Jacques Barzun is dead. He died late last year at age 104 and his family’s loss is barely greater than our loss. Barzun is one of my heroes and has been that since about 1970 when I first heard of him. His was a gigantic intellect and no one can fail to appreciate his writings if one takes the trouble. His grandson Charles has found a perfect way to communicate with Barzun even now. The letter is both a touching tribute and a profound wisdom essay. Please read it all. I am very grateful to BARRY FISH for forwarding it to me.

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Letter-to-My-Grandfather/139117/

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I am filing this post in the archives under “education,” “everything,” “language,” “love,” “personalities,” and “philosophy.”

I just don’t know whether I will publish anything else this year of equal importance.

1. I am 14-years old, Don Kagan is 16-years old. He is about 18 months older than I. We are standing around outside the community center playground of the H.E.S. [Hebrew Educational Society], with our mentor, Adolf Dembo. Adolf is holding forth, as he often does, on a variety of good topics and suddenly he asks, “What is the purpose of education?” Fortunately, he is looking at Don, sparing me some embarrassment. Immediately, Don fires back, “To teach us to think.” Of course! Why couldn’t I think of that? Had I been forced to give a response, I might have come close: “To teach us how to think.” It doesn’t matter now. The lesson was learned.

2. In that same year, 1948, an election for president is being held. Herky says to me, “Let’s go over to 156. Norman Thomas is giving a speech later today.”
I have no idea who Norman Thomas is but I trust Herky who, like Don, is about 18 months older than I am. So, I go. It becomes a transforming moment in my life. After listening to Thomas, I am forever off the FDR bandwagon. The truth of socialism is irresistable. I am still a Norman Thomas socialist.

3. I am now in my junior year in high school. Our history teacher, Mr. Rogoff, is speaking earnestly about something or other. He notices a student who is scribbling furiously, taking down every word he offers. Rogoff stops his lecture and asks, “What are you doing?” The student replies, “Taking notes on what you say.” Rogoff is clearly astonished. After a pause of perhaps five to ten seconds, he says matter-of-factly, “But why? I am only a fourth rate scholar.” I AM IN LOVE! Rogoff opens up a world to me, not because he is learned (even though he is), but he shows me that to be learned requires no ostentatious display of superiority. Never before had any teacher laid it out so clearly. I think that one day I will be a teacher, too.

4. I am now a senior. I am walking along with the self-declared genius of our neighborhood, Robert Rosen. I am making a speech before this audience of one. I tell Robert that William Faulkner is a genius. Robert almost falls down from laughter. “What would you know about genius? Have you read Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason?” “Not yet,” I meekly reply. I don’t have the guts to say I have never heard of the guy. Sometime that week I go to Brownsville’s renowned Children’s Library and find a copy of A.K. Rogers’ A Student’s History of Philosophy. Oh, my god! This is the real stuff. When I enter Brooklyn College in the fall, I declare philosophy to be my major.

Technical explanations of the cost of a college education are well beyond my expertise but I am sure I understand at least a part of the story.

There are 371,164 persons on college campuses across the land. They are well paid because 31.7% of them are professors, 27.4% are associate professors, 25.1% are assistant professors and only 6.6% fill the low rank of instructor. 7.4% are lecturers and something called “No rank” make up the remaining 1.8%.

At so-called Category I colleges, average salary is $96,686 and the benefit package another $27,936. The latter refers to retirement contribution, medical insurance, disability income protection, social security, unemployment insurance, group life insurance, workers’ compensation premiums, tuition waivers for faculty dependents and, wherever required, moving expenses, housing, parking privileges, and cafeteria plans. Of course not all universities provide all of these and some provide very few of them. Still, we are concerned with averages. The total average compensation equals $124,924.

Dropping all the way down to Category IV, faculty in the above mentioned “no rank”, have salaries that average $62,523 and the benefit packages are, on average, $21,283. This is not bad at all, especially when you consider that professors make up 31.7% of all the faculty and Category IV “no rankers” comprise a mere 1.8% of the whole shebang. Associate professors across the categories (average compensation equals $93,105) are 29.2% of all faculty. So I believe they, along with their Big Brothers, the professors, (also called “full professors”), make a substantial impact on the cost of education. Thank goodness that each college has only one president or the economy would be bankrupt. (The distinction between “college” and “university” shrinks each year simply because more and more colleges prefer the prestigious label.) At Category I public colleges/universities, median salary for presidents is $400,000 and some of them top out over $1,100,000. Oddly, top salaries at Category IIA colleges where students earn only Master’s degrees, not Ph.D. degrees, some presidents reach ionospheric $1,680,000, challenging the football and basketball coaches as Big Guy On Campus.

