Stop ISIS: Borders, Guns and God

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live. — Deuteronomy 30:19

A Republic, if you can keep it. — Benjamin Franklin, describing what had been created during the Constitutional Convention.

“Ideologues,” “restrictionists” and “extremists” are among the epithets applied to those who want the United States to adhere to simple values that would have been obvious to the Founding Fathers. Sometimes it takes a gruesome event like Friday’s slaughter in Paris — and the similar attack that is no doubt coming here one day, again — for the wisdom of such values to become startlingly clear.

So let’s state three of these values that could prevent ISIS from striking in the United States:

• Well-patrolled borders and limits on legal entry that help ensure the worst actors are excluded from our society;
• Guns that allow Americans to protect themselves from evil;
• And a belief in God that helps us recognize the existence and nature of evil in the first place.

When traditional values such as these, long held by our country, begin to break down, society loses the capacity to defend itself and is open to attack — from without and within.

In Western Europe, this process is well along and possibly irreversible. But in the United States, while we are in decline, we still have a chance to save ourselves. The core of greatness remains.

The sophistry that we are “a nation of immigrants” is as meaningful as a cancer patient saved by chemo who proclaims, “all drugs are good.”

The sophistry that we are “a nation of immigrants” is as meaningful as a cancer patient saved by chemo who proclaims, “all drugs are good.” We are a nation of immigrants, but not immigrants from one culture that subsume our own or from nations chock full of Islamists who want to destroy us.

President Obama must move immediately to vastly increase surveillance on our border with Mexico in order to ensure that ISIS is not funneling terrorists across it. And he must revoke his decision to increase our acceptance of refugees to accommodate at least another 45,000 Syrians over the next two years.

Related: Will Refugees Bring Terror?

At least one of barbarians who struck Paris bore a Syrian passport and entered Europe along with migrants who have been streaming in by the thousands.

Obama won’t do these things, of course, which is part of why an attack on the United States is inevitable. But this is what must be done. This is not “ideology” or “restrictionism,” unless ideology or restrictionism are defined as “common sense.”

In Europe, they refuse to learn. “Don’t link Paris attacks to migrant crisis,” tweeted the German interior minister.

The effort, led by Obama, to degrade the Second Amendment right to bear arms must be abandoned, or resisted with even greater force.

The effort, led by Obama, to degrade the Second Amendment right to bear arms must be abandoned, or resisted with even greater force. It should come as no surprise that there is no right to bear arms in France and that obtaining a weapon there is exceedingly difficult.

Terrorists who plan to strike in the United States will no doubt choose a setting for their carnage where they are most likely to find themselves unopposed — for example, the “gun free” city of Chicago, where they are only likely to incur return-of-fire if they have the misfortune of running into some gang members.

Related: Gun-Free Zones: A Killer’s Dream

Belief in God and adherence to organized religion in the United States remains, relative to other Western countries, very strong. It will be, in both Heaven and on earth, our salvation. Americans must oppose efforts to degrade religious activity and symbols in both the public and private sphere. The Constitution prohibits establishment of a specific state religion, not advocacy by the government or anyone else of belief in God.

You do not have to accept the existence of God to understand evil; but it sure helps. Rejection of God is too often associated with moral relativism that forgives virulent behavior as merely an alternate, equally valid point of view.

And those who accept God, paradoxically, can best perceive that those who believe in a false interpretation of of the Divine cannot be convinced by sweet words to relinquish their adherence to evil.

These values are not meant, as their opponents would have it, to hurt and disparage other people. Rather, we hold these truths — truths — in order to safeguard our nation, protect our children, and preserve our Republic for the good of our society and of the world.