Regarding “Is Society The True Culprit?” by David Romine in My Nickel’s Worth on Dec. 22:

Society certainly shares responsibility in the Connecticut tragedy. See Grant Duwe’s opinion piece “The Rise and Decline of Mass Shootings” by Googling the title. It’s very revealing.

A picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words. A chart included with Duwe’s opinion piece shows mass shooting gun violence in the U.S. by decade since 1900, defining mass shootings as those with four or more fatalities. Please look at the chart. It is worth thousands of words. From 1900 to 1970 there were a total of 28 mass shootings — an average of four per decade, with the 1930s peak of nine. From 1970 to 2010 there were a total of 112 mass shootings — an average of 28 per decade, with the 1990s having the peak number of 43.

Duwe offers the following comments accompanying the charted data: “For example, crime rates were relatively low during the 1940s and ’50s, and so too were mass murder rates. That was also a time when much of the country saw high rates of marriage, births, jobs, homeownership, church attendance and other pro-social indicators. The generally favorable social conditions over the past 10 to 15 years likewise may have had an impact on crime and, more narrowly, mass public shootings.”

Duwe says that mass shootings in the last decade tallied (2000-10) are on the decline, but he’s overselling the data. He cites that decade’s lower number of shootings (only 24) as a trend. It’s too early (in 2010, the date of Duwe’s piece) to know if that decade is a trend or an aberration. I would also say it’s too soon for Duwe to state that the social conditions of the past 10-15 years are “favorable.” It may take another decade or two before we can judge that.

The point I’d like to make is this: from the mid-1960s onward, mass shootings have become sickeningly more frequent. Those were the decades and eras of reversal of the various “pro-social indicators” cited by Duwe.

Corresponding to the increases in mass shootings since 1970, we’ve had the rise of the free-speech movement, the peace movement, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the sexual revolution, the drug culture, and other movements I may have overlooked. The ’50s were made the butt of jokes, a mythical era of Ozzie and Harriet and white picket fences. Proponents of moderate language and sexual restraint ridiculed as “uptight” and “repressed.” Social self-control was no longer fashionable.

Civil disobedience is in vogue and celebrated. The only positive outcome of the social movements of the ’60s was the civil rights movement, although it was short-lived. That movement became nothing more than a political voting bloc.

As a consequence of those social and cultural “advances” since the ’60s, society has had an explosion in the illegitimacy rate, single-parent homes, gang and drug violence, the devaluation of marriage, war on religion, declining educational outcomes, exploding prison populations and the devaluation of human life. Those ills have all harmed the middle and lower classes.

Additionally, the “income gap,” blamed for so many ailments, also corresponds to the decline of the decades since the ’60s. The top 1 percent of income earners from 1970-80 took in plus or minus 10 percent of U.S. personal income. In 2007 it is 23.5 percent. Maybe it’s not the upper end doing so well, rather it’s the middle and lower end doing so poorly.

I believe Duwe’s chart on mass shootings directly corresponds to rising social decay. To solve acts of social violence, reverse the social decline. I’ll conclude by quoting Romine’s letter: “We try to be politically correct and accommodating to everyone’s request, but perhaps it is time to stand up for what is right and moral.”