Opinion
USA – -(Ammoland.com)- For years gun-control-groups and their supporters, as well as assorted politicians and their media allies have been proclaiming that the availability and “easy access” of guns that is the primary factor driving “gun violence” in the United States.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, gun control as an ideology is as allergic to the truth as a vampire is to garlic.
The fact of the matter is that from the 1750’s up through the 1980’s, there were far fewer gun laws, and guns were more readily available to people, including kids, than they are today and yet Mass Shootings were reasonably rare events.
I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s and turned 18 in 1991. Like many kids of the era, we had both access to real firearms and a collection of incredibly realistic looking cap guns of various types. From the traditional style .38 Chiefs Special that took “ring caps” to the old “Cowboy” type revolvers that used paper “strip caps” to more modern types like 1911 pistols, replica’s of Walther PPK pistols, .357 Magnums, Luger’s and others and even full size copies of MP-5’s, Mini Uzi’s, AK-47’s
These newer types all used “magazines” that fed a plastic strip of caps into the “action,” they advertised on the packaging that they had functioning actions and even “ejected” the “spent rounds.”
It was a regular part of growing up than to spend summer days and or weekends when school was in session, running all over town or the woods with your friends from the neighborhood, playing “cops and robbers” or “war” or whatever people called it in their specific part of the Country.
The point being, 10 to 20 kids would spend all day playing and “shooting” at each other, and those same kids all had unfettered access to real firearms, yet the idea of actually shooting someone with a real gun never entered our minds!
We were able to differentiate between “play” or “make belief” and the real world but the two never mixed in our minds.
Kids also used to take their real guns to school for a variety of legitimate reasons, in all parts of the Country during the same period and again, mass and school shootings were rare events. The late Justice Scalia told a story of taking his rifle on the subway and El in NYC when he was growing up to shoot on the school shooting team, and no one blinked. Can you imagine the over the top response to something like that today?!
Some kids took their guns to school because they were, like Scalia, part of the school supported rifle or trap or skeet teams, some because they hunted before or after school. Some because they were in wood or metal shop and were doing repairs or making parts to get a grade in that class.
So what changed? Our culture did ! Hyper-violent movies, as well as video games, play at least some sort of role in this. But that’s a topic for another column. But its clear to me that the availability of firearms is far from the primary factor in whats causing our current spate of mass shootings by kids.
More articles, commentary and information by D. Roberts available at That Every Man Be Armed.com
anti-2a grabbers of all “genders” should consider that…a lot of things can happen to dog s**t
Do these poor children know what you did? That vile act of manhood in your mouth? I hope you’re proud of yourself. You sure seemed to enjoy it. You are not stupid enough to be pranked. You were acting on true desire. Admit it. Your mouth is big enough to handle two at once. As you said. Or are you that stupid?
I’ve been watching violent movies since the 1960s and I have yet to see any guns create the violence, it was always the man or woman behind the instrument that caused it. That is in place in reality by every time that a bad guy loses a gun in a movie, they find another instrument to cause mayhem until they lose that instrument then they go on to find another. The same as the good guys do that try to defend themselves or the innocent. How many times in these movies that you see someone run out of ammunition or… Read more »
Id like to comment on/agree with an earlier comment or two. Quite a few years back, I worked as an LEO. I spent a few years working with at-risk minority kids. Most came from single parent “homes” ( one kid lived in the dilapidated old garage, in the winter, in the Northeast. His mom’s boyfriend didn’t like him!), and were gang affiliated. Many of the teenage boys, and some of the girls, told me they wanted to go to prison. The boys said their pops, or uncle Jimmy was in prison. It made them a man. The girls just wanted… Read more »
Yep, we played army, cowboys and Indians, (I am cherokee), cops and robbers, but if we had a real problem with someone, we would deal with it one on one, with our hands. Not one time did anytime think about shooting the other person or pull a gun out. But, man, deer, coyotes, quail, rabbits, raccoons, ducks, turkeys, wild game was in danger of it was in season. Yes we hunted and fished with our local game warden but we never wanted to break the laws, we wanted to be able to shoot game next year and eat. Today’s kids,… Read more »
In thelate 1960’s the Supreme Court of the US kicked God out of the government schools. There went any ties to morality. Thus cast adrift, the values and limits of society could be changed into anything. If you’ve ever read Lord of the Flies (we had to, in high school– it was repulsive. None of us had any idea thats where our culture was headed at the time, but looking back, here we are). Less than a decade later, that same “august body of judges” declared that human life can be ended at the whim of another, even whilst that… Read more »