Guest Post by Walter E. Williams
Here’s a suggestion. How about setting up some high school rifle clubs? Students would bring their own rifles to school, store them with the team coach and, after classes, collect them for practice. You say: “Williams, you must be crazy! To prevent gun violence, we must do all we can to keep guns out of the hands of kids.”
There’s a problem with this reasoning. Prior to the 1960s, many public high schools had shooting clubs. In New York City, shooting clubs were started at Boys, Curtis, Commercial, Manual Training and Stuyvesant high schools. Students carried their rifles to school on the subway and turned them over to their homeroom or gym teacher. Rifles were retrieved after school for target practice. In some rural areas across the nation, there was a long tradition of high school students hunting before classes and storing their rifles in the trunks of their cars, parked on school grounds, during the school day.
Today, any school principal permitting rifles clubs or allowing rifles on school grounds would be fired, possibly imprisoned. Here’s my question: Have .30-30 caliber Winchesters and .22 caliber rifles changed to become more violent? If indeed rifles have become more violent, what can be done to pacify them? Will rifle psychiatric counseling help to stop these weapons from committing gun violence? You say: “Williams, that’s lunacy! Guns are inanimate objects and as such cannot act.” You’re right. Only people can act. That means that we ought to abandon the phrase “gun violence” because guns cannot act and hence cannot be violent.
If guns haven’t changed, it must be that people, and what’s considered acceptable behavior, have changed. Violence with guns is just a tiny example. What explains a lot of what we see today is growing cultural deviancy. Twenty-nine percent of white children, 53% of Hispanic children and 73% of black children are born to unmarried women.
The absence of a husband and father in the home is a strong contributing factor to poverty, school failure, crime, drug abuse, emotional disturbance and a host of other social problems. By the way, the low marriage rate among blacks is relatively new. Census data shows that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults from 1890 to 1940. According to the 1938 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, that year only 11% of black children and 3% of white children were born to unwed mothers.
In 1954, I graduated from Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin High School, the city’s poorest school. During those days, there were no school policemen. Today, close to 400 police patrol Philadelphia schools. According to federal education data, in the 2015-16 school year, 5.8% of the nation’s 3.8 million teachers were physically attacked by a student. Almost 10% were threatened with injury.
Other forms of cultural deviancy are found in the music accepted today that advocates murder, rape and other vile acts. In previous generations, people were held responsible for their behavior. Today, society at large pays for irresponsible behavior. Years ago, there was little tolerance for the crude behavior and language that are accepted today. To see men sitting while a woman was standing on a public conveyance was once unthinkable. Children addressing adults by their first name, and their use of foul language in the presence of, and often to, teachers and other adults was unacceptable.
A society’s first line of defense is not the law or the criminal justice system but customs, traditions and moral values. These behavioral norms, mostly imparted by example, word-of-mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Today’s true tragedy is that most people think what we see today has always been so. As such, today’s Americans accept behavior that our parents and grandparents never would have accepted.
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I graduated from a rural school in ’79. I drove the “farm truck” to school and it had a gun rack with the key always in the ignition. There was a single shot 20 gauge and bolt action 22 in that gun rack. I won the FFA state skeet shooting contest with that 20 gauge.
How can you shoot skeet with a single shot?
Double barrel?
It turns out you do. And they do. And it isn’t really any different today than those big heavy 12 gauge battle cannons.
https://www.chuckhawks.com/drive_20_gauge.htm
Who knew? We all learned something today. Thanks tsquared.
If they can’t just get rid of the 2nd amendment. Lets demonize the gun.At some point the people will beg us to repeal it. Marxism 101
About the time they introduce caning as a punishment here, we might see some improvement.
I’d like to be a caner. Where do you apply?
Cops have to get zapped with the stun gun, you’ll have to get caned first before you can cane others.
In our Middle school, grade 6-8, we had an indoor archery range, with old school fiberglass bows and target arrows, shooting into bails of hay. Our phys-ed guy was big outdoors man, it was a lot of fun.
