Professor Williams Says Guns Aren’t the Problem, Progressives Are

George Mason Professor Walter E. Williams asks the question of whether guns are the problem in an article on his blog. Beginning with the history of guns in America and ending with the Progressive mentality, the professor believes he has the answer.

In the early 1900s guns were readily available for people of all ages. Boy Scout’s were given merit badges for marksmanship. In the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, catalogs were full of gun ads aimed at children and parents. Many catalogs didn’t even request the age of the buyer. You can read the details on his blog.

My university, St. John’s, had a gun range and club which they had to abandon in the late 1960s because the leftists badgered them into it though there had never been a negative incident of any kind.

Professor Williams asks, “why…when a person could just walk into a store or order a gun through the mail, when there were no FBI background checks, no waiting periods, no licensing requirements — was there not the frequency and kind of gun violence that we sometimes see today, when access to guns is more restricted?”

What is different now? Guns don’t operate on their own. If they did, the left would have the answers.

This is the answer he believes:

Customs, traditions, moral values and rules of etiquette, not just laws and government regulations, are what make for a civilized society, not restraints on inanimate objects.

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 benefit of having customs, traditions and moral values as a means of regulating behavior is that people behave themselves even if nobody’s watching. In other words, it’s morality that is society’s first line of defense against uncivilized behavior.

Moral standards and codes of behavior have been under siege for decades and most often it’s the government education establishment and progressives who are the aggressors. They reject all absolutes and moral limits, Williams believes.

What still stands between the rule of law and the Progressives are law enforcement and the criminal justice system. They are “the last desperate line of defense” in a society under assault. That too is being destroyed by the left.

Whether you believe in religion or codes of behavior or not, think about the breakdown of mores in this Marxist cultural war and consider how things have changed, not for the better.

Progressives continue to ignore reality and come up with their mindless “cures,” such as “zero tolerance” for schoolyard recess games such as cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians, shouting “bang bang,” drawing a picture of a pistol, making a gun out of Lego pieces, and biting the shape of a gun out of a Pop-Tart. This kind of unadulterated lunacy — which focuses on an inanimate object such as a gun instead of on morality, self-discipline and character — will continue to produce disappointing results.

Guns aren’t the problem, Progressives are.

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