What do presidents do to earn this kind of paycheck? The question has a built-in bias because it uses the word “earn” rather than “receive.” From the way the question is actually framed, the answer is obvious – NOT MUCH. The Peter Principle applies: “Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence.” No place exemplifies this idea better than our “institutions of higher learning.”

For the longest time now, I have defended Harvard as at least equal in quality to the 3rd rate land grant colleges in the South. Perhaps i rushed to judgment, perhaps I did not consider enough factors. I certainly overlooked the fact that undergraduates at Harvard are mainly a bunch of crooks.

Considering how small the undergraduate school of Arts and Sciences is – 6400 students – [Most of Harvardians are in Graduate schools, the Medical College, the Law College and a half dozen other specialities], the discovery that 125 undergraduates cheated on a single take-home exam in a course titled Government 1310 is a bit disappointing. That is about 2.0% of the whole undergraduate body. My guess is that this means 200 students cheated on this exam but were not caught. What of other courses? Who knows? But my guess is that about 90-95% of all Harvard undergraduates are cheats. The Harvard Administrative Board is penalizing half the cheaters by forcing them to withdraw for two semesters. The other half will be on “disciplinary probation” and this is being called “a strong warning” that will be part of a student’s official record and a way of letting the world know this kind of behavior will not be tolerated.

Of course, this penalty is a warning to the world that cheating will forever be permitted at Harvard. The dean’s remark that this will be a “teachable, if difficult, moment for students” will be regarded by students as a funny endorsement of their ways. To make the matter funnier, Harvard announced that an investigation is underway. The dean further said “Harvard is looking at several ways to strengthen academic integrity.” Hilarity piled on hilarity.

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Harvard Fight Song – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR1YIb1F2Mk

Movie goers will recognize and grin on recalling the above line as spoken by Louie (played by Claude Rains) in the film, CASABLANCA. Claude was ably supported in small roles by Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Dooley Wilson and, probably, Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart, if you care to call the crap of the latter two “support.” Louie was expressing fake dismay upon learning Rick’s Café (owned by Humph), permitted gambling. I especially liked Dooley because he played the House Nigger who tickles the ivories while singing his signature song. [Link provided below.]

But of course I digress. This post is all about the shock I felt upon learning that “a large number of Belgium’s future secondary school teachers struggle with basic concepts of geography, politics and history.” Who’da thunk it?

Among final year teaching students involved in the study, one in three could not identify the United States on a map and almost half did not know where the Pacific Ocean was. [Okay, I'll bite. Where the flickendoodle is it?]

Shown a picture of Mao Zedong, two in three could not recognize the Chinese Communist leader, with the most common response being that it was the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. [Give those kids a score of 98%.]

Researchers at the Limburg Catholic University College tested 1,000 students in eight teacher training colleges in Belgium’s Flemish region. [Give them slack - after all, they're not Jews.]

When asked which political ideology stood for the redistribution of wealth, higher taxes and state involvement only one in two answered socialism. [The other half got it right, I suppose: redistribute by stealing - the old fashioned way, according to Smith Barney.]

Students who followed the news and read newspapers scored better in the test than those who said they did not, the study director said. [This strains credulity. What are those flickendoodle newspapers? I'd like to subscribe.]

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Play it, Dooley, play it with all your subservient boot-lickin’ soul. And pass the watermelon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=d22CiKMPpaY

A gentleman wrote to ask me to confirm the accuracy of a rule he learned by somebody who bills herself as THE GRAMMAR MONSTER. I am sorry to say the monster blundered.

The query from my friend: Is this site correct? http://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/an_or_a.htm.

The monster advised: TREAT ACRONYMS LIKE WORDS NOT ABBREVIATIONS

She said, ‘An acronym is an abbreviation that is spoken like a word, e.g., BUPA, FOD, FEDEX. Therefore, as the first sound of FEDEX is ‘f’, use a and not an.” The monster offered two examples. (1) Tim worked in the air industry as a FOD inspector for a year. (2) Jack was a FEDEX courier. The monster got lucky with the second example but blundered on the first.

