The View From 1776

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Self-centered mass slaughter of students in Newtown, Connecticut, as well as in movie theaters, shopping malls, and the work place, is a phenomenon unknown before the advent of student radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s.  It is an outgrowth of the moral corruption inherent in liberal-progressivism and its vision of social justice.

The overriding characteristic of liberal-progressivism’s conception of social justice is that individuals should not be required to take responsibility for their actions; the socialized political state exists to tell citizens, in every detail, how they should live their lives.  Comrades in such a society as it unfolds are not held responsible for anti-social or self-destructive actions.  Indeed, in order to destroy Judeo-Christian morality and clear the way for implementation of full socialism, people are encouraged by government, Hollywood, TV, and the mainstream media to reject as oppressive earlier standards of morality and to indulge in unlimited degrees of hedonism.

Before the ascendancy of social justice, school text books extolled the ideals of courage, wisdom, honesty, loyalty, patriotism, hard work, and temperance.  Students learned the primacy of self-denial and willingness to place the welfare of one’s family and political community above satisfaction of his own immediate pleasure.  They learned the importance of working hard and saving for the future betterment of their families.  Students expected to be judged by the quality of their individual work, which depended upon personal study, not upon membership in a protected social class.

Schools taught something called citizenship.  Pupils were expected to attend classes regularly, to arrive on time, to be polite to teachers and to each other.  They were expected to keep text books in good condition, to keep their desks and the school clean, without defacing either.  They learned that failing to do these things was a crime against all those who would follow them in the school system.  They learned that the future of America depended upon their willingness to think as much about the rights of others as about their own desires.  They were taught to revere the United States, its flag, and the principles of individual liberty for which they stood.

Social justice, in contrast, is a remarkably undemanding religion.  It requires nothing of the individual other than lip-service to currently-fashionable causes proclaimed by air-head Hollywood stars and rapsters.  Baby-Boomers and their progeny aren’t required to study or to understand any of this.  The media tell them what to believe.  The collectivized state will provide their needs.  Their only concern is to keep sex and drugs readily available.

Irresponsibility encouraged by the socialistic welfare-state is the precondition to horrors such as the Newtown massacre and to the murder of millions of babies every year in abortion labs.

Without moral codes, hedonism becomes the preferred life-style.  Simply by denouncing those who disagree with social-justice dogma, today’s believer in social justice can look upon himself as a good person, while indulging in rampant casual sex, unfaithfulness to his spouse, and use of addictive drugs.  Abortions take care of pregnancies that interfere with sexual promiscuity.  The Baby Boomer can feel good about himself while indulging in frequent no-fault divorces, with his children in day-care or in his former spouse’s latest home, on the rationalization that a sensually-gratified parent is a happy parent, therefore a better companion for his children on the limited occasions when he sees them.  The social-justice parent expects the collective “village” to take care of everything else, leaving the father and mother free to pursue “life styles.”

Belief that “it takes a village,” which is only a rationalization to evade personal responsibility, is the attitude that produces the illusion of more gun controls as an effective way to avoid repetition of Newtown.

As I wrote in The Liberal Jihad - The Hundred-Year War Against the Constitution:

Bill Clinton’s Baby Boomer generation became the first in history of whom a very large percentage attended college. For the first time, a very large percentage of the population was taught the secular religious doctrines of socialism and instructed that the Christian religion and the morality of their forefathers was unscientific value judgment. Many of them became the anarchist student radicals whose activities ranged from public demonstrations, to occupations of university buildings and destruction of computer centers, to underground organizations that murdered, bombed, and robbed in the name of solidarity with the Viet Cong. Today those student activists are disproportionately represented in politics, the media and the arts, the legal profession and the judiciary, and especially in the teaching profession. From these activists comes the virulent anti-Americanism that widely infects American colleges and universities today.

Prominent among the criminal underground activists were the Weatherman group, whose leaders— Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn— by 2008 were what the mainstream media described as prominent educators. As noted in other chapters of this book, both Ayers and Dohrn were close associates and advisors of Barack Obama before his election to the presidency.

Reacting to the domestic political turmoil caused by the Great Society and escalation of the Vietnam War, liberal-progressive students went on rampages in college campuses across the country. Public and private property was destroyed with bombs, and more than a dozen people were murdered in cold blood by student radical groups like Weatherman. They proclaimed allegiance to our Vietnamese enemies and to what they called the Black Colony within the United States. Their slogan was, “Death to Amerika! Bring the war home, kill your parents, and ice the pigs!”

