The Man who Killed Liberty Valance...

Source

Certainly this week has again brought home how quickly violence, related mental illness, and carnage collide.  In Oregon, a young man loaded up with guns and bullets, brought horror and death to a small college community.

Not much else needs to be said about this horror, since the media are sucking this massacre to the bone.

This sentence will surely seem unrelated, but has anyone seen “The Man who Shot Liberty Valance”?

 

Do you remember John Wayne in the role of Tom Doniphon and Jimmy Stewart in the role of Ransom Stoddard?  Lee Marvin as Liberty Valance?

Do you recall the conflict of justice through the law and justice through immediate confrontation of evil and good?

This is an excellent movie, filmed in 1962, directed by John Ford.

In an article by Michael Shermer quoting Steven Pinker cites this as: 

“…the (fictional town of) Shinbone embodies any small community in transition from an informal (law code/cowboy code) to a formal moral code and system of justice.  When everyone takes the law into their own hands there is no law…”

Basically, what I want to say is that this tragedy in Oregon (Sandy Hood, Columbine…) is not a gun issue.  It is a moral issue. The idea of more gun control laws, and more and more will not be the solution.

The solution is in the enforcement of moral right vs. wrong in the home by the parent(s), and then reinforced in churches and schools. Only then will mental illness, sociopathic behavior, and obsessive devotion to broken ideology  be recognized early and intervention taken. 

If that doesn’t happen, guns can be sucked up by a big vacuum and yet nothing will change. 

Absolutely nothing.

Source

Question:  If I were trained is in firearms, had a gun, and was confronted by such a person, would I shoot to kill.  Yes. 

Amorous K: the Kiss

Source: Wikipedia.org

"Kreutzer Sonata" by Rene Francois Xavier Prinet, 1901

What could be more appropriate or wonderful than Kiss for the letter K?

In 1889 Leo Tolstoy created a novella entitled Kreutzer Sonata, in which forbidden discussions of sexuality, love and lust, morality and immorality emerge.  

Marriage, divorce, and love were examined in a conversation on a train with Pozdnyshev and other passengers. 

He later marries and time goes by with relative happiness and children.  He discovers his wife has started using contraceptives.  There is a schism in the relationship and his wife begins a relationship with a violinist (whose name is 15 letters long). 

This is the first movement of the sonata, lasting about 7 minutes.

Well, then....

They begin practicing this challenging sonata, with the wife accompanying the violinist.  Pozdnyshev discovers them in a passionate kiss and kills the wife.  The violinist flees.

  

 The Russian Government prohibited Tolstoy's story to be published.  

Portions of the story made their way to the United States where these chapters were published in the newspaper.  

Not able to suppress free speech, President Theodore Roosevelt forbid the U. S. Post Office to deliver any newspaper containing the story.  

He called Tolstoy “…a sexual, moral pervert.”

Leo Tolstoy, 1828-1910

The title chosen by Tolstoy was based upon Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9, (which is another story in itself)!

All this happened as the result of an illicit kiss between a married woman and her lover. 

A kiss is a powerful thing.