Daniel Henninger weighs in with yet another ridiculous right wing excuse for gun violence; in this article for Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, Henninger argues that to really understand why the Newtown school shooting happened, we have to go back, back through years, all the way to 1968 (cue harp glissandos), when everything started to go wrong thanks to the hippies and the anti-wars and the college professors and the intellectuals and the mmm glavin!

We think it is possible to identify the date when the U.S., or more precisely when many people within it, began to tip off the emotional tracks. A lot of people won’t like this date, because it makes their political culture culpable for what has happened. The date is August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention found itself sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

The real blame here does not lie with the mobs who fought bloody battles with the hysterical Chicago police. The larger responsibility falls on the intellectuals—university professors, politicians and journalistic commentators—who said then that the acts committed by the protesters were justified or explainable. That was the beginning. America had a new culture for political action and for personal living.

The virtue known as self-restraint was devalued. Certain rules that for a long time had governed behavior also became devalued. Whatever else was going on here, we were lowering the barriers of acceptable political and personal conduct.

Clearly, 1968 was a very traumatic year for Mr. Henninger; he still hasn’t recovered.

(h/t: Wesley.)