1960s student radicals now hold leadership positions in politics, the judiciary, the media, and, most dangerously, in education. With liberal propaganda flooding movies, TV, and the print media, while liberal teachers radicalize young students, we have reached a point at which a significant percentage of Baby Boomers and young people believe that the United States is an oppressive, imperialistic power that must give way to a world government controlled by the socialist international or the UN.

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A typical statement of the new, radical left wing of liberal-progressive was in The Real SDS Stands Up, an article by Andrew Kopkind that appeared in the June 30, 1969, issue of Hard Times, a student radical publication.  Mr. Kopkind wrote,

But the most significant ideological force with SDS was a group of 11 New York and Midwestern activists and intellectuals who had drawn up an analytical and programmatic thesis called, simply, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” (the title is from Dylan…).  “Weatherman” was a 16,000-word paper which made the first and crucial attempt at defining an ideology and a program for SDS…it was the first major overhaul SDS has had since the “Port Huron Statement” and “America and the New Era”

…the paper presented this argument: Opposition to US imperialism is the major international struggle today……Those who are leading the fight are the guerrillas of the Third World (principally, now, the Vietnamese and the Latin American guevaristas) and those of the “internal” black colony within the US…

That central idea implies several consequences.  First, the black liberation movement in the US is the most important element of the whole process…Second, the way in which the various foreign and domestic colonies arrive at the revolutionary stage is through their own fights for “self-determination.”...Third, the youth movement did not spring full-blown from abstract idealism, but is a specific response to the black movement and the worldwide “war” against the American empire; it must now reach out of its middle-class origins to a base in the white working class and the permanent drop-out culture…Fourth, the several community “movements” should begin to think of themselves as cadres and collectives in the first stages of formation of a revolutionary political party.

From the same volume, Look At It: America 1969, which appeared first in New Left Notes, August 1969, amplifies on this outlook:

What’s new is that today not quite so many people are confused, and a lot more people are angry; angry about the fact that promises we have heard since first grade are all jive; angry that, when you get down to it, this system is nothing but total economic and military put-down of the oppressed peoples of the world.  And more: it’s a system that steals the goods, the resources and the labor of poor and working people all over the world in order to fill the pockets and bank accounts of a tiny capitalist class. (Call it imperialism)...

No longer will we tolerate “law and order” backed up by soldiers in Vietnam, and pigs in the communities and the schools; a “law and order” that serves only the interests of those in power and tries to smash the people down whenever they rise up…

We are expressing total support for the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam…We moved from individual acts of moral protest – remember the spring before, the draft card burning had been considered the very limit of the Movement – to massive attacks on the centers of military power in this country.  The Pentagon and the vast Oakland Induction Center were real; in Oakland the slogan changed from “:Hell No, We Won’t Go” to “HELL NO, NOBODY GOES.”

We had begun to realize that to stop the war we had to stop the United States government…Columbia transferred to a single campus the ideas of the Pentagon: Bring Home the War.  We hit where it hurts.  We had moved from individual protests to attacks on the centers of power, attacks on the home ground of the war machine.

Bill Ayers wrote in A Strategy To Win, appearing in New Left Notes of September 12, 1969,

...we’re going to bring the war home, we’re going to create class war in the streets and institutions of this country, and we’re going to make them pay a price…people have come to see the need to build collectives that can fight, the need to build collectives that are strong and tough, and in order to do that a lot of individualism has to be worked out of every one of us…we’re also going to make it clear that when a pig gets iced that’s a good thing, and that everyone who considers himself a revolutionary should be armed, should own a gun, should have a gun in his house.

We really are dealing with a matter of individual and national character.  And character is formed by religion and the resulting societal paradigm of “doing the right thing.”  Plato and Aristotle viewed it as lawgivers focusing upon the transcendental to understand true justice and then crafting laws that would orient people’s lives and the education of their children toward moral conduct and away from the sort of pragmatic philosophy (if a self-centered action gets what you want it is valid) advocated by liberal-progressives since the days of John Dewey.

What had been taking place in Athens as Plato and Aristotle looked back and endeavored to understand the degeneration of their city state is almost exactly paralleled in the moral degradation we in the United States have endured for the past forty years.

