, adding that individuals, not guns, commit crimes. “Our school districts, not just here [but also] across this state and across this nation need to stop minimizing the actions of their students. Hold them accountable…”
The sheriff made plain: “The one thing that has no ability or the capacity to commit the crime itself and that’s the gun. All the gun laws we have in place didn’t prevent it, did it? Neither will any new ones.”
Sheriff Woods also touched on a nationwide issue of “wannabe gangs,” where kids are engaging in violent activity at a young age. “[P]arents have the right to know who their kids are hanging out with… [if they’re to have a role in] preventing this. Everybody wants to ignore it or deny it.” Every community no matter how small has some form of gang activity, the sheriff said in a news conference. “They have no structure, but it’s still a gang.”
“We need to go back to our faith and our beliefs, back to our fathers that disciplined us. This is missing. It truly is. The foundation is there, but the walls have crumbled, and we need to build them back up.”
“What are we going to do about gun violence!?”
“I don’t know — make them use a different weapon?”
overheard conversation
These murders will quickly become mere statistics in the continuing hand-wringing about “gun violence.” The focus is always on one vilified type of weapon. The most shrill voices are of those in the media and in politics who find guns at fault but who fail to express outrage about violence. Apparently, since violence itself is not the issue, it should be committed with something less conspicuous than guns. There would be no outrage, it would appear, if the vicious people among us committed their carnage with knives, car bumpers, whips, hatchets, clubs, and poisons.
HOW DID WE COME TO THIS?
Against her reckless assurances, Hillary Clinton’s villages have failed in raising our children, leaving them to the unrestricted influences of the most corrupt, perverse, and monstrous villains in our society. Those in political power, extolling the virtues of village-raising, see no reason to incarcerate the worst criminals and have instead spent decades fiercely shaming anyone who tries to maintain the traditional family unit. Already in command of your children’s indoctrination masquerading as education, they have wrested from parents the responsibility for their children’s welfare as well as their children’s behavior.
Violence, with its graphic carnage, is sold as entertainment across all media. Cowboy shoot-outs of early television were nothing compared with the galactic horrors and medieval warfare in games and movies now. Everything that we knew to be evil in the past is now defined as acceptable self-expression.
Remember the scoundrels, Foulfellow and Gideon, leading Pinocchio astray in the original 1940 Disney movie? No one questioned then whether they were up to no good. By today’s moral standards, they were taking the wooden boy on a laudable tour of legitimate alternate lifestyles.
How did our society know, half a century ago, what was not wholesome, what was evil, what was not acceptable? If it went against kindness, personal responsibility, and respect for others as individuals or as a group, that behavior was not wholesome. If it was cruel, insolent, or contemptuous of others’ privacy or property, or if it was dishonest or deceitful, it was evil. If it was self-destructive or dangerous, it was not acceptable.
Strangely, liberating men from responsibility for supporting the children they’ve fathered is a core tenet of the women’s liberation movement. The premise, evidently, is that a woman who wants to raise children outside the confines of marriage should be free to do so and the man’s only purpose is to fertilize her eggs. In the past, even if she didn’t want to raise a child by herself, a pregnant woman might have been unsure about the paternity of a baby in her womb, but there is no longer any mystery: Check each suspects’ DNA and assign the father equal responsibility for his child’s support and raising.
In the meantime, those with the microphones and who are continuously telling us what to think want to confiscate the guns from non-violent people who are not out to harm anyone. They believe this will make you feel more secure among the sociopaths, psychopaths, and village-raised gang wannabes who will continue to slaughter your children any way they can. Let us hope then that you’ll notice there’s a second word in the phrase “gun violence.”
=David A. Woodbury=
9 April 2023
Albert Jay Nock 