A Better Time
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 9 months ago
As I write these words, a reproduction of the 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalogue, published in 1968 by Chelsea House, sits at my elbow.
The fat catalog is a casual reader’s delight and a historian’s treasure trove. Here are medicines like laudanum, herb tea, and castor oil. Here are tools, bobsleds, gasoline stoves, windmills, bicycles, clothing and footwear, valises, books, clocks and watches, fountain pens, banjos and snare drums, furniture and cutlery, buggies and wagons. (The price of most surreys is under $100, a belt is fifty cents, a child’s high chair a dollar, a ball room guide for gentlemen twenty-five cents.)
And in the Sporting Goods Department we find 28 pages of guns, ammunition, and accessories.
Here we have weapons ranging from the Daisy Air Rifle to “Our $1.55 Revolver,” from shotguns for $7.95 to Marlin Repeating Rifles. Sears, Roebuck & Company also sold ammunition, pistol holders, reloading tools, and cleaners for these weapons.
No one was monitoring these sales. The government had no part in regulation. No one conducted background checks on the buyers. Indeed, Sears brags that it is “the headquarter for everything in guns,” that their prices are below all others, and that “we will send any revolver to any address.”
Yikes, right? Even a common laborer, for three or four days wages, could order a Saturday night special from Sears. With guns and ammo so easily available, we might guess that the streets of every American city and town were running red with blood every day of the week. Mass murder surely occurred on a weekly basis. Assassination and terrorist attacks must have happened so regularly that no one blinked an eye.
We might guess so, but we would be wrong.
In 1900, the number of murders and “non-negligent homicides” in the United States was approximately 1 in every 100,000 inhabitants (This figure and the others in this paragraph include all murders, not just those by firearms.) In 1980, that figure was close to 11 murders per 100,000 people. Since then, that figure has declined to between 4 and 5 murders per 100,000. (For a deeper analysis, see here.) Bear in mind too that unlike today, a gunshot wound in 1900 frequently resulted in death.
These statistics contrasted with the easy availability of guns should raise some questions. Why in 1900, when firearms were so readily accessible, were murders so infrequent? Why are murders today quadruple what they were in 1900? Based on what gun-control activists tell us, shouldn’t we expect the exact opposite?
He has his answers, but in my opinion they are all connected and symptomatic of the higher order issue, which we all know as a rejection of God and His law. It’s a cultural issue, not one of hardware.
On March 10, 2020 at 8:16 am, penses said:
“…a rejection of God and His law.”
Amen.
“When man quits believing in God, he doesn’t believe nothing, he believes in anything.”
Nostalgia is pagan. It is also tragic in that it is self gratification, which is just another atheistic dead end. Until Job shook his longing for what was, he was in pain and torment. When he let go of the past and let God’s will be done, he once again became a man. Joy and fulfillment ensued.
Self gratification reached its apogee with the atheist dictatorships of the 20th century. Two hundred million lives were just the down payment on a bureaucratic better world that was to come in the future. If wishes were fish, we would all cast nets and socialism would work.
Christianity is a code that stands above any law. It is a barrier to prevent men from becoming gods and corrupting society. In the words of H. G. Wells, who was an atheistic revolutionary optimist who ended his own life in utter hopelessness at the consequences of his own atheism, in a world without God “there is no out or around, or through the impasse. It is the end.”
“Thomas Jefferson, though a Deist, could write in the Declaration of Independence that, ‘all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights’ because biblical thinking underlay the fabric of the society in which he came to maturity.
“People fail to appreciate the worth of [Western] society’s Christian underpinnings because they unconscious recipients of its blessings. The most vigorous atheist in the West has grown up in a world in which love and justice are ideals. But such ideas have no objective reference outside of the biblical accounts. That is why the old question about whether civilized man can be a believer is the wrong one. The real question is whether unbelieving man can be civilized.”
When David’s first child by Bathsheba became ill, David fasted and prayed. He didn’t bathe or change clothes while the child sickened and eventually died. After the child’s death David called his servants and told them to prepare a bath, fresh clothes and food. His servants were shocked. They asked him, aren’t you going to morn for the child. David told them that while the baby was alive he prayed and fasted hoping God would spare the child. David told them, the child is no longer alive, it is in God’s hands now.
Reminiscing is something everyone should do on a regular basis, in order to develop, hone and improve the capabilities and skills on lessons learned in the past. Nostalgia is just the opposite. It is a lament, a distraction that pulls you away from reality and God. Idle hands are the devils workshop.
On March 10, 2020 at 9:25 am, Mark Matis said:
The copyright on that Sears catalog should still be valid. Is it an authorized reproduction? Or has some ne’er-do-well illegally usurped the right???
On March 10, 2020 at 10:01 am, dad29 said:
It’s a cultural issue
Yup.
Thus, the results of the 11/20 election will be a tell on the direction of the country. I know that you have serious reservations about Trump (and I disagree with some of his actions, too), but the opposition party’s cult is near-diametrically opposed to the general direction taken by Trump–even if that’s merely posturing.