Walter Williams Asks...Are Guns the Problem?

His answer is a big NO! It's the breakdown of moral values, parental authority, and traditions. Here's a snippet from his column:

During the '50s and '60s, the education establishment launched its agenda to undermine lessons children learned from their parents and the church with fads such as "values clarification." So-called sex education classes are simply indoctrination that sought to undermine family and church strictures against premarital sex. Lessons of abstinence were ridiculed and considered passé and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth control pills and abortions. Further undermining of parental authority came with legal and extralegal measures to assist teenage abortions with neither parental knowledge nor consent. 

Customs, traditions, moral values and rules of etiquette, not laws and government regulations,
are what make for a civilized society. 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 importance of customs, traditions and moral values as a means of regulating behavior is that people behave themselves even if nobody's watching. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct so as to produce a civilized society. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society.

So what's the real problem? Liberalism. Let me give you liberalism's principles taken from the book Liberalism is a Sin:

1. The absolute sovereignty of the individual in his entire independence of God and God's authority.
2.  The absolute sovereignty of society in its entire independence of everything which does not proceed from itself.
3.  Absolute civil sovereignty in the implied right of the people to make their own laws in entire independence and utter disregard of any other criterion than the popular will expressed at the polls and in parliamentary majorities.
4. Absolute freedom of thought in politics, morals, or in religion. The unrestrained liberty of the press.

Sound familiar? Here are some examples illustrating liberalism's ugly outcomes:

Point 1 - Liberal feminists scream scream at pro-lifers to "Keep your rosaries off our ovaries?" Homosexual activists blaspheme God at pride parades and demand the "civil right" to equate anal sex with marital intercourse. 

Point 2 - Obamacare and the HHS mandate which usurp the consciences of people of faith. This is government as god. 

Point 3 - Does anyone consider the principle of "natural law" anymore? The Founders based the Constitution on its principles. Cicero, a pagan Roman, recognized it when he said, “True Law is right reason in agreement with nature (God, the Supreme Being); it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions …. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to repeal any part of it ….” 

Point 4 - Absolute freedom of thought can be seen in the atrocities of recent history. Hitler imagined a race of supermen and created a propaganda and extermination machine to help bring it about. Lenin and Stalin thought up a political system that attacked and murdered the middle class (the bourgeoisie) and made the state all powerful. Mao and Pol Pot also imagined the state as god and annihilated millions of their own people.

No, the problem is not too many guns, but too little virtue and an immoral government based on godless, ugly liberalism that reduces the individual to a meaningless cog in the state machine.