KIDS WITH GUNS- the good, the bad and the very ugly

 I grew up in the country in the 1950's. This was the post-war heyday of plastics aplenty and the promise of jet pack travel within a decade or so. We cluelessly played cowboys and Indians and "Army." Nobody told us not to call Japanese "Japs," or that Indians actually lived in the woods and corn fields we roamed long before our ancestors claimed it as their own. (Somehow the Nazis got a bye. The combo of WWII and the Korean War effectively demonized Asians in America as the "other," the enemy. Nazis were more like family gone astray). We were happy children, free as the wind, let out the door in the morning and not expected back until dinnertime, or if somebody (like my younger brother Ross) got hurt. Nobody worried about child abductions, sexual predators or any of the many dangers that would face future parents. From slingshots, penknives, and BB guns, we kids were all heavily armed.

     I received my "official" gun on my 12th birthday. It was a beautiful little single shot, bolt action .22 ca. rifle. But before that I had a "secret" gun. This simple, lethal little device was purchased for $5 from a classmate. It was something called a zipgun. It looked just like a fountain pen. All you had to do was unscrew the front "barrel" cap and place a .22 shell in the cap. The firing pin was no more than a spring and needle assembly that slid back and engaged in a notch. Once released the "gun" fired. I fired it once back in the fields. It scared the shit out of me. I gave it back to my friend and got my fiver back. I wouldn't own another "handgun" until receiving a pistol permit in my forties.

   The recent acquittal of teenage murderer Kyle Rittenhouse and the horrific Michigan school shooting enabled by the parents of Ethan Crumbley are about to - like everything else in America - be politicized. In an unusual move Michigan prosecutors have charged the Crumbley parents with involuntary manslaughter. Their egregious lack of responsibility in failing to recognize their son's propensity for violence or other deep seated emotional problems, while buying him a 9 mm. SIG Sauer SP semiautomatic handgun as an early Xmas present seems unexplainable. 

    Once again, let's go back sixty years. With so many heavily armed youth, guns given as a right of passage to kids barely old enough to lift them, a violent society recovering from a World War and the emergence of TV culture filled with violent imagery, why were there no school shootings in the 1950's, 60's, 70's or 80's? It wasn't until the 1990's that these horrific events became a thing. Now, it finally takes the arrest of the parents of a school shooter to put the discussion once again in the village square. In my less than researched, gut reaction, unofficial opinion a few things happened in society in those decades. The first was the Vietnam War and the hippies that opposed it. Killing was real. "Army" was no game. The flag draped coffins and wounded relatives proved that. Secondly, historians began to question our colonial, enslaver, genocidal past as media (TV and movies) became even more violent. The disconnect between a rural and urban upbringing (already wide) widened even further. As the NRA told white parents gun ownership was their children's birthright, black children found other, more creative means to arm themselves. Once again, the kids were armed. Only now the kids were black and the weaponry were no longer BB guns and slingshots. The Clintons had an answer to these gun-toting, tiny "super-predators"- lock 'em all up. The generational prison pipeline was the response to black kids with guns. No urban parent (black or white) would be caught dead giving their 15-year-old a 9 mm. from Santa. But in the hinterlands, the bastard child of those hay fields, in suburbia, all bets were off. Maybe going to the local range with a new gun would give troubled, lonely Bimmy a sense of purpose. What could it hurt?  

     Suburban white kids brought up in a post- 911 world of internet porn, unhinged violence, political turmoil, racial unrest, first-shooter video games, oppressive social media, and no way to assimilate it all, mass school shootings are now the all too common result. The Sandy Hook shooter was given a gun by his mom. Kyle Rittenhouse got his older friend to purchase his AR. When caught googling "ammo" in class Ethan Crumbley's mom's response was, "LOL. I'm not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught." I predict within a few days the NRA, Republicans and Trump will all get involved, screaming about the Second Amendment rights of parenting. Disarm your troubled children for your own safety. It's a brave new world out there. No child should be armed (without constant supervision) for all our sakes.* 

* I did give my stepdaughter a pink .22 ca. rifle for Xmas when she was 13. But that rifle never left my closet without my supervision and there it still sits.