Guns are, in a sense, the last line of defense against crime and violence. Moral values stop most people, long before they reach the point where they are about to commit a crime. Yet our public schools have been on a crusade against moral values for decades. Programs undermining moral values used to be called "values clarification" -- until parents began to understand what that really meant. Then the name was changed.

The same approach, however, pervades all sorts of other social engineering programs under different names -- programs claiming to be about "drug prevention" or "decision-making" or some other innocuous-sounding name. The idea is that each child should make up his own morality. A more stupid or more dangerous idea could not have taken root anywhere but in a school of education.

Why does this go on? Because the teachers' unions want it to go on -- and because the Democrats are in no position to challenge the teachers' unions. Republicans don't challenge them as much as they should. But any challenge at all from politicians in office are likely to be Republican challenges.

For the majority of blacks, Democrats have little to offer besides rhetoric on the things that matter most to them -- their children's education, their personal safety and their moral values. In all these key things, Democrats are not part of the solution, but part of the problem.

Republicans have an uphill fight to get their message across to blacks and they have not been doing a particularly good job of it. But they have more to offer than the Democrats, if they can ever manage to articulate better in the future than they have in the past.