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Allowing guns on campus would not prevent mass shootings and would actually increase the risk of gun violence. Research indicates that this policy would likely lead to more gun homicides and suicides, more nonfatal shootings, and more threats with a firearm on college campuses.9

In fact, colleges and universities, which have traditionally prohibited guns on campus, are already relatively safe from gun violence. Among all violent crime against college students from 1995 through 2002, 93 percent of incidents took place off campus.10 According to Everytown for Gun Safety’s tracking of incidents of gunfire on school grounds, an average of 10 gun homicides occur on college campuses each year, while almost 20 million students attend colleges or universities.11

Trump urges GOP to let catastrophic debt default happen if Dems don’t accept cuts

Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday urged Republican lawmakers to let the United States default on its debt if Democrats don’t agree to spending cuts.

“I say to the Republicans out there — congressmen, senators — if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default,” said Trump, who is again running for president. “And I don’t believe they’re going to do a default because I think the Democrats will absolutely cave, will absolutely cave because you don’t want to have that happen. But it’s better than what we’re doing right now because we’re spending money like drunken sailors.”

Read more: Confused about the debt ceiling? Here’s what you need to know

When pushed by CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins to clarify his remarks, Trump said: “Well, you might as well do it now, because you’ll do it later. Because we have to save this country. Our country is dying. Our country is being destroyed by stupid people, by very stupid people.”

Trump made the remarks during a CNN town hall during which he defended his supporters who staged a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 and mocked the writer E. Jean Carroll a day after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming her.

Trump is the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. He would likely look to use a default to his political advantage were he to face President Joe Biden in a rematch next year.

His comments came weeks before the U.S. is projected to run out of cash to pay its bills unless Congress addresses the debt limit. Since January, the U.S. government has taken extraordinary measures to avoid default.

A default would trigger chaos in markets and result in millions of job losses, according to analysts and economists. Republicans voted to raise the debt ceiling three times during Trump’s presidency.

Trump’s words could encourage his many GOP supporters in the House to harden their stance against raising the debt limit without corresponding spending cuts. Biden has said he won’t negotiate over raising the debt limit, although he said he is open to discussing ways to reduce spending in a separate context.

Biden and the top four congressional leaders, including Trump supporter House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., will meet again to discuss the debt ceiling on Friday. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the U.S. government could hit the debt limit as soon as June 1.

The Limits of Forgiveness

Every year of mankind’s fallen history witnesses countless sins, large and small. When they are committed against us, it raises the question of forgiveness, since Jesus made it clear that we must be willing to forgive.

The prior two years witnessed particularly heinous crimes. The year 2001 saw the terrorist attacks, and 2002 saw the priestly sexual abuse scandal. In the wake of both of them, people were pondering the subject of forgiveness.

I remember, in the days immediately following 9/11, people calling Catholic Answers Live confused because their priests had told them that the U.S. must not strike back against the terrorists because of the Christian duty of forgiveness.

After the sex scandal broke, there were many—even those who had not themselves been abused—vociferously declaring that they “could never forgive” the priestly abusers for what they had done.

There’s something wrong with both of these views of forgiveness. The latter reflects the all-too-human tendency to not forgive no matter what the circumstances. It’s the attitude toward which Christ’s teachings regarding forgiveness are directed.

The former attitude reflects the opposite extreme, insisting on all forms of forgiveness regardless of the circumstances. Though this attitude of hyper-forgiveness seeks to cloak itself in the teachings of Christ, in reality it goes far beyond what Christ asks us to do and even what God himself does.

Christ’s most famous injunction regarding forgiveness is found in the Our Father: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matt. 6:12—and it is debts in Greek though the common English translation uses the word trespasses).

Just to make sure we get the point, Jesus singles this petition out for special commentary: “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matt. 6:14–15).

So that’s it. You have to forgive if you want to be forgiven.

Forgiveness and Feelings

This creates the urgent question: What does it mean to forgive someone? This is a sticky issue because there are certain things that commonly go under the name of forgiveness that are difficult or impossible for us to do.

For example, we often think of forgiving people in terms of not being angry with them anymore, of having warm, positive feelings toward them. When we tell people that we forgive them for what they did, we often smile and try to convey the impression that we have warm feelings even though we still may feel angry.