The “Grammar monster” does not seem to know the difference between initialisms and acronyms. Initialisms are sounded letter by letter as, for example, “r.p.m.” “Radar” is an acronym , as we all know, and obeys a different rule than applies to “r.p.m.” “Your phonograph has AN r.p.m. problem” but “A radar system is nice to have.” “r.p.m.” but not “radar” is an initialism. In any case, when the consonant is introduced with a vowel sound as in “an r.p.m” one uses “an” but when it is introduced with the full consonant sound as in “a DVD player” one must pay attention to the different sound. So, “a FEDEX package” because FEDEX is an acronym but “Your phono has an r.p.m. problem,” because “r.p.m.” is an initialism sounded letter-by-letter. The grammarian monster needs to study with Sidney Gendin.

What made learning grammar oppressive is that we learned it mainly as it applied to foreign languages. We learned such things as the past perfect, the subjunctive and the various inflections only as our teachers thought they were aids to learning the basics of German, French, Spanish or Swahili. Of course, today, even as we know such things are nonsense we are still in their grip. For example, I know people who swear up and down that their splendid command of English has something to do with their having learned some Latin. They think this because they detect Latin roots in many English words. Actually, they overlook the obvious: it is not their knowledge of Latin that helps them decode the meanings of English words but, rather, it is their fine grasp of English that enables them to make sense of Latin. Nor does anybody speak well because he knows the rules that govern the use of the subjunctive. It just doesn’t work that way and in our sane moments we recognize that. Nevertheless, complex rules of grammar are sometimes trotted out to prove a point about grammar. My wife is a whiz at this. When we disagree about some fine point of English, she calls up a grammar rule that puts me in my place — at the back of the line. This dazzling performance does not show how she learned good English. I don’t doubt for a second that it is nice to prove a point by appeal to a recondite rule. I know, however, she does not prepare sentences by first testing them out via rules. She simply speaks or writes and her considerable success at doing these things well never derived from rules. Good speech came first; justificatory rules came later. She had a flashlight like most eight year old girls had, and hid her books under the covers when her mother said, “Lights out; go to sleep.” It was the flashlights, not the rules that were her enablers. Why doesn’t she know that? Her English is good but her memory is shot to hell.

Here is what you get if you rely on rules: “The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb.” Huh? Say that again. Having just read that, do you feel your power over words has grown? Well, try this for cheating’s sake: “In Proto-Indo-European languages two cases mark objects, the accusative and the partitive case. In morphosyntactic alignment terms, both perform the accusative function, but the accusative object is telic, while the partitive is not.” Gulp. Okay, now we’re getting some place. I ain’t never gonna say nothin’ to nobody that give me away as a nothin’. Morphosyntactic alignment is the way to go.

My German teacher taught me endings that were useful for separating the accusative case from the dative, the genitive and the nominative. I am extremely grateful. How could I write these sentences if I didn’t know this stuff? In truth, to stop being a wise guy for a moment, I do know this stuff but I know, too, this is just a freaky aspect of who I am and has nothing whatsoever to do with how well or badly I write.

I’ve said it before and I guess I’ll say it again and again. The main reason to learn to write and speak well has little to do with the usefulness of it all. Reading good writing is a source of pleasure, and not much more than that. [Is there really much more than that?] You’ll never persuade me that the kid in my introduction to philosophy class who writes “We study something called eppistomology to figure out what we know and stuff like that. I kinda like it,” is off to worse start than the student who begins with, “Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. I am intrigued by this and hope the class will fulfill my expectations.” I get it in both cases.

The great Ba’al Shem Tov holds court:
A man knocks on the door of the Rabbi. “I’ve come to you because I wish to study Talmud/Gemara.”
He says, “I have a Ph.D. from Harvard and wrote my dissertation on logic. I think I’m ready.”
The Ba’al Shem Tov decides to test the man to see if he is ready for such study.

The rabbi begins his questioning, “If two men come down a chimney and one emerges dirty and the other clean, which one will wash himself?” Confused by the simplicity of the question, the man answered, “That’s obvious, the dirty man will wash himself.”

