An image from video posted online shows masked gunmen just before one of them appears to shoot a Paris police officer at close range, following an attack on the office of weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, Jan. 7, 2015, in Paris, France.
Reading up on the Paris shootings, one has to wonder what the effect of gun laws was in preventing this attack. Judging by the outcome, I would say negligible.
The lack of homogeneity of culture is probably the leading factor in the increasing of violence in a society, not guns. The roots of radicalized citizens acting on behalf of Islam are in the theories of multiculturalism, as well.
Now I’m not talking about skin color, although they are linked, I’m talking about immigrants and other cultures not directly becoming singular with the prevailing culture.
Multiculturalism, in other words.
Leftists like to promote multiculturalism, but interestingly enough, do not support its racist roots which is essentially segregation. Multiculturalism is the opposite of the traditional American ‘melting pot’ theory. It promotes separate cultural and ethnic lifestyle living in the same society side by side. Problem is, that tends to ostracize and compartmentalize a community, and studies indicate it ultimately leads to violence.
If you look at some of the most peaceful cultures around the world you will find they support homogeneity in their culture, not multiculturalism.
Almost all countries and societies with low violence rates have essentially the same culture throughout their society. Japan has some of the lowest crime and murder rates in the world, and it also one of the most homogenous cultures in the world. The highest rates of violence seem to be in African nations where tribal and factional culture separation is extreme.
An interesting study done by Roger Putnam at Harvard indicated that multiculturalism leads also to a natural distrust of societal institutions like media and government; something distinctly on the rise here in America. He writes:
New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities.—Roger Putnam
The problems of immigration and an increase in minority populations is not ethnic diversity, but integration, such as in the original ‘melting pot’ theory of traditional American values. Putnam goes to assess American melting pot societal progress as enormously successful with earlier immigration groups like the Irish and waves of Jewish immigrants:
The best quantitative evidence concerns ethnic endogamy… Conversely, the cultures of the immigrant groups permeated the broader American cultural framework, with the Americanization of St Patrick’s Day, pizza and ‘Jewish’ humour. In some ways ‘they’ became like ‘us’, and in some ways our new ‘us’ incorporated ‘them’. This was no simple, inevitable, friction-less ‘straight-line’ assimilation, but over several generations the initial ethnic differences became muted and less salient so that assimilation became the master trend for these immigrant groups during the twentieth century— Roger Putnam
Violence and societal unrest is not necessarily an issue of guns but rather the natural distrust and increase in tensions from multiculturalism. By increasing diversity without creating homogeneity you increase the risk of a violent and segregated society.
This is the complete opposite theory of what ethnic purity and multiculturalism groups like La Raza, the KKK and the Black Panthers stand for. They all seek to divide and purify their own ancestry, not bring people together as Americans. This is evidenced often in cases like the Trayvon Martin case where ethnic group leaders do not promote an end to violence but rather call for more violence in a modern-day version of a lynch mob. We must reject multiculturalism and embrace the melting pot if we wish society to move forward.
Guns and terrorism are merely the tools of the violent, not the cause of violence. For that we should look to ourselves and our neighbors and we relate to each other. We should look to how we integrate immigrants into our society.
A shoddy house is not built by the tool, but by its craftsman.
Thomas Purcell is nationally syndicated columnist, author of the book “Shotgun Republic” and is host of the Liberty Never Sleeps podcast. More of his work can be found at LibertyNeverSleeps.com.
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Certainly some good points were mentioned by this author. However, the statement that gun laws did not affect such acts is exactly wrong. When there are extreme gun laws that prevent citizens from having and bearing arms, that is a requirement for such terrorist operations to be successful.
if 10 or 20 per cent of the people inside that magazine office had been armed, do you think that two shooters would have been able to kill as many or to have got away with it? After the Westgate Mall attack last year, Interpol said as much. Too bad not enough people were listening.
The bad guys will always have weapons, our challenge is how to get the good guys trained and armed.