Since our forgiveness before God is conditional on our willingness to forgive others, a person with a feelings-based understanding of forgiveness could conclude that he isn’t forgiven by God until he has rosy feelings about everyone in the world. This would lead him to try to manufacture positive feelings for others. When these feelings are not forthcoming, it can make him scared for his salvation, emotionally dry, frustrated, or even angry with God for making his salvation contingent on what kind of feelings he has when he doesn’t have full control of them. That way lies despair.

But the feelings-based view of forgiveness is wrong for precisely the reason that the previous two scenarios turn on: We don’t have full control of our feelings.

Sure, we can influence them. If a particular subject makes us angry, we can try to think about something else. We can ask ourselves questions like “Was it really that bad?” or “What good can come from this?” or “What can I learn from this?” to put the subject in perspective.

But these efforts dance around the anger itself. They attempt to influence it from the outside. There is no way for us to reach into ourselves and flip a switch that causes the anger to vanish and be replaced by rosy feelings.

What we can’t control we are not responsible for. Since we have only indirect influence on our feelings, we can be responsible for how we strive to manage them

but not for having them.

What Forgiveness Is Not

Of course, what we would really like in getting someone’s forgiveness is for things to be just as if we had never offended him. We’d like things to go back to exactly the way they were.

That may not happen. Even if someone’s ill feelings for us go away, prudence may dictate that he will not treat us in exactly the same way. This is particularly the case if we have broken trust with him.

Consider the extremes we mentioned earlier: If someone is a terrorist or a child molester then—no matter how penitent he may be—he simply cannot be treated as if he had never committed his crimes.

Most of us have committed offenses nowhere near that bad, but the principle still holds. We sense it in our interactions with others. If someone has violated our trust, we may be able to let go of our anger, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to put our trust in him again. Our trust will have to be earned.

Forgiveness thus does not mean treating someone as if they had never sinned. That would require us to let go of our reason as well as our anger.

The Church acknowledges this principle. In his encyclical Dives in Misericordia, John Paul II notes that the “requirement of forgiveness does not cancel out the objective requirements of justice. . . . In no passage of the gospel message does forgiveness, or mercy as its source, mean indulgence toward evil, toward scandals, toward injury or insult. In any case, reparation for evil and scandal, compensation for injury, and satisfaction for insult are conditions for forgiveness” (DM 14).

Preemptive Forgiveness?

We aren’t obligated to forgive people who do not want us to. This is one of the biggest stumbling blocks that people have regarding the topic. People have seen “unconditional” forgiveness and love hammered so often that they feel obligated to forgive someone even before that person has repented. Sometimes they even tell the unrepentant that they have preemptively forgiven him (much to the impenitent’s annoyance).

This is not what is required of us.

Consider Luke 17:3–4, where Jesus tells us, “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him; and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.”

Notice that Jesus says to forgive him if he repents, not regardless of whether he does so. Jesus also envisions the person coming back to you and admitting his wrong.

The upshot? If someone isn’t repentant, you don’t have to forgive him.

If you do forgive him anyway, that can be meritorious, provided it doesn’t otherwise have bad effects (e.g., encouraging future bad behavior). But it isn’t required of us that we forgive the person.

This may strike some people as odd. They may have heard unconditional love and forgiveness preached so often that the idea of not indiscriminately forgiving everybody sounds unspiritual to them. They might even ask, “But wouldn’t it be more spiritual to forgive everyone?”

I sympathize with this argument, but there is a two-word rejoinder to it: God doesn’t.

Not everybody is forgiven. Otherwise, we’d all be walking around in a state of grace all the time and have no need of repentance to attain salvation. God doesn’t like people being unforgiven, and he is willing to grant forgiveness to all, but he isn’t willing to force it on people who don’t want it. If people are unrepentant of what they know to be sinful, they are not forgiven.

Jesus died once and for all to pay a price sufficient to cover all the sins of our lives, but God doesn’t apply his forgiveness to us in a once-and-for-all manner. He forgives us as we repent. That’s why we continue to pray “Forgive us our trespasses,” because we regularly have new sins that we have repented of—some venial and some mortal, but all needing forgiveness.

If God doesn’t forgive the unrepentant, and it is not correct to tell people that they need to do so, what is required of us?

What Forgiveness Is

Jesus calls us to be like God in the showing of mercy “that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 5:45). So how does God forgive?

Scripture tells us that he “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4) and the he is “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9).

We should have the same attitude. We should will the good of every soul, even the most evil ones. No matter who they are or what they’ve done, we need to will their ultimate good, which is salvation through repentance.