Since the 1960s, however, the lunatic fringe of liberal-progressivism (the student activists) have gradually won society to their views, as expressed by Weartherman leaders and Obama’s friends and advisors, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.  They and their Weatherman colleagues advocated abandoning the paradigm of family loyalty, plumping for loyalty only to the commune; they demanded that, if one did not already have a pistol, he had to acquire one, the aim being to “bring the war home and kill the pigs.” 

Newtown is the fruit of liberal-progressive, self-centered hedonism and its effort to push everyone into the socialist cesspool.

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This op-ed article from the December 17, 2012, internet edition of the Wall Street Journal does a good job covering the issue.

Guns, Mental Illness and Newtown
There were 18 random mass shootings in the 1980s, 54 in the 1990s, and 87 in the 2000s.

By DAVID KOPEL

Has the rate of random mass shootings in the United States increased? Over the past 30 years, the answer is definitely yes. It is also true that the total U.S. homicide rate has fallen by over half since 1980, and the gun homicide rate has fallen along with it. Today, Americans are safer from violent crime, including gun homicide, than they have been at any time since the mid-1960s.

Mass shootings, defined as four or more fatalities, fluctuate from year to year, but over the past 30 years there has been no long-term increase or decrease. But “random” mass shootings, such as the horrific crimes last Friday in Newtown, Conn., have increased.

Alan Lankford of the University of Alabama analyzed data from a recent New York Police Department study of “active shooters”—criminals who attempted to murder people in a confined area, where there are lots of people, and who chose at least some victims randomly. Counting only the incidents with at least two casualties, there were 179 such crimes between 1966 and 2010. In the 1980s, there were 18. In the 1990s, there were 54. In the 2000s, there were 87.

If you count only such crimes in which five or more victims were killed, there were six in the 1980s and 19 in the 2000s.

Why the increase? It cannot be because gun-control laws have become more lax. Before the 1968 Gun Control Act, there were almost no federal gun-control laws. The exception was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which set up an extremely severe registration and tax system for automatic weapons and has remained in force for 78 years.

Nor are magazines holding more than 10 rounds something new. They were invented decades ago and have long been standard for many handguns. Police officers carry them for the same reason that civilians do: Especially if a person is attacked by multiple assailants, there is no guarantee that a 10-round magazine will end the assault.

The 1980s were much worse than today in terms of overall violent crime, including gun homicide, but they were much better than today in terms of mass random shootings. The difference wasn’t that the 1980s had tougher controls on so-called “assault weapons.” No assault weapons law existed in the U.S. until California passed a ban in 1989.

Connecticut followed in 1993. None of the guns that the Newtown murderer used was an assault weapon under Connecticut law. This illustrates the uselessness of bans on so-called assault weapons, since those bans concentrate on guns’ cosmetics, such as whether the gun has a bayonet lug, rather than their function.

What some people call “assault weapons” function like every other normal firearm—they fire only one bullet each time the trigger is pressed. Unlike automatics (machine guns), they do not fire continuously as long as the trigger is held. They are “semi-automatic” because they eject the empty shell case and load the next round into the firing chamber.

Today in America, most handguns are semi-automatics, as are many long guns, including the best-selling rifle today, the AR-15, the model used in the Newtown shooting. Some of these guns look like machine guns, but they do not function like machine guns.

Back in the mid-1960s, in most states, an adult could walk into a store and buy an AR-15 rifle, no questions asked. Today, firearms are the most heavily regulated consumer product in the United States. If someone wants to purchase an AR-15 or any other firearm, the store must first get permission for the sale from the FBI or its state counterpart. Permission is denied if the buyer is in one of nine categories of “prohibited persons,” including felons, domestic-violence misdemeanants, and persons who have been adjudicated mentally ill or alcoholic.

Since gun controls today are far stricter than at the time when “active shooters” were rare, what can account for the increase in these shootings? One plausible answer is the media. Cable TV in the 1990s, and the Internet today, greatly magnify the instant celebrity that a mass killer can achieve. We know that many would-be mass killers obsessively study their predecessors.

Loren Coleman’s 2004 book “The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines” shows that the copycat effect is as old as the media itself. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 classic “The Sorrows of Young Werther” triggered a spate of copycat suicides all over Europe. But today the velocity and pervasiveness of the media make the problem much worse.

