Making Our Streets Safer

Boston, MA:

Late Monday afternoon, a courageous woman confronted her sub machine gun-toting attacker and disarmed him before he could fire a shot. She then held him until authorities could arrive.

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But the authorities didn’t arrive. The woman stomped off with the weeping attacker in her arms as she said in angry tones, “I tried to tell you nicely! I don’t like those things in my car!” The unhappiness of a toddler seems a small price to pay for the strong intolerance we all must show for resort to violence.

This is the sort of nonsense that passes for politically correct morality these days. It’s nonsense precisely because violence has legitimate uses in society—or we wouldn’t tolerate the holsters that complement police officer uniforms. Instead of forbidding guns, why not make the effort to thoughtfully address the ugly things we find in every human heart?

The answer, I think, is one that ought to make us ashamed of the culture we’ve developed. Our public philosophy is built around the single imperative to be “non-judgmental,” so there is no socially acceptable way to address matters of the heart. The only permissible means of altering behavior are external, so we ban guns and take the plastic ones away from toddlers. Similar thoughts have led us also to frustrate parents’ attempts to mold children’s moral sense. We have declared that spanking and all other forms of corporal punishment are species of the violence we make such a self-righteous show of abhorring. But there is no malice in spanking, as there is in assault, rape, and murder.

The unspoken, and perhaps unimagined, purpose behind this external view and symptom-focused solution to violence is to make an internal morality superfluous and unnecessary. It seems to me that our world is desperate to cling to the belief that man is inherently blameless and good, even if we must put him in chains to prove it. What madness is this?

Is it not more noble to believe that the human being ought to learn self-control and moral goodness in order to be a steward of his physical freedom?

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