The rabbi replies, “Why would the one with the dirty face wash his face if he looks at his friend with the clean face and thinks his face is clean as well so he doesn’t bother washing his face. On the other hand, the one with the clean face looks at his friend with the dirty face and thinks his face is dirty. So the one with the clean face goes to wash his face.”

The Harvard man is thrilled with this example of Talmudic wisdom and says, “I knew I was right to come here to study with you.”

The rabbi says, “Not so fast. Let’s try again. Two men come down a chimney. One comes out with a clean face, the other come out with a dirty face. Which one washes his face?”

Thinking he already knows the answer, the Harvard man says, “I know that! You just told me! The man who is clean sees his friend who is dirty, thinking that he is dirty too, he washes his face because he thinks he is dirty, while the man with the dirty face sees his friend with the clean face, so he doesn’t bother, because he assumes that his face is clean.”

The Ba’al Shem Tov is getting a little depressed by these answers. He says, “Don’t you realize that the one with the dirty face looks at his friend with the clean face and thinks his face is clean so at first he doesn’t wash his face. While the one with the clean face looks at his friend with the dirty face and thinks his face is dirty. So the one with the clean face washes his face. When the one with the dirty face sees the one with the clean face washing his face, he asks what he’s doing, to which his friend answers that he saw the dirty mans face and assumed that his face was dirty as well, at which point the friend with the dirty face realizes that his face is dirty, so he also washes his face. So each one ends up washing his face.”

The genius from Harvard nows says, “The Torah is amazing in its logic. I’m begging you Rabbi, please teach me Torah!”

The great rabbi says, “I’ll give you one more shot. You still don’t seem to get it. Tell me, “How is it possible for two men to come down the same chimney, and for one’s face to get dirty, while the other’s face stayed clean?”

The Harvard genius does not know so the rabbi says, “Your fellow chimney traveler is your mirror. If your own face is clean, the image you perceive will also be flawless. But should you look upon your fellow man and see a blemish, it is your own imperfection that you are encountering — you are being shown what it is that you must correct within yourself. When you meet a stranger you have a tendency to criticize his way of life. The Yiddish journey through life is long and hard. Still, if one tries the journey, in the end he finds it rewarding.”

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The Chimney Sweepers and Chimneys Regulation Act 1840 [England] made it illegal for anyone under the age of 21 to sweep chimneys. The 1840 Act was widely ignored, attempts were made in 1852 and 1853 to reopen the issue, another enquiry was convened and more evidence was taken. There was no bill. The Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act 1864, c37. tightened controls significantly, by authorising fines and imprisonment for master sweeps who were ignoring the law, giving the police the power of arrest on suspicion and authorising Board of Trade inspections of new and remodelled chimneys. Lord Shaftesbury was a main proponent of the Bill.

In February 1875 a twelve-year-old boy, George Brewster, was sent up the Fulbourn Hospital chimneys by his master, William Wyer. He stuck and smothered. The entire wall had to be pulled down to get him out and although he was still alive, he died shortly afterwards. There was a Coroner’s Inquest which returned a verdict of manslaughter. Wyer was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour. Lord Shaftesbury seized on the incident to press his campaign again. He wrote a series of letters to The Times and in September 1875 pushed another Bill through Parliament which finally stopped the practice of sending boys up chimneys.

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Here’s Dick van Dyke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te_Nv3lMUnA

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Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer, often called Baal Shem Tov or Besht, was a Jewish mystical rabbi. He is considered to be the founder of Hasidic Judaism. He died about 1760.

The slaughter of young children is nothing anybody can make a joke about. But the solutions to the violence are hilariously off the mark.
The professional Liberals at MSNBC, Current, and the NY Times don’t want civilians to be armed. Instead they want two things, one of which is fine with me – get rid of assault weapons (that will reduce violence by at least 4%) and the second – allow the police to do their job of protecting us. We don’t need to review the statistics concerning the first suggestion because I have gone over that often enough.

I have also written about the second of these “solutions.” I have pointed out that the courts have ruled it is not a legal obligation of the police to protect us. Look it up; don’t make me repeat it. But summarily, it is this: the job of the police is twofold: (a) by their presence to deter and (b) to catch the bad guys after the fact. They are not in the business of coming to the rescue. Deterrence via presence can be provided by any group trained for that purpose – the private protection organizations as advocated by Robert Nozick. We have statistical evidence that people who own guns only for the sake of protection and who hate hunting are less likely, as a group, than unarmed civilians to commit violence – sorry to shock you but that is how it is. We have statistical evidence that people who protect themselves are safer than people who don’t protect themselves.

