Posted on 06/05/2018 5:16:03 PM PDT by Politically Correct
Having enjoyed my 82nd birthday, I am part of a group of about 50 million Americans who are 65 years of age or older. Those who are 90 or older were in school during the 1930s. My age cohort was in school during the 1940s. Baby boomers approaching their 70s were in school during the 1950s and early '60s.
Try this question to any one of those 50 million Americans who are 65 or older: Do you recall any discussions about the need to hire armed guards to protect students and teachers against school shootings? Do you remember school policemen patrolling the hallways? How many students were shot to death during the time you were in school? For me and those other Americans 65 or older, when we were in school, a conversation about hiring armed guards and having police patrol hallways would have been seen as lunacy. There was no reason.
What's the difference between yesteryear and today? The logic of the argument for those calling for stricter gun control laws, in the wake of recent school shootings, is that something has happened to guns. Guns have behaved more poorly and become evil. Guns themselves are the problem. The job for those of us who are 65 or older is to relay the fact that guns were more available and less controlled in years past, when there was far less mayhem. Something else is the problem.
Guns haven't changed. People have changed. Behavior that is accepted from today's young people was not accepted yesteryear. For those of us who are 65 or older, assaults on teachers were not routine as they are in some cities. For example, in Baltimore, an average of four teachers and staff members were assaulted each school day in 2010, and more than 300 school staff members filed workers' compensation claims in a year because of injuries received through assaults or altercations on the job. In Philadelphia, 690 teachers were assaulted in 2010, and in a five-year period, 4,000 were. In that city's schools, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, "on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes. That doesn't even include thousands more who are extorted, threatened, or bullied in a school year."
Yale University legal scholar John Lott argues that gun accessibility in our country has never been as restricted as it is now. Lott reports that until the 1960s, New York City public high schools had shooting clubs. Students carried their rifles to school on the subway in the morning and then turned them over to their homeroom teacher or a gym teacher — and that was mainly to keep them centrally stored and out of the way. Rifles were retrieved after school for target practice (http://tinyurl.com/yapuaehp). Virginia's rural areas had a long tradition of high school students going hunting in the morning before school, and they sometimes stored their guns in the trunks of their cars during the school day, parked on the school grounds.
During earlier periods, people could simply walk into a hardware store and buy a rifle. Buying a rifle or pistol through a mail-order catalog — such as Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s — was easy. Often, a 12th or 14th birthday present was a shiny new .22-caliber rifle, given to a boy by his father.
These facts of our history should confront us with a question: With greater accessibility to guns in the past, why wasn't there the kind of violence we see today, when there is much more restricted access to guns? There's another aspect of our response to mayhem. When a murderer uses a bomb, truck or car to kill people, we don't blame the bomb, truck or car. We don't call for control over the instrument of death. We seem to fully recognize that such objects are inanimate and incapable of acting on their own. We blame the perpetrator. However, when the murder is done using a gun, we do call for control over the inanimate instrument of death — the gun. I smell a hidden anti-gun agenda.
Gun Control or People Control?
I know what you mean. Good relationship with school officials, local police and parents. Small town=everyone knows your business Small towns=everyone knows your business got your back covered.
“Liberals don’t hate guns, they hate gun owners. They despise anyone who disagrees. They really want to ban US!”
And if they ever disarm us, they will.
I have to admit my high school principal would have liked to choke most of us. Especially my senior year. We were always screwing up or around into some kind of duck school authority plan. But never to physical harm to each other unless it was an argument where fists and talk ended it at the time. No gangs, no ambushes, and some girl at the bottom of the issue who ended up dating a guy not in the disagreement. But that is just small town crap.
Excellent piece.
Socialists architect moral decline in order to increase their control over society.
Black people kill other black people at a far great rate than anyone else does.
When the country was more european based citizenry, it was much, much more civilized.
Never should have let socialism ever take roots here.
When we lived on Long Island in the late 50’s my Brother was in a School Gun Club.
He carried his .22 Rifle to School twice a week and nobody batted an eye.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Dodd Dodd was elected as a Democrat to the House of Representatives in 1952, and served two terms. He lost a Senate election in 1956 to Prescott S. Bush, but was elected in 1958 to Connecticut's other Senate seat and then re-elected in 1964.
In 1967 Dodd became the first Senator censured by the US Senate since Joseph McCarthy in 1954,[22] and was one of only six people censured by the Senate in the 20th century. The resulting censure was a condemnation and finding that he had converted campaign funds to his personal accounts and spent the money
Thomas Joseph Dodd became vice chairman of the Board of Review and later executive trial counsel for the Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality at Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945 and 1946. He practiced law privately in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1947 to 1953.
U.S. Senator Thomas Joseph Dodd, (May 15, 1907 – May 24, 1971) the father of U.S. Senator {1981 to 2011} for Connecticut, Christopher Dodd. You know as the {the other slice of bread} via Teddy Kennedy was one slice of bread in the notorious "waitress sandwich" {waitress Gaviglio} reported by many and documented by respected journalist Michael Kelly.
In 1967 [Thomas Joseph] Dodd became the first Senator censured by the US Senate since Joseph McCarthy in 1954, and was one of only six people censured by the Senate in the 20th century.
As chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, [Thomas Joseph] Dodd worked to restrict the purchase of mail order handguns, and later shotguns and rifles. These efforts culminated in the Gun Control Act of 1968, which Dodd introduced, including certain registration requirements.
Zimring, Franklin E. (1975). "Firearms and Federal Law: The Gun Control Act of 1968". The Journal of Legal Studies. 4 (1): 133. ISSN 0047-2530. Nuremberg Trials
Both Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor for the U.S., and {Thomas Joseph} Dodd insisted upon a fair and legal trial to prosecute the Nazi war criminals.
Gee, I wonder who paid to have the German gun laws transcribed into English. I have this Name RIGHT ON THE TIP OF MY TONGUE.
I have to ask, where on Long Island?
I'm from the arm-pit of Brentwood, {Suffolk County} L.I. N.Y.
Left that hell-hole Long Island in 1978. On my mother's side of the family, I was the first to leave Long Island in over 300 year's, dating back to the French Huguenots.
I lived in Brentwood for a couple of years around 1960 on Merrill Street.
It was going downhill then.
>>>Where on Long Island<<<
Elmont / Valley Stream.
My wife (now deceased ) was I think from that area. Alway’s talked about the Belmont Race track not being to far away from her house.
My Father and his Brother owned an Esso Gas Station on Dutch Broadway, a few blocks from our House.
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