A second explanation is the deinstitutionalization of the violently mentally ill. A 2000 New York Times study of 100 rampage murderers found that 47 were mentally ill. In the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law (2008), Jason C. Matejkowski and his co-authors reported that 16% of state prisoners who had perpetrated murders were mentally ill.

In the mid-1960s, many of the killings would have been prevented because the severely mentally ill would have been confined and cared for in a state institution. But today, while government at most every level has bloated over the past half-century, mental-health treatment has been decimated. According to a study released in July by the Treatment Advocacy Center, the number of state hospital beds in America per capita has plummeted to 1850 levels, or 14.1 beds per 100,000 people.

Moreover, a 2011 paper by Steven P. Segal at the University of California, Berkeley, “Civil Commitment Law, Mental Health Services, and U.S. Homicide Rates,” found that a third of the state-to-state variation in homicide rates was attributable to the strength or weakness of involuntary civil-commitment laws.

Finally, it must be acknowledged that many of these attacks today unfortunately take place in pretend “gun-free zones,” such as schools, movie theaters and shopping malls. According to Ron Borsch’s study for the Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato, active shooters are different from the gangsters and other street toughs whom a police officer might engage in a gunfight. They are predominantly weaklings and cowards who crumble easily as soon as an armed person shows up.

The problem is that by the time the police arrive, lots of people are already dead. So when armed citizens are on the scene, many lives are saved. The media rarely mention the mass murders that were thwarted by armed citizens at the Shoney’s Restaurant in Anniston, Ala. (1991), the high school in Pearl, Miss. (1997), the middle-school dance in Edinboro, Penn. (1998), and the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo. (2007), among others.

At the Clackamas Mall in Oregon last week, an active shooter murdered two people and then saw that a shopper, who had a handgun carry permit, had drawn a gun and was aiming at him. The murderer’s next shot was to kill himself.

Real gun-free zones are a wonderful idea, but they are only real if they are created by metal detectors backed up by armed guards. Pretend gun-free zones, where law-abiding adults (who pass a fingerprint-based background check and a safety training class) are still disarmed, are magnets for evildoers who know they will be able to murder at will with little threat of being fired upon.

People who are serious about preventing the next Newtown should embrace much greater funding for mental health, strong laws for civil commitment of the violently mentally ill—and stop kidding themselves that pretend gun-free zones will stop killers.

Mr. Kopel is research director of the Independence Institute and co-author of the law school textbook, “Firearms Law and the Second Amendment” (Aspen, 2012).

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Michael Barone gives us an interesting perspective.

The key factor in this split is politicization of education.  Before the 1960s students were taught history, literature, and civics that were little changed since the late 19th century.  Since the convulsions of student radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s, our youth have been taught that the United States is an oppressive nation guilty of crimes against humanity.

As I wrote in The Liberal Jihad: The Hundred Year War Against The Constitution:

The liberal-progressive jihad has been most dangerously consequential in education. Radicalized young students fan out across the country and, in turn, radicalize hundreds more when they become teachers.

Liberals adopted the prescription of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and transformed education from a method of developing character and preserving the traditions of society into a value-free methodology. Teaching history was abandoned, or history was re-written under multi-cultural education, so that students could be radicalized to believe that the United States is an evil nation with a sordid past.

Education is a principal battlefield today and it is also the best hope for restoring and preserving the Constitution.

If our federal republic, under a Constitution of limited powers at the national level, is to survive, balance must be restored in education, from earliest grades through college graduate levels. Teaching faculties must be populated by constitutional traditionalists in at least equal numbers to radical leftists. Curricula and textbooks likewise must be rebalanced to present both sides of the argument between traditionalists and liberal-progressive-socialists. Politically-correct speech and behavior codes must be abolished or restructured to recognize students’ First Amendment rights to express views that oppose liberal-progressive-socialism.

Today, after a century and a half of relentless struggle, the liberal jihad has gained effective control of American education, and it holds major redoubts in the media, politics, and the judiciary. Control of education ensures that an increasingly higher percentage of students will enter adulthood as radicalized converts to the religion of socialism. This means that liberal-progressive-socialists will, within another generation or so, control all key elements of the nation. They will then be free to remove final vestiges of the ethos of individualism that gave birth to the United States in 1776. We will have become a fully socialized nation like France, drifting downward toward third-world status, as our economic productivity and inventiveness are slowly crushed under the regulatory controls required to maintain equality of income and wealth. We will all be poorer, but, in accordance with socialist social justice, equally so.

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