Are Guns Really the Problem?

Professor Walter E. Williams doesn’t think so. “When I attended primary and secondary school — during the 1940s and ‘50s — one didn’t hear of the kind of shooting mayhem that’s become routine today. Why? It surely wasn’t because of strict firearm laws. My replica of the 1902 Sears mail-order catalog shows 35 pages of firearm advertisements. People just sent in their money, and a firearm was shipped. Dr. John Lott, author of ‘More Guns, Less Crime,’ reports that until the 1960s, some New York City public high schools had shooting clubs where students competed in citywide shooting contests for university scholarships. They carried their rifles to school on the subways and, upon arrival, turned them over to their homeroom teacher or the gym coach and retrieved their rifles 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 sometimes storing their rifles in the trunks of their cars that were parked on school grounds. Often a youngster’s 12th or 14th birthday present was a shiny new .22-caliber rifle, given to him by his father.” But today, liberals are so frightened of guns in ANYBODY’S hands (except cops or government agents) that they don’t want guns anywhere NEAR a school, so they make ALL schools “no-gun zones,” which ASSURES that one day a “crazy” will come to a school and shoot it up because he knows there will be NO GUNS there to oppose him, or if there are, they will be in the hands of a uniformed cop who can be located and killed FIRST. That’s why school shootings have become so “routine” these days. (Walter E. Williams)