Monday, January 21, 2013

The Golden Age of Barbarity

Charles C.W. Cooke:
In 1975, New York state had over 80 school districts with rifle teams. In 1984, that had dropped to 65. By 1999 there were just 26. The state’s annual riflery championship was shut down in 1986 for lack of demand. This, sadly, is a familiar story across the country. The clubs are fading from memory, too. A Chicago Tribune report from 2007 notes the astonishment of a Wisconsin mother who discovered that her children’s school had a range on site. “I was surprised, because I never would have suspected to have something like that in my child’s school,” she told the Tribune. The district’s superintendent admitted that it was now a rarity, confessing that he “often gets raised eyebrows” if he mentions the range to other educators. The astonished mother raised her eyebrows — and then led a fight to have the range closed. “Guns and school don’t mix,” she averred. “If you have guns in school, that does away with the whole zero-tolerance policy.”

But how wise is that “zero-tolerance policy”? Until 1989, there were only a few school shootings in which more than two victims were killed. This was despite widespread ownership of — and familiarity with — weapons and an absence of “gun-free zones.” As George Mason University economist Walter E. Williams has observed, for most of American history “private transfers of guns to juveniles were unrestricted. Often a youngster’s 12th or 14th birthday present was a shiny new .22-caliber rifle, given to him by his father.” This was a right of passage, conventional and uncontroversial across the country. “Gee, Dad . . . A Winchester!” read one particularly famous ad. “In Virginia,” Williams writes, “rural areas had a long tradition of high-school students going hunting in the morning before school, and sometimes storing their guns in the trunk of their cars during the school day, parked on the school grounds.” Many of these guns they could buy at almost any hardware store or gas station — or even by mail order. The 1968 Gun Control Act, supported happily by major gun manufacturers who wished to push out their competition, put a stop to this.
Obviously Newtown would have gone completely differently if the first-grade students had been packing.

7 comments:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

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.

You know what happened after 1936?

That's right...World War II.
~

mikey said...

C'mon, subs, you're both better and smarter than that.

Teaching kids to shoot a .22 on a controlled range under strict supervision cannot be conflated with packing third graders. There's problems, there's solutions, and there's deep piles of bullshit...

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Until 1989, there were only a few school shootings in which more than two victims were killed. This was despite widespread ownership of — and familiarity with — weapons and an absence of “gun-free zones.”

Nothing to do with high-capacity magazines and semiautomatic weapons... nothing to do at all. I SAID, NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!!!

Substance McGravitas said...

Teaching kids to shoot a .22 on a controlled range under strict supervision cannot be conflated with packing third graders.

That's exactly the point. Cooke starts off saying that once there was a golden age when kids brought guns to school. The Sandy Hook kids were grades 1-4.

Smut Clyde said...

This was a right of passage, conventional and uncontroversial across the country. “Gee, Dad . . . A Winchester!” read one particularly famous ad

‘Right’... ‘rite’... same thing, write?

A cynical person would wonder, if advertising can be used as such a reliable guide to existing social circumstances, why do advertisers spend so much money trying to create that social circumstance?

Substance McGravitas said...

My guess is that the dead kids didn't feature in the ads either.

Smut Clyde said...

If future historians base their reconstructions of our society upon present-day advertisements, history may be even unkinder on us than we deserve.