Saturday 27 July 2019

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.

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