Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

—William Blake

Some thoughts on the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris:

1. Maybe gun control isn’t such a great idea. The killers somehow got AK-47s and possibly other weapons, while the victims suffered from France’s strict gun-control policy. As gun-rights folks say, When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.

2. Maybe immigration isn’t such a great idea, either. The Enlightenment ideal of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité seems not to have worked out as planned. Ethnicity wasn’t supposed to matter. Religion was supposed to fade away, or at least hide in a closet, replaced with “reason.” Instead, the vacuum left by the destruction of Christianity has been filled by other religions.

The Washington Times reported: “A backdrop to the massacre in Paris on Wednesday by self-professed al Qaeda terrorists is that city officials have increasingly ceded control of heavily Muslim neighborhoods to Islamists, block by block.

“France has Europe’s largest population of Muslims, some of whom talk openly of ruling the country one day and casting aside Western legal systems for harsh, Islam-based Shariah law.”

3. As I wrote in “Gelded Europeans,” in Chronicles four years ago this month, America’s long occupation of Europe has turned it into a continent of welfare-pampered wimps unwilling to have children. Imagine if Europe’s birthrate were four per woman, instead of today’s rate of as low as 1.3 in several countries. Would alien immigrants be flooding in, filling up the empty schools and taking over crumbling churches? Instead, Europeans would be fanning out across the globe again, including to America.

4. Corollary to 3: Like America, Europe has an abortion culture. It’s high-tech Albigensianism. Instead of the “Francis Effect,” Europe needs another St. Dominic Effect. So does America.

5. The murders at Charlie Hebdo are deplorable. But as good Enlightenment denizens, they welcomed the importation of people so against the Enlightenment that mockery sparked the killings. What did they expect? It’s like that Grizzly Man who eventually was eaten by a bear.