The human world has changed tremendously since I was young.
Since on my last birthday I turned 57 and am now officially an old-fogey, I
thought I might share with you some of the changes I’ve witnessed. Frankly,
quite a lot of this is somewhat bewildering to me. Though that is too be expected
from an ancient such as myself when faced with the modern age.
First: Gun racks.
In the 1970s in Arkansas, and I imagine across the south,
gun racks were all the rage. It would look something like the picture below,
except it usually held only two guns and was meant for your…truck.
That’s right. In the 1970s in Arkansas many members of the
male population carried rifles and/or shotguns hung up in the back of their
trucks. I even had a gun rack, though I didn’t have a truck to put it in.
Eventually I gave the rack to a nephew, I think.
In the parking lot outside the high school you would often
see a dozen trucks with racked guns in the back. There was often some admiring
of weapons going on by non-racked folks. This was especially true during
hunting season. A lot of kids would go hunting either right before school or
right after. Even though I had a car and no rack, there were plenty of times I’d
put my shotgun or rifle in the back seat while at school so I could head out to
hunt after.
No one shot anyone else. No one reached for a gun to settle
any kind of argument. No one even accidentally discharged a firearm on school
property. I wonder what happened. I don’t believe it is any one thing. Some
factors that I think were involved in the changes are listed below.
1. Everyone of us who had a gun for hunting had been taught
by fathers or brothers or someone how to handle them, how to make sure they
weren’t loaded, how to keep them in working order.
2. We had also been taught that if honor required a fight,
you did it with your fists. You weren’t a pussy. You didn’t reach for a weapon
to make you a big man.
3. We weren’t cowards like the assholes today who use guns to
settle every dispute or who just decide to use a gun to take some folks along
with them when they decide to die. We weren’t so afraid of every little thing
that we had to bluster and blow constantly about how tough we were. And we didn’t
just make up enemies, or let the media make them up for us.
4. We lived in a community where you did fear losing the
respect of your peers and your family and the folks in your town. You knew, for
example, that if you did something
stupid or wrong, it would get back to your family. Now that can be a double
edged sword, for sure. But we not only cared what our parents thought of us, we
wanted to please them and tried to do the best we could to make them proud.
I’m sure there are many other reasons for why the way people
act around guns has changed over the last forty years. These are just some of
my thoughts. What are yours?