But forget all that. Where have you been since about 1877, the year of the mass murder by police of railroad strikers? For the last 135 years, police have killed more people per year than any criminal gang. Have you ever been to the movies? Do you really think that all that police violence, brutality and corruption is fiction, bordering on fantasy? It is NOT. Let me bore you with facts and figures.

1. The good news is that the worst of police brutality occurs in other countries. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet until you get to South Africa. I will confine myself to the sordid story of the USA. I will further confine it to events since 1960 and not trace the true and total history. Much of the violence is not by police but military people but if you think that matters, you are entitled to your qualms.
2. 4 May 1970: The Kent State shootings — also known as the May 4 massacre or the Kent State massacre — occurred at Kent State University in the U.S. city of Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.
3. Forty-three people killed by police in 1967 in Detroit in a single episode that caused damage to the city that lasted for years.
4. Denver, Colorado. 2011. Three police killed an unarmed man. Such incidents are actually commonplace.
5. Rodney King. 6. Literally (I use the word “literally” in the unconventional sense nowadays to mean literally) thousands of beatings each year by police, mostly visited upon black people. Quadriplegics and paraplegics are frequently victimized. Read the newspapers.
7. For the most recent year, 2012, police committed 531 unjustifiable homicides. Compare that to the Connecticut massacre.
8. The Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, informally known as the Christopher Commission, was formed in April 1991, in the wake of the Rodney King beating, by then-mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley. It was chaired by attorney Warren Christopher (who later became U.S. Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton). “The commission was created to conduct ‘a full and fair examination of the structure and operation of the LAPD, including its recruitment and training practices, internal disciplinary system, and citizen complaint system.” However, with the election of Richard Riordan, these reforms were put on hold. The Commission report says that the failure to control police who persistently ignore written guidelines is “the heart of the problem.” Go back and review the Knapp Commission findings, too.
9. Frank Serpico earmarked for assassination because he was an honest cop. You all know the story. All of it true.
10. The Christopher Commission found that only 2% of 2152 “excessive force” complaints (1986-1990) were thoroughly investigated. The Commission report says, “Ugly incidents will not diminish until ranking officers know they will be held responsible for what happens in their sector, whether or not they personally participate.” This is NEVER, NEVER going to happen.
11. I grew up in the officially worst section of America – Brownsville – and witnessed more unprovoked attacks on decent people than you can imagine. I have seen almost as many Gays bashed by homophobes and cops as my son, Stephen, witnessed. Read STREET JUSTICE by Marilynn S. Johnson and permit yourself to be sickened. Give up listening to news on the vile propaganda outlet of thinly disguised capitalism that is promoted by MSNBC. The TV “journalists” [sic] are a bunch of unknowing, unrealizing sycophants of the cops, politicians and corporate structure even though they think they are our defenders. The attacks on Wayne LaPierre and the rest of his horde at the NRA are stupid well beyond your understanding. Every dope from the black guy in the White House down to the merely moronic people in Congress who proudly declare themselves not opposed to the good old American sport of hunting ought to be shot. DEAD. Hunting violence begets human violence. Read your Mahatma Gandhi, for Pete’s sake. If you want to put the wisdom of Obama against the wisdom of Gandhi, then you are a certifiable lunatic. I will take no place in line behind people who hate guns. I hate them more than you do. I hate starters’ pistols at track meets, target guns in your back yard, paint guns you allow your children to play with. They all play a part in making this a mad world. You play your part, too, if you refuse to see things for what they are.

12. COPS ARE THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.

Their main purpose in life is to make us unhappy [when they are not drunk and beating up their own spouses.] There is not one iota of exaggeration in anything I write. I am interested only in unvarnished truth.
13. There are partial solutions for the sick violence in America but it cannot be halted altogether without moving to an Orwellian world. Don’t dream. Act. I can tell you what to do if you are really interested. I doubt you are. Better to eat a ham on Thanksgiving. Better to complain in a high-minded, self-righteous way against murderous Jews in Israel. Better to tell me my posts are facetious. I am the most serious man who ever lived. Do you want to get started? Send me a private message and learn GOODNESS. As Frank Szymanski, the great Notre Dame footballer of the 1940s, said “Coach, I could have said I am not the greatest player who ever lived but I was under oath.” ME, TOO, FRANK.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y2SIIeqy34

I promised myself not to participate in the poorly named “gun debate.” However, I cant help adding a few words.

