1. Doing a little better than last week, though still struggling with melancholy and difficulty making myself be productive.

2. The shooting in Maine yesterday actually happened close to where my sister lives. She and all her friends are safe, thank God, but please pray for everyone involved and everyone in the area, who are under lock down while the authorities hunt for the perpetrator.

3. Of course, bodies aren’t cold before some one starts talking gun control again. The thing is, I’m not a gun rights absolutist, but it seems to me that anti-gun measures today completely miss the mark of what’s going on in our world. The problem is that social cohesion is breaking down, and that we in the west increasingly lack a psychologically healthy environment in which to live. That is to say, the problem, it seems to me, is that we’ve created a social environment that is increasingly toxic to the human psyche, since we based it off of false ideas of humanity. Which means that we increasingly can’t count on basic human decency and societal cohesion, which means that the official structures are increasingly impotent to protect individuals from each other.

In other words, the more this sort of thing happens, the less justification there is for gun control. Because individuals have a duty to protect themselves, their families, and communities, and the less able the large-scale authorities are to do this, the more individuals and local authorities will have to do so.

4. Legitimate reasons for gun control would be if you have organized, armed uprising, or see that you will soon, and are disarming a specific group or region that is a potential danger to the peace. Like when the British disarmed the Scots following the ’45 uprising. Now, I’m in favor of the ’45 and think they should have won, but at the same time I understand that any state has the right to protect its own existence and to safeguard the peace, and having won the victory, the British were within their rights to remove the Scots’ ability to make war again in the near future, and since there was little chance of a foreign invasion of Scotland or of societal breakdown within, they could reasonably say that the Scots only needed their weapons for warfare.

Point is, government exists to safeguard the common good of the realm, which includes ‘the peace’ (that is, the ability of the ordinary citizen to feel reasonably secure in his life and property). If a specific group is a danger to the peace, then the government is within its rights to minimize that danger by disarmament, but if the government itself cannot protect the peace because short-sighted social changes have caused the fabric of society to start dissolving like a paper towel in a swimming pool, then ordinary citizens or local authorities have to do so in their own area and the government is only further abdicating its responsibility by attempting to disarm them.

Basically, it depends on what is the actual state of affairs on the ground.

5. Hm, didn’t really intend to go all in on that, but what the heck, I’ll leave it. I don’t usually get political here, since, as you can tell, my views are largely out-of-step with most people on either side. Anyway, please pray for Maine and for our whole screwed up world.

6. As I say, still dealing with some bad melancholy and a listless inability to get things done. I feel as though there’s something urgent that needs to be taken care of, but which I can’t figure out. Like there are a hundred unmet obligations all pressing in at once. Yet whenever I try to focus on one, it’s as if my brain revolts against it.

7. Jeez, two grim and down-beat Fridays in a row. Hopefully things will be better next week.