As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap

The shootings in Las Vegas surely were the acts of mentally unstable people. But were those people not merely putting into practice what some folks preach on places like Facebook every day? The folks I'm talking about are the ones who hate our government, and want everyone else to hate our government just as badly as they do.

Truth be told, if some of these people preaching hate had their way, they would put a bullet in our President and never bat an eye. Well, facing facts, nobody with a gun is going to get anywhere near our President. So the folks who hear all this anti-government preaching and ranting decide to focus not on what they CAN'T do, but what they CAN do.

And the closest part of government, to most people, is the local police force. The two shooters in Las Vegas took out a pair of cops who were having lunch...and then covered their bodies in Gadsden flags, the yellow ones with the legend "DON'T TREAD ON ME." Apparently this indicates that these shooters took that hatred of government talk seriously...deadly seriously.

And I'd bet that the manner in which they died didn't bother them at all, either. My guess is, they considered themselves martyrs for the cause.

As folks kept repeating during the Bill Clinton "debate" over the meaning of the word "is," words DO have meaning. Apparently all that "take our country back" and hatred for government talk echoed within the souls of these two young people. And they acted upon it. Now, I'm sure all the "take our country back" and "hate the government" folks will disavow any connection to the actions of these two shooters; they have to. These shooters were over the edge, mentally. We all have to believe that.

Because that's a whole lot easier than going to the families of the dead officers and the dead civilian and saying, "We didn't really mean it." When you call people to action, never forget that words have meaning, and actions have consequences. And people WILL take your words literally, even if you meant them in a figurative sense. And once those words are said, they can never be unsaid.

The hatemongers who influenced these shooters are no less culpable in this case than the hippies in the '60's who preached "revolution" while never thinking that others would take THEM seriously and plant bombs that would kill innocent people.

That's my opinion on the subject. No doubt yours is quite different.