Eventually it got closed down, not for any reasons you might imagine, the culprit was this room was called the dug-out, unfinished utility room, the ceiling was sprayed with asbestos, and clumps of that shit would come down what an arrow missed the mark. (circa 1973).
1973 was just last week, dude. Have you even started shaving yet?
Will the schools be indemnified while the guns are: 1-on school grounds, 2-used in a school sanctioned competition or practice, 3-carried to and from school or competition, or 4-stolen while in school custody and later used in a crime?
Obama provided guns to the Sinaloa Cartel which were used to kill hundreds of people in Mexico and at least one border patrol agent and used in an Islamist terror attack at a recruiting office complex in Tennessee. Did anything happen to him?
Please share the evidence upon which you are basing this theory.
Also, ballistic evidence was not able to conclude a specific firearm from Fast & Furious was used to kill Agent Brian Terry.
http://documents.latimes.com/ballistics-report-atf/
Spoken like a true ambulance-chaser.
I read an article that talked about harnessing and directing male energy and sexuality. When harnessed and directed appropriately, society blooms. When it is not, we see disastrous results. Women tend to be the harnessing factor. However, women now are taught to hate men and their energy and sexuality, rather than direct it and socialize it properly.
So both sides are no longer doing their jobs, and this is what we have. Large populations of men with no direction, no social mores, no gainful employment or the perpetual student, babies they take no interest in, violent, shiftless, angry.
We have women who are also angry, violent, shiftless, perpetual students, neglectful of the children they have, unkempt, and basically unrecognizable as women. Female, sure, but woman?
The “incels” are like that, they claim, because women will not have sex with them, yet they do zero to help themselves appeal to any woman at all. Women, on the other hand, do nothing to help them change, and instead ridicule them.
The women claim they are like that because of the “patriarchy” yet women work, drive, own property, vote, and hold public office, can kill a fetus at will, make their own medical decisions,have a credit card in their own name, go to college, and have sex pretty much whenever they want, and have done so for a very long time. So I don’t know exactly what the patriarchy is doing but they seem inept at this point.
It’s a vicious circle that is fueled by social media and politics.
Women are naturally caretakers and the societal gatekeepers. Throughout history, women wielded power through the family and social circle of the world.
I remember growing up and my great-uncles gathering together. The Aunts would roll their eyes and send them outside to drink beer and spit, and warn them to stay away from the kids and watch their mouths. But when it was time to come eat, they washed up and behaved at the table because otherwise the wrath of the Aunts would come down on them like a ton of bricks. Then they got up and went to work on Monday because your family depended on you. Today’s Aunts are right beside them, drunk as skunks and encouraging bad behavior and recording it for the whole world to see.
If you wanted to be accepted and have a home life of any kind, you behaved, you got a job, you didn’t spit on the sidewalk (or shit nowadays), you cleaned up, you took care of things you were supposed to take care of. You stayed away from women who drank too much, were divorced (Catholics!), or “gold diggers”.
As a woman you were decorous, kind, loving, and took care of yourself, and didn’t leave your children home alone while you went out clubbing or have a house that was such a mess animals couldn’t live there. You didn’t treat your vagina like a hostage situation where the only way in or out was through a transnational exchange of goods or money.
We are not fish or frogs, where the male just comes along and sprays out his milt and goes on his merry way, yet that is exactly how we are acting. On both sides. Being a single parent of either gender is both very difficult and not good for any child. I have seen single dads struggle mightily, and their children suffer for it just as much as the single mother’s children.
I don’t think we can economically go back to a situation where women no longer work, nor do I think anyone wants that, including me. Technology makes our lives much easier, we are not spending literally a whole day doing laundry or cleaning a house. No one has to darn socks or sit at a sewing machine and make their own clothes. Yet what if we had to? Can anyone even do any of these things? Can most men fix anything? Find food that doesn’t come from Market Basket?
