doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Taking My Gun to Public School- Twice a Week

Lowell, In my area of PA students can still make gunracks in school shop class.The first day of deer season is a day off holiday. Photos of dear shot by students are displayed on the school office window.There are rifle teams in some schools that compete against each other. The gun/hunting culture is not as strong as it was when I went to school,1970's, but it is still strong,for now.
Dave

I went to a Quaker school in Delaware. I took my Poly-choked 20 gauge 11-48 to school to give an 8th grade talk on Duck Hunting. Not today!

In the fall, many of us had our shotguns in the car on the high school parking lot because we were all going dove hunting together on the levee by the river after class. Those "evening flights" of dove were great fun.

Later on in the fall, we would go squirrel hunting after school, and also left guns in the car during class.

It was a small town, and had very little gun theft. Everyone know what brand of gun everyone else used. A stolen gun would have been immediately recognized.

JERRY

Sometimes one of the male teachers would go hunt with us.

I graduated in the mid- 80's and times were much different even then. Keeping hunting guns in your car was very common. In the spring when we had "home" track meets, school would let out at 3:00 but the track meet wouldn't start until 5:30. Head track coach would split the boys (and an occasional girl) up into 2 teams and we would go out groundhog hunting. Everyone had their own little honeyholes on some isolated backroad or friendly farmers field. Rules were always the same... teams back by 5:00, team with most hogs didn't have to do run timed sprints the next practice. Track coach was a Horse owner and had a deep hatred toward those groundhogs. Said one of his prized quarter horses had broken a leg in a GH hole in the past. Kept the boys busy for a couple of hours and eliminated some hole makers in the process. I think the coach was more proud of me the day I shot 5 hogs with my marlin 39A than he was when I won the conference 4 years in a row in the high jump.

I still remember the day the Vice-Principal made me bring that Marlin into his office so he could see the Lyman peep sight I had on it. Today they'd call in homeland security, lock down the whole county, set up the National Guard, film it on CNN and then lock me up and throw away the key!!

I remember kids taking guns for show and tell back in the early 60's in Northeast Maryland. The biology teacher was a gun collector and liked to see what some of the kids had. I also remember coming back from Vietnam in 1966 and taking my new .338 Winchester and walking through town on the way to the town dump to try her out.I carried it uncased,bolt in my pocket and no one even gave me a glance. I'll bet the noise was definitely heard though, This was 1/4 mile from downtown! Today the swat team would have been on me .

I grew up in the Denver area and attended Denver public high school in the early to mid seventies. In Army ROTC we had mandatory rifle shooting at the school range, and every Denver high school had a shooting range. At mine we had the top small bore rifle team in Colorado simply for the fact that we came to school two hours early and stayed late at least an hour for shooting practice every day.

This was done with supervison from the retired military ROTC instructors, and before any of us could shoot we were given a weapons handleing course and a hunter safety course at the school. Our class "A" drill team used M-14's and we probably had fifty of them locked up in the rifle range. When we traveled to drill team meets we would take the guns home with us so we could bring them to the meet. Some of these meet's were held at the University of Colorado which is now a gun free zone.

I'll bet this doesn't happen today.

About 1960 I played the part of the bride's father in a shotgun wedding at my Jr. highschool in San Diego. I remember taking my Fox Sterlingworth to school each of the several days we gave a performance. In addition, I loaded black powder blanks and fired off two of them on stage during the play. Although it woke up a few inattentive parents in the audience, no one thought it was a really big deal. Try that in a San Diego school today! Bill Frech

Yeah, old memories.... when I was in high school in the 1960s in deep East Texas almost none of the boys were at school on openning day of deer season, including me. When we actually shot a buck we tied him to the hood of the car and drove to school to show him off. Hands and arms half bloody from cleaning our quary, with the guns in the back seat.
Everyone, almost, would come to see the trophy and no one thought it strange. It was considered normal. Only a very few of our crowd got in serious trouble (and he was no hunter!) and everyone turned out to be a tax paying responsible adult.

That could not happen today, but still boys, and girls, are absent the first days of deer and quail season and no one thinks its strange. Viva Texas!!!

Quailguy

"Virtute et Labore"

Fun to read about these memories...

I spent my summers in Lodi, CA during the late 70s and early 80s and during dove season we would ride across town with shotguns tucked through the handle bars of our bikes. When we were 14, we were buying shotgun shells at the local drug store and taking our guns into the local donut shop for a freshly baked glaze donut and hot chocolate.

I teach in a high school today, and while I feel we are doing many things better than before, there are a lot of things we are doing that is causing harm to our young people.

In short, as a society, we are infantilizing our young people and removing all opportunities for "real" responsibility from them.

Hunting and shooting is just the tip of the iceberg. Take into consideration that today most teenagers do not receive their driver's license until 18 in lieu of 16. Most teens do not get their first minimum wage job until 19. In California, school districts have the right to deny or approve the opportunity for their students to work. EVERYONE under the age of 18 MUST have a school approved work permit in order to get a job. ALL student must attend school until age 18 or graduation --the only exception is to pass the GED, which is given in Fresno once a year and not offered by school districts because if they allow students to leave early they lose ADA (money).

In essence, we are creating baby-like adults who have cell phones, drink alcohol, do drugs, have sex, and have ZERO RESPONSIBILITY. Until that is, one of these baby-like adults picks up a gun at a school and shoots someone.

Guess I am kind of a rebel, but I am currently working to combat and hopefully reverse this situation by creating an Engineering and Construction Academy. The purpose of this Academy is to give opportunities for responsibility and in turn transform these baby-like adults into young adults. We are going to offer and pay for driver's licenses for our students as soon as they are eligible (age 16) who maintain a "B" average, have them earn a 10 hour OSHA Certification Job Safety Card, offer them summer and after school internships in the Construction Industry, and upon graduation, give them Industry Validated Certification so that they can go directly to work if they so choose.

Of course I am not doing this alone. My partner and I (another teacher) have over $750,000 in industry sponsors that range from the local plumber to the nationally and internationally recognized unions. We have written two grants totaling 8.5 million dollars to build a new campus and hope to become a model program for the state.

The baby-like adults that we are creating are screaming out for opportunity and responsibility. In many ways, these kids are like hunting dogs. If you want them to hunt, ya gotta get them out into the field as young pups. Ya gotta expose them to birds and the gun at an early age. Ya gotta build desire to go after that bird and ya gotta make it feel like they are in control of some element of the hunt so that they are having fun too. The best way to train a dog is to make the training feel like its not really training. Every limitation you place on a dog (or a kid), will take that much more freedom away from them when they are running in the field --and everyone knows you can't make a whipped dog run.

Hell, Delmar Smith should have been a high school teacher.

You might want to take a look at this front page article from todays NY Times

:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/08/us/08hunting.html?hp


Al