Things haven't always been this way

August 2019 – A propos nothing in particular, I stumbled upon the following article (see further down). It was written for an American audience rather than a British audience but the message is appropriate in each nation.

Years ago I worked for an international company which provided me with opportunities to work overseas. It also provided opportunity for my children to benefit from private education, both overseas and here in UK. Eventually, when local overseas education became not best-suited for purpose, my sons and daughter attended boarding school in England. There, for the boys, extra-curricular activities such as Army Cadets were available and some of their peers eventually left the school to go on to military service of one form or another. Membership of Cadets involved access to and supervised use of firearms on site and nobody at that time thought anything more about it. My sons proved themselves to be excellent shooters. They still are. One, no longer living in this country, lawfully carries a pistol in the course of his work (but not at other times). Neither of them has fired in anger – ever.

In Britain, it is made out to be the act of a criminal to carry (or want to carry) a firearm but it wasn’t always so.  Before World War 1 many people routinely carried weapons and many returned home after the war with their lawfully provided trophy weapons. 

In fact, I’m told that the design and spatial size of our House of Commons chamber came about in an effort to separate routinely armed, sword-wearing members on opposite sides of the House!

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Things Haven’t Always Been This Way

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 counselling 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 behaviour, 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 Encyclopaedia 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 behaviour. Today, society at large pays for irresponsible behaviour. Years ago, there was little tolerance for the crude behaviour 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 defence is not the law or the criminal justice system but customs, traditions and moral values. These behavioural 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 defence 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 Britons accept behaviour that our parents and grandparents never would have accepted.
(ends)

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I’m not advocating the right to bear arms (although it is an argument that could be made at another time). Right now I’m advocating a return to the value systems once held to be true in our nation. 

How is a child able to honour ‘his father and his mother’ if father isn’t (ever) home and mother must leave home to work to make up the income shortage? How can a child grow up to not commit adultery when everyone around him/her seems to have little or no understanding of that directive? Especially when the providers of filmed entertainment on voyeur-vision see it as essential?

How can a child obey the command to ‘do not steal’, when stealing is a way of life, not just by the poor but by corporations and banks? How can a child understand not to bear false witness (meaning lie), when everyone from the top down lies?  And that’s only a few of the basic ten instructions.

It’s OK. I’m just musing. But what if straightening out some of this could be the beginning of our return to ancient values – which worked? There’s a thought. (md)

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Walter Edward Williams (born March 31, 1936) is an American economist, commentator, and academic. He is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, as well as a syndicated columnist and author known for his classical liberal and libertarian conservative views.[2] His writings frequently appear on Townhall.com, WND, and Jewish World Review.

This just in . . .

THEY ARE POLITICAL SPIROCHAETE!

They are all the same

They accept no blame

They possess no shame

They seek wealth and fame!

They lie, thieve and over eat

They postulate the truth and cheat

They utter words with meaning of deceit

They manifest in a polluted culture of spirochaete!

They have our nation in a horrendous financial deficit

They have forced the people into borrowing to the limit

They have made our land the haven of the human illicit

They have caused crime cost to skyrocket as explicit!

They support marriage for the hermaphrodite

They claim transgender marriage is a hygienic legitimate

They have no respect for heterosexual child that should dominate

They believe these jurisdictions of the bible they should obliterate

They are political imperatives of a New World Order; ordered to consummate!

Colin Uebergang    5th May 2019

Spirochaete: A bacterial disease

Who are ‘they’?

Don’t you just feel so grateful that we don’t live in the same country as ‘they’?

Or, maybe we do! (I do dislike ‘rap’.)

Also from Australia this week

(from Ron Owen of Gympie, Queensland)

“Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.” Ayn Rand

(Ayn Rand was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism.)

Strong words. Not everyone will agree with her interpretation of the word ‘socialism’, which is an interesting idea to muse upon – the meaning of words, I mean.

