WONDERFUL, WONDERFUL – AT 1:43 P.M. ET:   One of the best essays I've seen recently, written by the distinguished African-American economist, Walter Williams.  It is good to see a scholar with an appreciation of the good things in America's past.  From dailywire.com: 

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. 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.

COMMENT:  By all means read the whole thing.  There's much here I didn't know.  No one is claiming that everything was better in the good old days.  We've improved in some areas.  But some things were better, including adherence to standards of behavior.  We have to be honest and determine what has gone wrong, and then we must correct it.  But how can we do that when one of our two political parties won't admit there's a problem in the first place?

June 10, 2018