Posted on 06/06/2018 5:04:56 AM PDT by Kaslin
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.
Now we have openly socialist and outright communist anti-American Democrats.
Things have just been downhill since.
Yea, verily and forsooth! Thou hast the right of it.
Why do you shoot armadillos?
Are they a pest?
It’s mostly psychotropic drugs
Pests? Hell yes. In Fla. One had lived under my buddies trailer for years, dug all around until the trailer sunk up to the front door during a storm.
To me, the reason is preachers, parents, and your average individual doesn't believe in or teach the doctrine of Hell or damnation for really serious sins, let alone other "Deadly" Sins.
As nutty and inconceivable as this writer says it would be back then to imagine school shootings, that is EXACTLY how nutty one is perceived if he believes in Hell or teaches it to his flock or his children nowadays.
Fatima was only 100 years ago... a blink of an eye on the Biblical scale.
People need to know the testimony of those saintly kids, who saw Hell, in real time. Lucia, who died just recently, lived too long and left too much credible testimony to be denied.
People need to ponder it and get to biting their fingernails again.
Thank you.
Does a bear sh*t in the woods?
Hale yes they're pests. Tear up our garden and flower beds and leave holes all over the yard. Hard to catch but we trap them then shoot them.
As bad or worse than the squirrels eating our peaches and pecans and ruining the crops. We shoot them too.
I’m 75 and don’t remember God ever having been in the classroom, so the continued lack of same can’t be a major factor in what we see today.
Bttt.
5.56mm
I know of a preacher the swears the glock is waterproof.
He wears one even when doing baptisms.
I don’t either. As an Army brat, we rotated through many different school districts. No bible reading or prayers in any of them. The one thing I never saw was working mothers of young children. Children were priority number one of mothers back then.
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