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When a bunch of middle-aged folks sit around a saloon in a small rural town, the topic often turns to what we read about life and death in standard metropolitan statistical areas, as well as some reminiscing.
Times have sure changed. We all had guns when we were
teenagers, and nobody made any big deal out of it.
Yeah, but we weren't doing drive-bys.
Unless you count occasional pot shots at road signs,
insulators, mail boxes, prairie dogs and
jackrabbits.
Okay, we weren't angels. Far from it. But we weren't
shooting at people.
True enough. And we sure didn't spray bullets every
which way. The ejector didn't work on that old .22 rifle I
had -- after every shot, you'd have to pry out the casing
with a pocket knife. Made you pick your shots pretty
carefully.
Not just that. My old man spent hours teaching me to
handle a gun.
We could almost chant in unison the lessons our fathers had taught us. Treat every gun as though it's loaded and cocked. Don't trust the safety. Never point a gun at anyone unless you intend to kill him. Clean the gun every time you put it away, and clean it every month or so anyway. It won't take care of you unless you take care of it.
It was drilled into all of us, no matter where we grew up, that a gun was a dangerous tool that demanded constant practice and maintenance. Some of us, in fact, had finally concluded that guns were more trouble than they were worth, and no longer owned or used them.
And that's probably the difference between then and now. Judging by what I read, most of the urban youths who get into trouble with guns are kids who are growing up without fathers, and it is generally fathers who instill respect for guns. Little wonder that these kids seem to think guns are just movie props that make a lot of impressive noise.
So, what's the solution? No institution is in a position to provide fathers to all gun-toting kids who lack them now, but perhaps the National Rifle Association could do the next-best thing.
Instead of buying senators and representatives, the NRA
could set up shooting ranges and classes in every major
city, and recruit aggressively with a public-relations
campaign to the effect that you can't be a real stud
with that piece until you know how to use it right.
The interest is obviously present, and the NRA could channel it.
Liberals might not like this, but I know a lot of gun nuts. They spend hours on the practice range. They treat their weapons well. They reload their own ammunition and they can spend hours boring you with explanations of the relative merits of various primers, bullets and primers. However, they aren't killing random people on the street.
The NRA is the only institution with the skill and resources to convert the current generation of fatherless urban youth, to take their passionate interest in guns and turn it into an expensive and demanding -- but relatively harmless -- hobby.
It's worth a try; nothing else seems to be working.
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