Not just in Newtown: Abundant evil and millions of innocent victims in this world

By Ben Stein

I learned about the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school while we were setting up at Fox News to tape Cavuto on Business. The news was so horrible that we all felt as if we had lost our legs and could no longer stand. It was such horrible news that it simply turned the world upside down. …

As usual, the smartest comment about the whole subject came from John R. Coyne, Jr. “There is evil in the world. It’s beyond mental illness, beyond gun control. It is evil.”

The Khmer Rouge set out to eliminate anyone involved in free-market activities, professionals and almost everyone with an education.

The killer got his weapons from his mother, who apparently had bought them legally and registered them. That tells us something about what anti-gun laws would do, although maybe the mother should not have had them either. In this world, a killer devil can kill his mother and steal her guns to kill six year olds. That’s what some humans are and I am not sure what laws will stop them.

Second, I read that the killer was socially awkward (putting it mildly) and “reserved.” I know what that often means. He spent much of his miserable life playing shoot ’em up video games on line or on machines. I see a troubled young man doing that often.  Up close and personal.

In these games, the “player” just spends his whole day attempting to exercise and exorcize his loneliness and low self-esteem by shooting imaginary creatures and creating damage all day long. At a certain point, just “killing” on the console blurs into doing it in real life. …

Finally, a comment that will enrage the beautiful people. The whole world is rightly overwrought and crazed with grief over the murder of twenty totally innocent and blameless souls last Friday in Newtown. It was and is a catastrophe for the ages. …

Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge killed roughly one third of all of its people, including children, from 1974 to about 1977 — and it was U.S. policy to avoid doing anything to stop them — because they were opposed to the North Vietnamese Communists and Communist Vietnam, which had just taken over South Vietnam — our ally. What can we say to that? We cheered the deposing of the President — Richard Nixon — who would have stopped the Khmer Rouge from taking power. There is plenty of Cambodian blood on our hands. There is plenty of blood of all kinds on our hands, especially of the most innocent and blameless among us… real babies, truly innocent. …

God help us.

SEE COMPLETE TEXT

You must be logged in to post a comment Login