What if they don’t repent?

One may hope that they were not culpable for their actions and so can be saved, that they were affected by mental disorder, intense pressure, ignorance, indoctrination, or something that affected their judgment so that they weren’t responsible for their actions at the time they committed them.

But what if they were?

We may hope that they are brought around to repentance. In fact, we ought to hope this even for those who weren’t responsible for their actions. But to be brought to repentance often requires suffering the consequences of one’s sins.

This is where righteous anger comes in. It is often said that anger is a desire for vengeance (cf. ST II-II:158:1). This puts it a little more harshly than many today would want to say it, but anger does involve a desire that the offending person experience the consequences of his sins. Without this desire, the feeling would be something less than anger, such as simple frustration.

Anger is righteous—in keeping with justice—if it is still fundamentally directed toward the good. Thus one may wish that a person experience the consequences of his offenses to sufficiently understand how he has hurt others, and teach him to not commit them in the future.

However, “if he desires the punishment of one who has not deserved it, or beyond his deserts, or again contrary to the order prescribed by law, or not for the due end—namely the maintaining of justice and the correction of faults—then the desire of anger will be sinful” (ibid., 2).

It is so easy for us in our fallen state to slip into sinful anger that Scripture repeatedly warns us against it, but anger serves a fundamental purpose.

If a person with whom we are angry repents, then the obligation to forgive kicks in. This means that we must be willing to set aside our anger because he no longer deserves it. We may still feel it for a time, and it can even be advisable to let him know this in order to underscore the lesson he needs to have learned. But we do need to manage our emotions so that we let the anger go and, to the best of our ability, encourage it to fade.

And what if a person doesn’t repent when all is said and done?

At some point we need to let our feeling of anger fade, not for his sake but for ours. It isn’t good for us to stay angry, and it poses temptations to sin. Ultimately, we have to let go of the feeling of anger and move on with life. Frequently we have to do so even when a person has not repented.

But for the person himself, what should we hope? With regret, we recognize that it is appropriate that he gets what he chose, even if that was hell. This is, after all, the attitude taken by God toward those who choose death rather than life.

-where there is more gun control, there is less murder. this is the scientific consensus, as shown with the literature review. being a literature review makes this a lot more informing than just being a single study; we see the consensus forming. also included is a link to a poll of scientists but a literature review itself makes the claims even stronger.

https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11120184/gun-control-study-international-evidence

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-oe-hemenway-guns-20150423-story.html

-where there are more guns, there is more murder, across geographic regions from localities and larger. this is also a lot more informing because it a literature review of lots of studies. what's more, people are shown not to kill with other weopons instead of guns, as is often argued, because if they did there would be no correlation here.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/

-women are five times more likely to be killed if their significant other has a gun. this is a practical point in illustration of the guns v murders correlation. same in individual lives as general trends

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447915/

-you are more likely to be murdered if you have a gun, as well as those close to you

https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/160/10/929/140858

-States with more gun control have fewer mass shootings

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/433017-states-with-stricter-gun-control-regulations-have-fewer-mass?fbclid=IwAR0f5l5eW7d-rX4ZoE8R2MOe6VBvLJVrfQQRFwd2b7anlBIM_wgsYYx-uQk

-only around two hundred and fifty killings are done in the name of self defense per year. people like to pretend defense is such a huge thing, but the odds of being murdered is is closer to forty times higher. the odds of being shot and not necessarily killed are upwards of four hundred times higher. 
-we have half the worlds guns in the usa but a small percent of the worlds population
-Police are more likely to kill unjustifiably in low gun control and high gun areas due to their increased fear, and police are more likely to be shot themselves in those areas.

http://justicenotjails.org/police-shootings-gun-problem/

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/more-guns-more-dead-cops-study-finds-n409356

-Compared to 22 other high-income nations, the United States' gun-related murder rate is 25 times higher. 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-u-s-gun-deaths-compare-to-other-countries

-High school kids in the USA are eighty two times more likely to be shot than the same kids in other developed countries.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0767

-states with more gun control have fewer youth who die from guns
https://abc30.com/5396718/?ex_cid=TA_KFSN_FB&utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A+Trending+Content&utm_content=5d2d172f8e73cc000164c229&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2T40EdBsGdPZk_VCL8Bi5RDJsNtpF2Ud9NIYiB74njS72zrcqudw1idWY

-it is claimed that most murders are gang related, but this looks to be factually incorrect in the link. even if higher numbers floating around on the internet are true, our murder problem still there if you take out the gang murders from consideration. the numbers here can be arrived at with basic math. 

