There’s a special time in childhood. It is from about five years old when you start to run around with the “big kids” to around twelve when you can’t stand being around the “little kids”. It is a time of a certain innocence. It is a time when learning about life is not encumbered by the confusion that puberty eventually brings on.
It is during this time that a child’s imagination has a free rein to create worlds where anything can happen. The words, “let’s pretend”, are the sesame to adventures limited only by the time, space and energy a child has to act them out.
As a child growing up in the post-World War II Baby Boom, I lived in a neighborhood bursting with children. All the delayed urges the war interrupted were released in an explosion of new life in unprecedented numbers. Schools couldn’t be built fast enough to accommodate all of us. The elementary school classrooms I was in had thirty-five of us packed into a room that was probably designed for twenty or less since the high school we were connected to was only graduating thirteen to eighteen seniors in those years following the war.
It was a good thing most of us were pretty well behaved or it would have been a recipe for disaster with so many of us in one room. I’m not sure why we more or less listened to the teacher and certainly never openly defied her authority. I say “her” authority because in my school as in most of the post-Baby Boom schools, there were scant few men in the elementary classroom. Principals of course were an exception as certainly women could not possibly be the head of a school.
Play in my Boomer neighborhood took many forms. War and cowboys and Indians were big favorites with the boys when we weren’t playing baseball. All the boys had toy guns, mostly pistols, along with an occasional Tommy Gun that made sounds that were supposed to imitate an automatic weapon. In our play, our guns didn’t need to be historically correct. They just had to resemble a gun.
In our wars, we took turns being the killer and the killed, often arguing about who got whom first and had to play dead for a certain amount of time before being resurrected to fight again. In our child’s minds, no one ever really died but someone could triumph at least until it was his turn to die.
We were emulating our fathers, uncles, cousins, and all the brave soldiers we saw on TV winning wars and saving the world for Democracy. We wanted to be heroes like them. We wanted to feel brave and powerful. Our grass-stained overalls and skinned knees were our badges of courage.
Ironically, while our post WWII world was awash in toy weapons, the adult world was much less enamored with the real thing. Many households, like mine, had guns but they were mostly seen as utilitarian, used in hunting season for rabbit, pheasant and deer. They were then carefully cleaned, oiled and put safely away until next season. Owning a rapid firing, high-powered military assault weapon with a 30 round magazine would have been looked on by the adults in my life as a waste of money needed for the family. Anyone expressing a desire for such a weapon would be looked at as possibly mentally ill. The adults had just lived through a horrific world war. Most wanted nothing to do with the tools of death they had been required to wield on battlefields around the world.
We did have one rifle that would be used for “plinking”* when we went out to my grandmother’s farm. It was a single shot Stevens Boy’s Rifle in .22 caliber. It had belonged to my grandfather when he was a boy which made it somewhere around eighty or ninety years old. It was about two-thirds the size of a standard .22 rifle, thus the designation, “Boy’s Rifle”. It fit quite nicely in my juvenile frame. So many rounds had been fired trough it that the chamber** was worn to the point that the brass cartridge would swell and be difficult to extract. A look down the barrel revealed only a faint hint of rifling***. My dad would only let me shoot .22 shorts, which were the least powerful of the three .22 rounds available. This was probably a wise decision on his part. Other than this miniature single shot rifle and my Daisy BB gun, which was only utilized during country visits to my grandmother’s, real gun’s existed only on the margins of my life.
In high school, guns would reappear in another form. I was an Explorer Scout in a troop that was very active in outdoor activities. It was a great antidote for a hormone-heavy adolescent like myself. Scouts gave me and, most probably my fellow scout some relief from the complexities and confusion of our adolescence. At one point, our scout leader heard about a program offered by the Office of the Director of Civilian Marksmanship. It offered target grade .22 rifles and free match grade ammunition to organizations like the Explorer Scouts. Our troop formed a rifle team and began participating in shooting competitions. Along with these freebies from the US government came a complementary junior membership in the National Rifle Association and a free subscription to its monthly publication, American Rifleman.
I shot regularly on our rifle team for about two and a half years until the level of commitment to excel in school athletics took increasingly larger amounts of time and energy. I eventually drifted away from Explorer Scouts but my free subscription to the American Rifleman continued faithfully. I liked getting this magazine along with Boy’s Life, the official publication of the American Boy Scout Association.
It was sometime in my junior year of high school that I began to notice a change in the editorial content of the NRA magazine. It started to sound more and more militant. It ran caricatures of those the editorial board deemed anti-gun. They had a sinister quality to them like I had seen in my world history books when we studied World War II. The distorted faces portrayed in the magazine’s graphic art were too reminiscent for me of the kind the Nazi’s used in WWII to portray Jewish people and other enemies of the state. I don’t remember exactly what was the turning point but I became so concerned that I wrote the editors of the American Rifleman and told them I found their editorial content biased, divisive and offensive. I requested that my subscription be cancelled immediately.
