"End Game"

In a discussion of the gun-control hysteria, I was told, "So I leave it to you to propose the endgame."

This is what I wrote:

I don't know what you mean by that, but I can tell you this with all the authority of a lifetime of study and observation:

This is a cultural problem about the existence of values. None of this is -- at this point -- a dispute over which values to hold, but about the very existence of values to begin with: what they are and why they are necessary to human life.

Taking Adam Lanza as only one extreme example of the cultural psychosis, now: that kid was somehow brought to an adult age without ever having been taught what values are. There are teeming tens of millions of specimens like him, now, at the dead-end of a cultural procession that began long before he was born. Not all, or even many, will run to the extent that he did, but their lethality is every bit as real over the long run, in their casual nihilism.

You don't understand: Adam Lanza is "the end game".


Whether you or anyone else likes it or not, that is the problem in its entire scope. That's how big it is, and that's why these complaints about the guns is just so much rubbish. If cars were the social menace here, you people would be arguing about what colors to prohibit.

There is no way that resort to non-essential trivialities is going to address this matter.