The young man was acting in a “weird” and anti-social way — he wouldn’t even shake another competitor’s hand. Then the gamer, at a video-game tournament this past Sunday, opened fire. It’s yet another mass shooting that, sadly, has become a sign of godless times.
The Daily Mail reports on the story’s nuts and bolts, writing that the shooter, David Katz,
killed himself and two others, and left 11 people injured in the shooting at the Jacksonville Landing complex in Jacksonville, Florida at around 1.34pm on Sunday, police said.
According to friends in the gaming community, the two men whom Katz killed in the tournament were Taylor ‘SpotMePlzzz’ Robertson, 27, of Ballard, West Virginia and Eli ‘Trueboy’ Clayton, 22, of Woodland Hills, California.
Robertson was married and father to a young son, and had won 13 out of his 18 prior matches in Madden NFL tournaments, according to EA Sports. Clayton was a rising star in the Madden community.
… One of the gamers to defeat Katz in the tournament told ActionNewsJax that Katz was acting ‘weird’ on Sunday and wearing the same clothes he wore the day prior, on the first day of the tournament.
The gamer said that when he beat Katz on Saturday in the group round, he tried to shake his hand, but that Katz just stared back at him blankly.
Bizarrely but unsurprisingly in this high-tech age, “A livestream of the tournament caught the chilling moment that a laser landed on Clayton’s chest before shots rang out,” the Mail also informs.
What no one has to be informed about is that, tragically, mass shootings have now become common in America. The commentary on them has become common, too, and often lacking in common sense. For example, Many will blame these heinous crimes on guns, but frequent mass shootings are a phenomenon of the last few decades — the period after the birth of thousands more anti-Second Amendment laws.
In fact, in the early 1900s you could just order a firearm from Sears’ catalogue and have it delivered to your home, or you could pick one up at the local hardware store. In the 1940s and ‘50s, boys sometimes carried guns on NYC’s subways (imagine the reaction to this today!) because they had rifle clubs at school. More such points could be made, and they’re found in my articles here, here, here, here, and here. Suffice it to say, however, that there’s simply no correlation between increased gun-control laws and lower homicide rates.
Yet other than more gun-ownership restrictions, many things have changed in the United States over the past century. An obvious one is the diminishing of faith and rise of atheism and its corollary, moral relativism. Another way of putting this, using our admittedly lacking liberal/conservative political terminology, is that our civilization has been descending into a morass of liberal (un)thought.
This is not debatable. What are considered hard-right social positions today — opposition to homosexual behavior, fornication, and cohabitation; the embrace of traditional sex roles; etc. — were consensus beliefs as recently as the 1950s. Moreover, while many “conservatives” today accept the first three things and oppose the last, it was only “liberals” who did so 60 years ago.
Even more to the point here, while moral relativism has infected most — with studies showing that only a minority of Americans believe in “morality,” properly defined (as something absolute and universal) — it well characterizes leftists. In fact, I don’t remember ever meeting one who wasn’t a moral relativist.
And what impact does this have? It’s almost incalculable. As David L. Goetsch put it at PatriotUpdate.com in 2014:
Liberals have used the public schools, entertainment industry, and mainstream media to promote the concept of moral relativism; a concept that recognizes no absolute rights or wrongs. The moral relativist believes that individuals should make their own decisions about right and wrong. The best summary of the philosophy of moral relativism is this: if it feels good do it.
For Americans who grew up in an era when traditional moral training and positive character shaping were thought to be passé and even scoffed at, what feels good to them is often bad — for them and society. Choices based on moral-relativism lead inevitably to cheating, lying, stealing, and … other character problems…. On the other hand, moral relativism is a convenient philosophy for hedonistic people who don’t want to follow society’s historic rules of decency and behavior.
For a real-life example, consider an expression of the relativistic ideal, uttered by a man I know of to someone close to me: “Murder’s not wrong; it’s just that society says it is.”
This is moral relativism taken to its logical conclusion. That man doesn’t believe in God, and how could an atheist argue with him? For if God doesn’t exist, the only thing left to say murder is wrong — or to say anything — is society.
This notion’s wide-scale acceptance sets the stage for great evil to occur. After all, if everything is relative, mere opinion or preference, why not rape, steal, or kill if it pleases you? Who’s to say it’s “wrong” in any real sense?
More than anything else, this explains our rapid descent into immorality, of which mass shootings are a part. Raise people to be vacant amoral vessels and teach them to believe in nothing above themselves, that life has only the meaning you give it and that there’s nothing beyond this world. Then fill the void with vice of all varieties: lust (lewd sexuality), pride, greed, envy, and sloth — and, quite relevant here, wrath, stoked with glorified violence peddled via television, video games, and the Internet.
Figuring out what the result will be doesn’t take a rocket scientist — just some intellectual honesty.
Correction: An anonymous anti-Trump Reddit user was misidentified as Katz in an earlier version of this article. It has been altered to reflect the correct information. We regret the error.
Photo: AP Images
