Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M.
Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of 'Race
and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination?' and 'Up from
the Projects: An Autobiography.'
By Walter Williams
When I attended primary and secondary school -- during the 1940s and
'50s -- one didn't hear of the kind of shooting mayhem that's become
routine today. Why? It surely wasn't because of strict firearm laws. My
replica of the 1902 Sears mail-order catalog shows 35 pages of firearm
advertisements. People just sent in their money, and a firearm was
shipped.
Dr. John Lott, author of "More Guns, Less Crime,"
reports that until the 1960s, some New York City public high schools had
shooting clubs where students competed in citywide shooting contests
for university scholarships. They carried their rifles to school on the
subways and, upon arrival, turned them over to their homeroom teacher or
the gym coach and retrieved their rifles after school for target
practice. Virginia's rural areas had a long tradition of high-school
students going hunting in the morning before school and sometimes
storing their rifles in the trunks of their cars that were parked on
school grounds. Often a youngster's 12th or 14th birthday present was a
shiny new .22-caliber rifle, given to him by his father.
Today's
level of civility can't match yesteryear's. Many of today's youngsters
begin the school day passing through metal detectors. Guards patrol
school hallways, and police cars patrol outside. Despite these measures,
assaults, knifings and shootings occur. According to the National
Center for Education Statistics, in 2010 there were 828,000 nonfatal
criminal incidents in schools. There were 470,000 thefts and 359,000
violent attacks, of which 91,400 were serious. In the same year, 145,100
public-school teachers were physically attacked, and 276,700 were
threatened.
What explains today's behavior versus yesteryear's?
For well over a half-century, the nation's liberals and progressives --
along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals and the
courts -- have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values. These
people taught their vision, that there are no moral absolutes, to our
young people. To them, what's moral or immoral is a matter of
convenience, personal opinion or a consensus.
During the '50s and
'60s, the education establishment launched its agenda to undermine
lessons children learned from their parents and the church with fads
such as "values clarification." So-called sex education classes are
simply indoctrination that sought to undermine family and church
strictures against premarital sex. Lessons of abstinence were ridiculed
and considered passé and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth
control pills and abortions. Further undermining of parental authority
came with legal and extralegal measures to assist teenage abortions with
neither parental knowledge nor consent.
Customs, traditions,
moral values and rules of etiquette, not laws and government
regulations, are what make for a civilized society. These behavioral
norms -- transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings
-- represent a body of wisdom distilled through ages of experience,
trial and error, and looking at what works. The importance of customs,
traditions and moral values as a means of regulating behavior is that
people behave themselves even if nobody's watching. Police and laws can
never replace these restraints on personal conduct so as to produce a
civilized society. At best, the police and criminal justice system are
the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. The more
uncivilized we become the more laws that are needed to regulate
behavior.
Many customs, traditions and moral values have been
discarded without an appreciation for the role they played in creating a
civilized society, and now we're paying the price. What's worse is that
instead of a return to what worked, people want to replace what worked
with what sounds good, such as zero-tolerance policies in which bringing
a water pistol, drawing a picture of a pistol, or pointing a finger and
shouting "bang-bang" produces a school suspension or arrest. Seeing as
we've decided that we should rely on gun laws to control behavior, what
should be done to regulate clubs and hammers? After all, FBI crime
statistics show that more people are murdered by clubs and hammers than
rifles and shotguns.
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