Flat and VX are right. After all, it was a young person that did make the call to the police. Read up on the story and you’ll see how the good people in Richmond walk in fear everyday. This will not make things better there.

A nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its laws made by cowards and its wars fought by fools

As a libertarian, generally, the draft is something I’m pre-disposed to be against unless it be completely necessary, but at times I fear we are becoming just such a nation as Thucydides warned against. Jefferson wanted military service to be a pre-requisite for a college degree IIRC but I might be wrong. Either way I’m now beginning to believe the idea has some merit.

On the same notion as society resting on the knife’s edge at all times is Mark Steyn’s take on the “hovering roof” philosophy of the left. That is if you remove all pillars of our civilization like the sanctity of the nuclear family, Judeo-Christian moral values, constitutionally restrained government that may not “help” when it has the power to do so because it will then have the power and license to do whatever else the imperfect whims of its all too human leaders want it to do, etc. then the roof of our freedom and prosperity will just continue to hover in place even though it’s now held up by libertine personal values (or lack thereof) and an all intrusive nanny state that “takes care” of your every need and divorces you from the responsibility for yourself and your actions.

Guess you are only allowed to speak truth to select groups at select times.

Mixed in with the rest of society, or in smaller numbers, as in rural communities, the kids have a chance to experience “normal” life outside the home, even if that home is a disaster. Working with cadets, this sort of person may flourish if given something to identify with, even as late as twelve years of age. Speaking coldly, as far as pros, most are already self-reliant, used to finding their own solutions, and mentally resilient: on the con side, there’s often all kinds of mental baggage to be handled, with varying degrees of success. Still, far easier to work with than a damn suburban bubble-child, used to being ferried from event to event, and otherwise living in front of a screen.

Would be interesting to know the backgrounds of the crowd and the perps… almost no point speculating on social causes without that info.

I think you hit the nail on the head with the line of substituting the state for the family (an idea that extends as far back as Plato’s Republic). I don’t know the specifics of those involved in this instance, but if I was a betting man I would bet that many, most, if not all of them came from broken homes. Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted the breakdown of poor families would be the result of welfare, which punished nuclear families in relation to “rewarding” single mother families and out of wedlock childbirth. Our original good natured intent to help the worst sufferers of fate has been transmogrified by the far too often ignored law of unintended consequences into subsidizing the corrosion of the basic moral unit that has carried on civilization since Ur, the two parent mother-father based family.

And people wonder why I carry whenever legal… Because there is no telling when something bad could happen and I’m not counting on being ‘protected’ by the police…

Just because CA is burning doesn’t mean the rest of the country is. Some people still take pride in raising their children correctly, as well as protecting them from harm.