Posted on 04/23/2007 9:07:02 PM PDT by jazusamo
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Someone recently said that mass shootings, such as those at Virginia Tech or Columbine High School, are largely a phenomenon of the 1960s and afterwards. If so, these tragedies can be added to the long list of disastrous consequences of the heady notions and extravagant rhetoric of that decade.
What was there in the 1960s vision of the world that could possibly lead anyone to consider it right to shoot at individuals who had done nothing to him?
Collective guilt is one of the legacies of the 1960s that is still with us. We are still seeing a guilt trip for slavery being laid on people who never owned a slave in their lives, and who would be repelled by the very idea of owning a slave.
Back in the 1960s, it was considered Deep Stuff among the intelligentsia to say that American society -- all of us collectively -- were somehow responsible for the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King.
During the 1960s, the idea spread like wildfire that whatever you were lacking was someone else's fault -- society's fault. If you were poor, whether at home or in some Third World country, you were one of the "dispossessed" -- even if you had never possessed anything to dispossess you of.
The urban ghetto riots that swept across the country during the 1960s were all blamed on society. This view was formalized in a much-hailed report on urban violence by a national "blue ribbon" commission headed by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois.
President Lyndon Johnson likewise blamed urban violence on social conditions, saying: "All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs."
This sweeping and heady vision made it unnecessary to stoop to anything so mundane as hard facts -- which would have included the fact that urban riots struck most often and most violently when and where this collective guilt vision prevailed.
Southern cities, where at that time discrimination and poverty were more pronounced than in the rest of the country, were not nearly as often or as hard-hit as cities outside the South.
Detroit, which suffered the most deadly of all the ghetto riots of the 1960s, with 43 deaths, had an unemployment rate among blacks of 3.4 percent -- which was lower than the national unemployment rate among whites.
Chicago, where Mayor Richard J. Daley was not buying the liberal guilt trips of the time, was one of the few big Northern cities to escape the wave of riots that swept across the country in 1967.
The kinds of mass urban riots that occurred all across the country during Lyndon Johnson's administration became virtually unknown during the eight years of the Reagan administration, which projected a completely different vision of the world.
But, then as now, facts often came in a poor second to heady visions and sweeping rhetoric.
If other people are somehow responsible for whatever is lacking in your life, lashing out at random against individuals who have done nothing to you personally can sound plausible to many people.
Whether or not the latest mass killings at Virginia Tech were a result of medically verifiable insanity, there have always been insane people but there have not always been mass killings with the frequency we have seen since 1960.
Nor is gun control the magic answer, as often suggested by the same kind of people who believe in collective responsibility instead of individual responsibility.
Since murder is illegal everywhere, why would someone who is unwilling to obey the law against murder be willing to obey a law against getting a gun -- which is easy to get illegally?
One of the many hard facts that get overlooked by those impressed by visions and rhetoric is that mass shootings almost invariably occur in gun-free zones like schools, workplaces, or houses of worship.
When has a mass killer opened fire on a meeting of the National Rifle Association or fired on a group of hunters?
Instead of banning guns, maybe we should rethink 1960s dogmas.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.
“When has a mass killer opened fire on a meeting of the National Rifle Association or fired on a group of hunters?”
Well, a certain Hmong gentleman comes to mind but otherwise a decent article.
Yes, I thought the very same thing when reading it.
There was a Columbine like school shooing mentioned in Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels book (from 1966). The kids targeted preps, jocks, and brains.
Charles Whittman climbed the UT tower. Richard Speck raped and murdered something like a dozen nurses in one night.
These are rampages against those in the ordered society.
I remember the Speck and Whittman cases well and the school shooting sounds vaguely familiar. My wife was a nurse so the Speck case hit close to home.
It's getting awful old and tired but it sure isn't going away.
LOL!
bttt
Since murder is illegal everywhere...
Our agitations and riots were ginned up by the same people who now run moveon.org. In 1968 there were attempts at revolutions across the US and Europe and there is now a good book on 1968. As Yogi Bera said, It’s deja vu, all over again.
Actually, I’ve considered the “great think” of mass society to be sick, some form of mass psychosis that is an out shoot of the MSM. The sick little children we call adults can do whatever they want, but not on my property.
I, like many Americans,learned to laugh at the “it’s society’s fault” bilge back in the sixties. I remember watching a Dudley Doright cartoon where the villain, Snidely Whiplash, was acquitted of one his crimes by his attorney , Dudley’s sweetheart Nell, because she claimed that it was society’s fault as Snidely grinned maliciously . The whole family had a pretty good laugh at the cartoon. But most people I knew sneered at the idea that society was responsible for bad behavior. We were taught that you and you alone were responsible for your own behavior. Apparently libs fostered the society’s fault canard very well. Now today nobody is responsible for what they do. Except for Bush and Republicans. (smirk)
He also forgot the DNC riot in Chicago the next year. I like Sowell’s opinions, but he’s missing a couple of facts in this one.
Growing up in New York at that time, all I can say is, "Thank you, Mayor Lindsey".
That sort of narrows it down.
Is it bigger than a bread box? (Nineteen more questions to follow.)
The French (God bless 'em) have an expression, "soixante huitants", "Sixty-Eighters", meaning superannuated hippies.
...What was there in the 1960s vision of the world that could possibly lead anyone to consider it right to shoot at individuals who had done nothing to him?
Collective guilt is one of the legacies of the 1960s that is still with us. We are still seeing a guilt trip for slavery being laid on people who never owned a slave in their lives, and who would be repelled by the very idea of owning a slave.
Back in the 1960s, it was considered Deep Stuff among the intelligentsia to say that American society -- all of us collectively -- were somehow responsible for the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King.
During the 1960s, the idea spread like wildfire that whatever you were lacking was someone else's fault -- society's fault. If you were poor, whether at home or in some Third World country, you were one of the "dispossessed" -- even if you had never possessed anything to dispossess you of...
...This sweeping and heady vision made it unnecessary to stoop to anything so mundane as hard facts -- which would have included the fact that urban riots struck most often and most violently when and where this collective guilt vision prevailed...
...But, then as now, facts often came in a poor second to heady visions and sweeping rhetoric...
If other people are somehow responsible for whatever is lacking in your life, lashing out at random against individuals who have done nothing to you personally can sound plausible to many people.
...Instead of banning guns, maybe we should rethink 1960s dogmas.
Nailed It!
This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for the perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author all 100% to feel the need to share an article.) I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of the good stuff that is worthy of attention. You can see the list of articles I pinged to lately on my page.
You are welcome in or out, just freepmail me (and note which PING list you are talking about). Besides this one, I keep 2 separate PING lists for my favorite authors Victor Davis Hanson and Orson Scott Card.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.