There is a conscious conspiracy of lowgrade propaganda against John R. Lott and Wayne LaPierre, the two chief exponents of the value of fire arms. TV broadcasters gather round a table to excoriate both of them as liars, stupid, bent-on-evil, money grubbers and they have a few bad things to say about this redoubtable duo, too. LaPierre’s proposals are said to go against everything America believes, and ignorant, non-empirically inclined pundits succeed only in proving their own incompetence.

Lapierre and Lott believe guns should be in the hands of as many competent weapons carriers as possible. They would flood the schools with private armies of defenders. They have little faith in the police to protect us. They blame crime mainly on a culture of violence taught to our children via video games and TV shows that ought to be locked out by responsible parents. Some of their claims go unaddressed and some are laughed at as not worthy of being addressed.

Statistics do not interest the critics. Heart-breaking stories of children being slaughtered is what matters to them. They locate the problem for the madness at the gun shows and the easy access with which bad guys and the mentally defective can obtain guns without going through security checks. “Assault weapon” is on all their lips. Who needs them, etc.? Respectable deer hunters get by very well without them, ad nauseum.

All our efforts to battle violence are misdirected. The random acts of crazy people have been with us forever and they are only the tip of the iceberg. They fascinate because they fascinate. Violent criminals, members of drug gangs, the mafia and even casual street robberies are not enabled by access to military-style automatic weapons (whose firing power is no more rapid or powerful that the standard guns of gangsters). The facts are these: Fewer than 8% of all violent crime is committed by the weapons that the Liberals are screaming to have banned. Moreover, they account for under 1% of all the murders. Winning friends and influencing people is the sole strategy of the professional Liberal. And with evidence to the contrary staring him in the face, he thinks that we should entrust our safety and security to police – a subculture of villains that out performs in horror any of our gangs and who have no legal obligation to come to our rescue. They have a dual purpose: (a) to deter, by means of their presence; (b) to capture, after the fact. The history of plant Earth proves they are not very good at either.

The theory of the Liberals is that if you give private citizens access to guns ONLY after all the usual safeguards are in place, mental health checkups, crime records, a ban on gun shows, training with weapons, and all the rest, crime will drop dramatically due to one thing and one thing only:sane citizenry. Better yet, the Liberal thinks, keep guns in the hands of the police. People with guns occasionally get angry. So we need to end that. Of course, this happens but cannot this “shrewd observation” be tempered with a bit of research? Research shows that people who own guns for self-protection are less likely to acts of violence than other citizens. Research indicates indicates that criminals who invade homes they discover to be protected by the inhabitants are much less likely to follow through. Prison inmates, by a wide margin,say they are far more frightened by private citizens with guns than they are by police. This shouldn’t be replied with, “I don’t believe it.” Search the data. Much more crime is deterred by ordinary armed citizens than by the combined police forces throughout America.

But the children! They take a gun from the unsealed lock box of Daddy and blow bullets in the faces of 10-month old sisters and brothers. This has got to stop! And a very good idea that is, indeed, but it won’t be stopped by the preposterous call on all of us to surrender our guns. Criminals would only be too delighted for the rest of us to go unarmed, praying for delivery from police. Take a look at the Federal Register to learn how few tragedies are caused by the blunder of allowing young children access to guns.

LaPierre is right – we need to stop crime at the ground floor. Teaching teenagers not to use guns is like teaching them not to experiment with marijuana. Not introducing toy bazookas into their repertory of things to play with would go much farther as a technique for gun control. As long as we keep victimizing ourselves with preposterous worries of a nation going berserk with its weapons, as a nation whose children will be lucky to reach 8-years of age, as long we refuse to do the research and merely spend our time attacking LaPierre and others of his ilk, we are going to be in for tragedies for a long, long time. As long as we are resolved to suppose that the deaths of 20 children deserves daily sobbing, shrieking and hair-pulling whereas the negligent, preventable deaths of 100,000 people in hospitals each year is just one of those things to shrug off with, “Well don’t blame me, Dear. You just put up the kettle and we’ll have a nice cup of hot teas,” this country is going to hell in a hand basket.