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-defilippis/do-we-have-a-gang-problem_b_5071639.html

-this really isn't just a mental health problem. we don't have more people with mental health problems than other countries.... just more people with guns.  the study controls for mental health factors v other factors. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/9/16618472/mental-illness-gun-homicide-mass-shootings?fbclid=IwAR3nS6e4bHyakjB-_GkXvWZKNqnWfDfx-LwBVnuAUXewEzgB_7AnMGdgXVk#

-we dont have more crime than the rest of the world, just a lot more people getting shot and killed. you aren't more likely to be mugged here, for instance, but you are more likely to be mugged and shot in the process. again a gun problem. showing it's not just deviants being deviants as some suggest but an emphasis on the gun problem.

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9217163/america-guns-europe

-You can tell this is a gun problem, not just a bad person problem as the gun lobby says, also by comparing non-gun homicides of similar countries as the USA, and then adding guns to the mix: non-gun homicides are slightly on the higher side but within normal range, while gun homicides go wildly higher. If this was a bad person problem at its core, there would be a wildly higher amount of non-gun homicides as well, but that's not the case. Included is an article describing this phenomenon and a link with a picture. 

https://i.imgur.com/skcT8qr.png

https://www.reddit.com/r/gunpolitics/comments/71n1u2/gunnongun_homicide_rates_in_oecd_countries_for/

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/canada-gun-control-debate/566102/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_term=2018-07-28T09%3A00%3A12

-people like to say assault rifles are not that dangerous, because there are only a few hundred murders with them per year out of only around ten or so thousand of gun murders. the thing is though, the percent chance an assault rifle will be used to kill someone is significantly higher than the chance other guns will be used to kill someone. ///  you can do the math yourself. there are 2.5 million assault rifles in circulation. 374 rifle deaths per year. there are 11000 gun homicides. there's a gun for every person in the usa, 340 million. what's the math say? 374 divided by 11000 is 3.4 percent of deaths are from rifles. 2.5 milliion divided by 340 milliion is less than a percent. so what does this mean? despite rifles being less than a percent of guns, they cause 3.4 percent of deaths. that is, a rifle has a higher percent chance of being used to murder than a non rifle. most guns that are used in murder are hand guns, but assault rifles are more likely to be chosen over a hand gun when faced with that choice. just like, as an analogy, people are more likely to speed in a sports car, but most cars that speed are not sports cars.  

-people like to throw around number of defensive gun use. the idea is that not all defensive gun uses result in a killing. the most common number in literature is tens of thousands, though the number vary wildly. the only thing is, even if you are more likely to use a gun in self defense than being murdered, you are still more likely to be murdered than someone who doesn't have a gun. also, a lot of those thousands of defensive uses are not all that critical.... downplaying their significance. and, a lot of those 'defensive' uses were actually situations that were people instigating and escalating a situation that wouldn't otherwise exist, as the link below illustrates. even if we used the higher numbers, is it all that convincing that there are tens of thousands more near murders in a nation with already a globally disproportionate number of murders? it holds true, that we could give lots more people guns, and that may increase defensive use... but it would come at the cost of more murder, too.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/

-for more on giving an overview of the gun issues, see the following

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/us-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts

-in the usa, the number of murders has overall gone down in recent decades. the thing is, while the number of guns went up, the number of people owning them went down. also, this is just one measure: all the other measure include all the countries and localities where gun levels are proportionate to murder rates.
-for more information on gun policy in the usa and other countries: www.gunpolicy.org 

-australia. they enacted major gun reform around twenty years ago after a mass shooting. they bought back a bunch of guns and enacted other gun control. their mass shootings stopped. this almost surely is not an anomloy. their homicides dropped by up to fifty percent. the idea is a lower murder rate came with a lower percent of people owning guns (note that this is different than the specific gun ownership rate because if less people own more guns that could cause the percent owning to go down but the overall rate could be the same). misinformation attempts like to point that overall murder went up slightly after reform, but the rate did not and went down. also, the number of guns have gone up closer to previous level but the gun ownership rate is still lower. it is true that global murder went down, and some of that correlates with australi's rate... but global reductions arent as drastic s australia's.

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9212725/australia-buyback

-japan. they literally have barely any murders, and barely any guns. they have a rigorous process for allowing guns