At this point it doesn’t seem there’s really any going back, and society will have to learn the lesson the hard way. We can only hope the pendulum doesn’t swing too far back, yet history often shows it does. Even having this conversation in any meaningful manner will trigger severe backlash. Sigh.
“Even having this conversation in any meaningful manner will trigger severe backlash. Sigh.”
Read Pauls letter to Titus. Trigger alert…!
Hey, that would make one hell of an article.
I have been echoing El Doggy’s message on this theme; he continually rants about the epidemic of ‘zorras’ – sluts such as those described above. Eventually, there will be a public outcry. For now, El Doggy is one who preaches in the wilderness.
Real estate agent ,you come from a family like my family. Looking back I never realized how blessed we were.It was a good time to be alive. America was still traditional and mostly white. Women wouldn’t have to work if the men in government would take back control of our money and issue it Debt free and interest free. They are all bought off and weak. They remember what happened to Kennedy as he was staring to break us away from the Federal Reserve .They will not challenge the money powers. They should be ashamed of themselves but they take the money and sell their souls .
I’m a child born of the 70’s, raised in the 80’s, and sadly seeing the deterioration of the 2000’s…my son is 27 and I see a good man who treats women well but has such a thin stock to choose from he is going to move to Texas to find one.
In 1985 my brother and I could ride our bikes to the corner store without fear of any violence and certainly no police coming to our house to arrest my mother because she let us go. She even let us drink from the hose. THE HOSE….oh the horror.
The neighbors yelled at all us kids when we were being little shits, and we listened to them because they were ADULTS.
I saved up from my first job to buy a 80-something chevy chevette (standard shift because my dad taught me like dads are supposed to).
We didn’t tolerate bullies
No one was fat (well, one kid)
We had a rifle club in HS (I graduated in 90)
I often am completely boggled by the absolute lunacy and abject idiocy surrounding me on a daily basis.
Most people are functionally illiterate, cannot think for themselves, engage in any kind of meaningful discussion.
This world is not a happy place at all.
“…he is going to move to Texas to find one.”
?
Socks are much better than back in the day. I remember in grade school putting a light bulb inside a sock to hold the shape of the heel and darning them. Everybody had those iron on knee patches on their jeans too.
I take exception to the article’s accompanying photo that includes that symbol of industrial strength mass murder – the hammer and sickle.
Proscribe it like the gammadion.
Persons displaying the “Communist” symbol should be prosecuted for incitement to commit hate crimes due to political position and mass murder.
Nowadays, teachers curse in classrooms and teach ebonics.
Or seduce the students.
Everyone, including you & I, speak a dialect. Ebonics is just another dialect. So which dialect should teachers use?
Ebonics can be a bit of a colloquialism; most linguists use the term African American English or African American Vernacular English.
I still have the target .22 my dad gave me that I took to rifle club in Jr high school growing up on Long Island, NY in the early 70’s. Five shot bolt action Savage with peep sights. I was pretty good… didn’t take many things seriously back then.
I was in highschool from 1975 to 1979 . All four years we had guns to shoot. 1979 was the last year because some parents were threatening a law suit. They move to my home town from somewhere up north and didn’t want their kids around guns. Never was anyone hurt and this is where I learned gun safety. It’s a damn shame these liberals progressives Democrats from up North ruined it for all the other kids coming behind us. This was the first time I had ever heard of a thing called ” liberal Democrats “. These people have just destroyed what was once good.
It’s a progression we can see coming BB. Plan accordingly.
2 Timothy 3:13 KJB… “But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.”
One single source of truth in the world. Study it… 2 Tim 2:15
Give a listen to JJ while you’re out on the road. Guy is on point!
Pastor ,you are right. I just wish the rest of white Americans could see and understand the Evil coming their way. It is scary to think about but the evil is all around us. I try to prepare accordingly but how do we get away from this abomination.
You would think people would want to avoid the evil coming their way.
