But one scary thing about moral panics is that hardly anybody recognizes them for what they are until everybody finally snaps out of the hysteria.
The panic against weapons and those who use them has been going on at least since the early 1990s (and probably began in the 1960s). My great fear is that a) it’s getting worse and b) it’s infecting the minds of an entire generation, so that the current crop of children and young adult students will arrive “in the real world” with the assumption — implanted by the current hysteria — that weapons themselves are actually evil.
If you’re six years old and your classmate gets suspended for having an inch-long G.I. Joe gun in his backpack, you’re likely to draw a deep-seated conclusion that guns carry some almost-supernatural power to commit atrocities. If, besides that, you have no exposure to real guns for target shooting, hunting, or other sports, and you’re never taught anything about the realities of gun safety, you’re likely to hold onto that superstition as an adult. Even if you eventually realize that your little classmate was a victim of hysteria, the message that guns are eeeeeeevil remains at some level of your unconscious self.
And now that fear of weapons is spreading to tiny pocketknives, table knives, and the epees of fencing clubs.
FK – And this is happening because so-called ‘libertarians,’ and ‘conservatives’ and other supposed anti-authoritarian liberty lovers fail to get in the proper panic about our greatest enemies, or domestic blood enemies, “Liberal” and ‘progressive'(commie) trash who have been working feverishly for decades to kill the Bill of Rights once and for all.