This past weekend, I did something that might just horrify the more liberal among you.
We handled firearms, gave them to children, and shot a bunch of stuff. It was a blast.
You see….I'm a Scout Leader and this was our annual shooting weekend.
It's a curious thing...I was talking to a couple of my counterparts at the troop, and I of course had to mention that I'm an odd bird, and my liberal friends would probably be horrified to find that I'm here this weekend and letting my twelve-year-old handle firearms. (Actually, it was pretty comical. I mentioned to the Range Safety Officer that my son had only ever shot a Nerf gun, right before he handed him a 20-guage shotgun, but I digress.)
In talking to one of the other adult leaders, he mentioned that he "played for the other team", but we both agreed that guns shouldn't be demonized. We had two weeks of safety presentations and video at the troop meeting, reinforced again the morning of the shoot. Everybody was quiet, attentive, followed the rules, and so on.
What better environment to introduce younglings to firearms and firearm safety than at a gun club, with their friends, and run by a local active-duty police officer? It wasn't that far of a reach to compare it to alcohol and drinking….we go out of our way to make it "evil" and restrict access, with the result of binge-drinking and all kinds of other bad things "because you can't do it."
So, we fired shotguns all morning. I have no idea how I managed to do it, but I hit the target a few times, too.
The afternoon was the rifle shooting, and one of the members of the gun club brought out part of his collection. He's into combat pieces, so he had lined up a Vietnam-era short-range combat shotgun, a WWII vintage M-1 Garand, a Vietnam-era, Romanian made AK-47, and the one that astonished me, a 1943-stamped, Soviet made sniper rifle. Just holding it was astonishing; I could readily imagine somebody defending his home against the Nazis with this very weapon.
We had the younger kids along with us, but they couldn't shoot the "big guns", so our troop brought along 5 Daisy air-rifles, and we set up a pellet range for them to participate, too. This turned out to be even more popular than the real guns, and we went through all the ammunition we brought for the event.
Hell, we had such fun that I'm actually considering buying an air rifle or pellet gun myself now. I checked the laws for where I live, and curiously the only restrictions are they can't be fired in an alley, across a street, or along an active railroad track. There may be local restrictions, but that's all there is at the state level.
Of course, convincing Mrs. TriSec and our pacifist relations (including the one with a big yard where we can actually shoot the things) will be the real challenge here.
And going back to my liberal bias….regrettably, one of our scouts was held back from attending the trip because his father "doesn't like guns". Unfortunately, he's now got that demonization bit I spoke of earlier. Whether or not I like guns is irrelevant; I'm the teacher here, and we gave our scouts the opportunity to go out, see, touch, and use these things, and make up their own minds, without any personal bias from Troop leadership one way or the other.