“The secret things belong unto the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever.” Deuteronomy 29:29

Not every tragedy, atrocity, or act of evil is rooted in politics, has its source in a public policy and is redressable through the political or legal system. This is a point all of us on all sides of the ideological spectrum would be well advised to internalize.

Accusing individuals who never incited any violence as being responsible for the evil acts of a single perpetrator, such as the El Paso Walmart shooter, is scandalous. The perpetrator alone is the perpetrator, along with those who gleefully cheer his action. The rest of us should all be on the same side. We should not point fingers at our political opponents for responsibility for murder by a madman.

Once that simple fact is recognized, it makes sense to try to learn about the source of a growing crime or terrorism trend and try to find a solution to the problem. But one must approach such an endeavor with the understanding that not every problem is caused by or redressed through a public policy decision. Each generation, due to culture, technology, environment, and an amalgamation of endless factors, is confronted with evils that previous generations didn’t experience much, but also is free of other evils other generations dealt with. Politics is not necessarily the cause of the problem or the solution.

When it comes to protecting the safety of the public from mass murder, it is certainly fair to explore public policy. After all, protecting us from external/foreign threats is emphatically the job of the federal government, and protecting from internal threats is the job of either the federal government, local governments, or both, depending on the circumstance. However, in a free country, with today’s technology of social media fueling a copycat mentality of the most evil and demented people, there is a limit to what can be done to prevent the most confounding form of homicide – lone wolf mass murder by people without any record of crime.

The reason we focus here at CR so much on being tough on crime in general and illegal immigrant crime in particular is precisely because these issues are redressable. In the case of illegal immigrant crime, as I’ve often said, it’s not that the crime is inherently more evil when perpetrated by an illegal alien than by a citizen, it’s that it is so much more preventable. By definition, it’s the lowest-hanging fruit on the “do something to protect public safety” tree, because if the laws were actually enforced, any illegal alien arrested by law enforcement for a crime would be turned over to ICE and removed from the country, thereby ending their career as criminal threats to Americans.

It should be easy to “do something” about crime committed by career criminals from other countries. There are at least two million who remain here.

I often highlight in this column cases of American criminals with endless arrest records who remain out on the streets. Cases of juveniles in Prince George’s County, Maryland, for example, who were arrested for MS-13 murder, but let out on the streets again to commit a murder exactly one year later. Those are all preventable by public policy. If we really are clamoring to save every life, there should be no debate over those “no-brainer” known wolves, who are known to the public as a safety threat, irrespective of their identity, political motivation, or mental health status.