On May 2, 1967, two dozen Black Panther Party**** members entered the state capital in Sacramento, CA carrying firearms. They were there to protest the mistreatment of Black Americans in society and specifically at the hands of the police. At this time, it was legal to openly carry firearms in California so the police were unable to arrest the protestors. However, a bill was quickly passed with significant bi-partisan and NRA lobbying support as an “Urgency Statute” that prohibited citizens from publicly carrying firearms. At the time, Governor Ronald Reagan was quoted as saying he saw, “no reason why on the streets today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons in public.” He went on to say, “that guns were a ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will”. His messaging changed significantly to pro-gun ownership and gun rights when he ran for President in 1980 and needed conservative Republican support. It changed again when he barely survived an assignation attempt in March, 1981. It does make one wonder if being shot makes the potential lethality of guns more real to those on the receiving end of bullets.
Ironically, during the ensuing years, the U.S. citizenry has become increasingly armed. As mass shootings have proliferated to almost daily events, gun sales have soared. Some states, like Texas, have recently made it legal for virtually any adult to openly carry loaded firearms. The toy guns of my childhood are now the real guns of adulthood.
What seems to have evolved around gun ownership is the development of a gun culture. When I look at some of the numerous YouTube posts that appear on my feed, (click on one and they multiply like rabbits), guns are presented almost as a fetish: an inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers. The utilitarian function of guns such as hunting or target shooting, while receiving some attention, seems to be overshadowed by an emphasis on the power the guns represent. There are demonstrations of the penetration of bullets of various caliber into blocks of ballistic gell that simulate a living body. Lethality, magazine capacity, muzzle velocity and rate of fire are discussed and demonstrated in minute detail. Self-defense and the stopping power of a particular firearm is also a frequent topic.
Since my late teens, when I cancelled my subscription to American Rifleman, I have been baffled as to why a supposedly civilized country like the United States has tolerated so many deaths caused by firearms. I thought surely after 20 innocent children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 12, 2012 by a mentally ill twenty year old, the U.S. would do something about the easy availability of assault style weapons. It did nothing. Some citizens even claimed it never happened and was a propaganda ploy to justify the Federal Government taking guns from everyone.
Then came the massacre of fifty-nine people and over 500 injured when a man with a rapid-firing military style assault rifle opened fire from his Las Vegas hotel window on a crowd of people enjoying an outdoor concert. The only change in our gun laws following that tragedy came in the form of banning a thing called Bump Stock***** that allowed an already rapid firing weapon to spew out death even faster.
I no longer believe that the U.S. can enact meaningful “gun control” measures. Virtually all legal measures that have been presented have either been voted down by politicians in the grip of the gun lobby or are so weak and watered down they have no significant impact on gun violence. Currently, the only answer I see to the gun madness gripping the U.S. is addressing the very ethos of the gun culture. We as a nation have embraced a cult of violence which has as its main icon or fetish, the gun. The gun is treated as a holy object that can save us from ourselves. If enough people walk around in our cities and towns with powerful weapons, then we will all be safe. The gun becomes the vaccination for “herd immunity” against violence.
The reality of this gun “herd immunity” is that it makes us more vulnerable to being subject to violence or the perpetrator of violence. Brain science tells us that as our stress increases our cause and effect thinking diminishes. When the stress hormones flood our brain and body even the most reasonable, mild mannered person is subject to commit a violent act. If a firearm is present it is likely to be the go-to stress reliever.
If I look at the culture of America with some objectivity, I see that it appears to be addicted to gun violence or if not addicted, immune. Can a nation fundamentally change its culture? Are there enough people willing to speak truth to firepower? We don’t have to give up our guns. The government doesn’t have to send stormtroopers into our homes to wrest our guns from us as the gun lobby and its scare tactic minions love to say. Hunters can still hunt. Plinkers can still plink. What I believe is that we need to mature as a nation. We need to remember that unlike when we were seven years old, when someone is shot they don’t just count to ten and leap back up and continue the game. Someone’s mother, father, child, sister, brother, cousin, friend or lover is gone forever.
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*Plinking refers to informal target shooting, typically at non-standard targets such as cans, plastic bottles, homemade objects, etc,
**The chamber of a firearm is the opening that receives the cartridge and attached bullet.
***Rifling is a series of spiral groves in the barrel of the firearm that spins the bullet as it moves down the barrel and increases its accuracy through gyroscopic action.
****Black Panther Party, originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was a Black Power political organization founded by Oakland, California college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in 1966. The party was active in the United States from 1966 to 1982.
*****Bump Stock is an attachment to a semi-automatic rifle that uses the recoil energy of the gun to make pulling the trigger faster than an individual shooter could accomplish manually.
I started this essay several weeks ago. Then came a blizzard of extra work obligations along with a significant increase in clients asking for counseling as they emerged into the sunlight of what we all hope is a post-Covid world. I just could never find enough mental bandwidth, let alone time, to focus on writing. Hopefully, some blue sky has opened up and I can connect with you again with greater frequency. I hope you are all thriving and reconnecting with all those you have missed during this trying year of pandemic and loss.
As always, I urge you to love the ones you are with and the ones you wish you could be with. Life is short even when there isn’t a pandemic.
I value your feedback. I know guns in America is a third rail issue and one takes a hold of it at some peril. But if we don’t, the death and grief that comes from the deification of guns as an answer to our personal and political problems will surely continue to be a constant threat to all Americans. We only need to read our daily newsfeed to know that there are no places in America immune to gun violence.
My last essay, “Goodbye Columbus”, had more views than any previous essay. At this writing it has had 1,629 views by readers. I thank all of you for being my readers and sharing my essays with family and colleagues. Your interest is what keeps me trying to write interesting and thought-provoking content.