School Shootings and Other Ills of 60s Dogmas

Thomas Sowell recently wrote an article at National Review in which he points out that school shootings are an outcropping of the 60's. Prior to the 60's these types of things were virtually unheard of. So what changed in the 1960s that led to these kinds of tragedies?

Sowell places blame squarely on collective guilt and a subsequent lack of personal responsibility.

What was there in the 1960s vision of the world that could possibly lead anyone to consider it right to shoot at individuals who had done nothing to him?

Collective guilt is one of the legacies of the 1960s that is still with us. We are still seeing a guilt trip for slavery being laid on people who never owned a slave in their lives, and who would be repelled by the very idea of owning a slave.

Back in the 1960s, it was considered Deep Stuff among the intelligentsia to say that American society — all of us collectively — were somehow responsible for the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King.

During the 1960s, the idea spread like wildfire that whatever you were lacking was someone else’s fault — society’s fault. If you were poor, whether at home or in some third-world country, you were one of the “dispossessed” — even if you had never possessed anything to dispossess you of.

Pretty Deep Stuff indeed. But it makes sense. A lot of sense. Cho, the VA Tech shooter, didn't personally know the people he was shooting, but it seems they represented an element of society he blamed for his problems. Sounds very familiar. While not many folks would go to the lengths Cho did, there are vast numbers of people who see the world precisely how he did. Their problems have nothing to do with anything of their own doing; society or some faction thereof is to blame. And there's danger in that kind of thinking - and potential for violence. People get angry - even hateful - when they believe that society or some collective is causing their problems.

If other people are somehow responsible for whatever is lacking in your life, lashing out at random against individuals who have done nothing to you personally can sound plausible to many people.

Sowell's article is a good read and I suggest you visit the link and read the rest. It's short but well worth the time.


Blaming others for your problems is quite convenient. But it takes away from your own personal responsibility of dealing with them. Now it becomes an issue of getting others to fix your problems for you instead of doing something to fix them yourself. It leads to frustration which leads to anger and in the right human being it becomes a recipe for violence. As we've seen several times over going back to the urban riots of the 60s.