Control by Glenn Beck

Author:Glenn Beck [BECK, GLENN]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Threshold Editions
Published: 2013-04-28T22:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

Winning Hearts and Minds

Adam Smith’s most famous book is The Wealth of Nations, but his more important work came seven years earlier, when he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. While most people have never heard of that book, it was the key to everything. Smith realized that the free market could never work unless people first understood morality and human nature. When a breakdown in the free market occurs, it’s not the market’s fault; it’s the fault of individual participants who’ve lost their way.

The same principle holds true for guns. The Second Amendment, like all of our rights, is reliant on a moral and virtuous people. Without that, nothing else matters. Man cannot rule himself if, as Smith put it, moral sentiment is missing.

That, I contend, is the answer. Not just to gun violence, but to many of the other problems that plague us. We must stop looking to assign blame to the choices we are offered—whether it’s guns or large sodas or tanning beds—and instead take personal responsibility for our choice and our lives. It’s clear to me that if we raise children with no moral compass, we are planting the seeds of our own destruction. As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “[O]nly a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

But the good news is that the opposite also holds true: if we can restore morality and responsibility and virtue back to their rightful places, we are planting the seeds of a future filled with hope and opportunity.

It is my hope that now, after showing that guns are not the problem, this section will prove what really is.

* * *

To claim that America’s “culture of violence” is responsible for school shootings is tantamount to cigarette company executives declaring that environmental pollution is the chief cause of lung cancer.

—STEPHEN KING, Guns

At 7:45 a.m. on a frosty Monday in December 1997, a bespectacled fourteen-year-old boy walked into his Kentucky high school and made his way toward the lobby outside the principal’s office. There, an informal group of thirty-five to forty kids stood in a large circle saying their morning prayers. The boy, a freshman who played baritone saxophone in the high school band, waited for the final “Amen” before taking a stolen handgun out of his backpack and opening fire.

By most accounts, the boy fired eight to ten shots into the group. By the time he put his weapon down three of his classmates were dead and five more had been wounded. Before the police arrived, the boy spoke to his principal and seemingly could not believe what he’d just done. “It was kind of like I was in a dream,” he said. “And then I woke up.”

As the reality began to settle in, the boy looked up at his friend who had come to stand by his side and said, “Kill me, please.”

Investigators were stunned by the lethal accuracy in which the boy had carried out the massacre. Of the approximately eight shots he’d taken, he had registered eight hits.

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