Things Haven't Always Been This Way

Townhall.com ^ | July 17, 2019 | Walter E. Williams

[Kaslin]

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.

[castlebrew]

“I wonder when the American public is going to wake up to what the Left is doing.”

I suspect the American people won’t wake up until they’ve lived through the nightmare of socialism.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Professor Williams paints a very sad picture of how the Great Society has ruined the lot of black people in this country.

He grew up in the poorest part of Philadelphia. I’m sure his life wasn’t a fairy tale, but nobody shot him on a street corner, he completed his education, and went on to achieve great things.

[Texas resident]

In the mid 70’s, my buds and I would go duck hunting after school, so we had shotguns, shells, decoys and waders in our cars. In my speech class, I did a demonstration on how to tear down, clean and reassemble a pump gun. Carried it through the school, no problem.

[elteemike]

I was in high school in the Midwest during the mid 60s and regularly took my .22 rifle and 12 ga shotgun to school...

Marksmanship training in the indoor range in the school basement, and often road hunted or walked adjacent fields for pheasants and cottontails during lunch hour...I could walk from the truck to the nearest corn or bean field!

We even kept the guns in our personal lockers occasionally...Can’t recall anyone ever abused the situation, and our shooting coach (a retired Marine and English teacher) kept a close eye on us...No incidents involving firearms, ever... How times and people have changed!

[xkaydet65]

Yhanks gor pinging this post. My HS was JROTC. We had a championship rifle ream which competeted with seven other HSs in NYC that were not JROTC. Being a JROTC school every student we all had to qualify in marksmanship beginning in 10th grade. We used .22 cal match rifles on a 50’ range. The rifles were stored in school.
One amusing note, while I had scored sharpshooter in 10th and 11th, for some reason I was off target in 12th. Our new rangemaster and MilSci instructor brought me down to try again. He was a Green Beret who had been wounded as an adviser. He had placed his M16 in the range rack. It was 64 and none of us had ever seen a 16. He said “What do I have to do to get you qualified?” I looked at the rifle racks and said if I scored sharpshooter he could let me fire one round from that weapon. To my surprise he agreed. I hit 89 out of a 100. He then readied his M16, showed me how to hold and sight it , and I fired my one round. Very cool experience.

[Manly Warrior]

Indeed, many upstate NY HSs had CMP/DCM sponsored rifle teams operating in the basement 50 ft small bore three position ranges.

I graduated from Deposit Central HS in 79, shot every fall in HS, my younger brother graduated in 83 or 84 and it went away shortly thereafter.

Funny thing, none of the team members murdered anyone 9 we did drink a few illicit brewskies on the bus ride home from away shoots).

As a lefty, I shot a US Army marked Winchester 52D, as the Anschutz 54s all had sharp RH cheek pieces.

My dad was the team armorer for decades.