Most folks just want to vote for it if it is a lesser evil.
“…how do we get away from this abomination.”
This abomination is our fault. God will make it right. In the beginning we willfully chose to follow ourselves. Today we have the option to follow Him. Most are still following themselves. Paul writes…
1 Corinthians 11:1 KJB… “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ.”
Williams is a total Uncle Tom. there never were any good old days for blacks. When my mother used to drive me to kindergarten we drove down Pembroke Road in Hollywood which was the black section. Blacks lived in shotgun shacks perched up on four cinder blocks. Wood stove, no electricity no running water. They had nothing. NOTHING. And no opportunity to change that. And this was in 1965 and 66. So painting a picture of how wonderful it used to be is bullshit.
Maybe he grew up in a fairly normal place? I was born in a 100 year old and changing neighborhood which is now a combat zone. The public school where I went to kindergarten before we moved to another town was not segregated and I remember all of the Black kids fathers picking them up after school. It was a different world in so many ways. No bad memories about any of it. It was 1960.
Or maybe it was just the same and you were too dumb to realize it. If their fathers were picking them up after school they weren’t working. And most mothers didn’t work in 1960. Do say, where was this Utopia? Doesn’t sound like any kind of stable thing to me. Sounds like a modern commercial. Black men were never Mr Mom.
Maybe you never knew people who worked shifts like 7-3? Picked up the kids at 3:15 or 3:30 when school let out. It was Joliet, Illinois. It wasn’t Utopia but it was way better than what replaced it.
Odd how the black middle class was expanding until the ’68 Uncivil Rights act was passed.
Maybe someone could trace a connection there?
Another moronic statement. There was ZERO black middle class until the post office and the school boards started hiring blacks in earnest, and that happened after the Civil Rights Act was passed.
So…the govt is the solution to problems?
There are scholastic works about the CRM that say something like the following:
Although the CRM did have roots in, and took many of its cues from, working class struggles of the 1930s and 1940s, the movement from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s was heavily based in the black middle-class.
You can use the search engine of your choice and find these – if you want to look for them.
You really are ignorant and proud of it. No black middle class in Detroit auto workers?
Segregation was a horrible practice and deprived blacks of everything – except freedom to compete. Down South, there were often two business districts in town – one white, one black. The white business district would have segregated water fountains, colored-only entrances (if any) and similar claptrap. Quite a few would refuse any black customers at all, depending on how racist the owners were.
But – black people could and did earn money, have needs, want to buy things. If the white business district discriminated against them, where could they go to buy?
To the black business district. Where shop owners of color would welcome them and their money, and sell them what they needed or wanted. Not surprisingly, the economic laws are colorblind; if you understand them, you prosper and if not, you go bust.
Can a black person learn how to run a store successfully? YES, and many did. They were “middle class” (if not RICH) but white economists ignored them – after all, the blacks were poverty-stricken, hopeless and helpless captives of the white business class. Of course, the white economists (and historical revisionists) who wrote about these subjects never set foot in the black business district during its peak – and it was dissolving as early as 1970: because the 1965 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination, and the white businesses could no longer refuse to do business with the black customers. And since many of the white businesses could outperform the black ones SOLELY FOR REASONS OF SCALE, the black businesses closed, one by one, as their customers bought their needs from white businesses for lower prices.
Star I doubt you ever saw or heard about any of this, but I grew up in the South and saw some of it. Heard about a lot more, sometimes from retired black shopkeepers who suddenly lost their clientele and support base and sometimes from frustrated shoppers of all colors who lost access to certain goods and services that the white shops didn’t see a need for and the black folks sometimes made for themselves – until their grandparents died and took the knowledge with them. Could you cook possum, Star? Chitlins? Tan a deer hide and make moccasins from it?
It’s both what you don’t know and what you know that ain’t so, Star. You could make an effort to learn, though.
Indeed, things haven’t always been this way.
Gun Safety should be part of Driver’s Ed.