For example, if I use the word ‘democracy’ does it mean the same thing to you as it does to me; (for example, democracy in England is the same as or different to Democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo?); if I say ‘justice’ does it mean the same thing to you as it does to me; if I refer to ‘crime’ are both of us interpreting the meaning of the word in the same way? And ‘progress’ – does that mean the same? In all four instances the answer is: ‘Probably not.’

I put it to you that we don’t interpret these words (and others) in the same way. Nor do our politicians, our police, our lawyers, even our parents! We speak different languages that sound the same but aren’t the same. Such different interpretations form the soundest of sound basis for never-ending argument, deceit, misunderstanding and unhappiness. The Tower of Babel never had it so good. (Genesis 11:1-9, if you want to look it up). And lawyers excel at it. Their  language is known as ‘legalese’. Many aspiring and many actual politicians also use a different language. They call it ‘diplomacy’. We tend to call it ‘duplicity’ or, perhaps, ‘lies’.

 

We speak a different language to that of our parents because they are old and they know nothing, whereas we are young and have been educated. We have been educated by our peers; by voyeur-vision, newspapers, politicians, and teachers, all of whom were educated by the same state-sponsored university lecturers.  None of us seem very capable of understanding the language known as ‘history’ because ‘history’ is the language spoken by the winners of any dispute. And we all know that ‘winners’ come from the family of ‘I am right and you are wrong’. QED. ("quod erat demonstrandum"). Anything other than this is ridiculous, they tell me. The status quo doesn’t need to change much. It just needs to be tweaked every now and again!

OK. Let’s see if we can agree on the meaning of the word LIBERTY. On-line dictionaries offer several different ideas about the meaning but let’s see what you make of this:

“Life, faculties, production – in other words, individuality, liberty, property – this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.

“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”

“..........Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labour; by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is the origin of property.

“But it is also true that a man may live and satisfy his wants by seizing and consuming the products of the labour of others. This process is the origin of plunder. (This is much, much, wider than the idea of ‘tax’. - md)

“Now since man is naturally inclined to avoid pain – and since labour is pain in itself – it follows that men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. History shows this quite clearly. And under these conditions, neither religion nor morality can stop it.”

“. . . . . It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder. What are the consequences of such a perversion?

“In the first place, it erases from everyone’s conscience the distinction between justice and injustice.” Think of how many politicians you have heard supporting, undefined, ‘the Rule of Law’ when often the law itself might be unjust. Worse, when the victim is not permitted to declare his liberty to oppose an unjust law.

“When plunder is abetted by the law, it does not fear your courts, your police and your prisons. Rather, it may call upon them for help.”

These concepts were first brought to my attention by Frederic Bastiat in his classic blueprint for a Free Society, his essay on ‘The Law’.

Think on these things when you read of ‘the law’ and David Noakes and Lynn Thyer (David having been imprisoned and Lynn pursued by an European Arrest Warrant to imprison her for them both believing that they could help mankind with their research into a cure for cancer, which legally but unlawfully attracts an automatic charge of money laundering!; ‘the law’ and Common Law courts which don’t require expensive legal beagles to interpret justice because ‘justice’ isn’t the idea behind Courts of Law (the ‘business’ of law is behind so-called courts of law); and think of those ‘courts’ which extract the rewards of a man’s labour from his pocket to someone else’s pocket for some alleged offence that caused harm to no-one.

THIS IS NOT LIBERTY! This is evidence that we live in a prison without walls and the scribes and Pharisees (politicians and lawyers) of our day determine where the walls should be. Leaders of political parties merely suggest where else the invisible walls might be if they should win control of lawmaking. It is a perversion of the ideas of ‘justice’ and of ‘liberty’.

So, now I offer you an alternative:

I stand under our natural & Common Law Trial

and Annulment by Jury Constitution.

I promise to promote it at every opportunity I have.

Will you join me?

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"Ask not what the government can do for you.

Ask what the government is doing to you." - David Friedman