I hunted almost every day as a kid, got off school and took my rifle or shotgun and went out in the fields and orchards around my house and hunted rabbits, doves, pheasants, whatever was in season and rabbits if there weren’t any game animals in season.
I had a couple of friends that were constant hunting buddies, and it seemed like every time we expanded our group to other guys things had a tendency to get really weird. I was raised with very controlled safety and ethical standards, and I’ve never liked being with guys that weren’t raised in a gun supervised environment. There were just things that if my dad ever saw me or even heard of me doing my hunting and shooting days were over for a long time. I lived under the threat that if I ever deviated from rules I would not have my guns anymore, they were treated as an earned privilege, not a right. And to this day this is how I look at it.
We lived out in the country about 12 miles from town, took a school bus, people and kids were just different, and I’d have to say I hung out with bad asses, and the ones out there that we didn’t like and were afraid of were way badder than the guys I hung out with. A guy that lived around the corner from me was tolerated with a sense of careful wariness, the guy was subject to rages and going off on people. Anyone that had seen him go off on someone in a totally berserk rage wanted nothing to do with getting in a fight with him.
During pheasant season my friends and I wanted to hunt an area about six or seven miles away that was loaded with birds, but we didn’t have cars yet so had no way to get there. Denny was one of the first to get a car, and he offered to drive three of us there. We hunted one area walking a circle around levees and got in the car to try another area. Another car did something, I don’t remember what, and Denny flew into a rage, chased the car down, pulled to the side and cut him off the road. We were telling him to chill out and he was threatening to blow us away if we didn’t shut up. His face was purple, his eyes were bugged out and rolled to the side.
He jumps out of the car with his shotgun, runs back, and jams it at this guy’s head, screaming at him. One of my friends was whispering that if he shot that man he might come back and shoot us. I told the guys that if he shot that old man I was going to waste him when he came back to the car, that he might start shooting us next because we were witnesses. Trust me when I say I know the difference between talking and doing. We truly thought we were going to see this guy get shot.
He backed off, came back to the car, and told us at gunpoint that if any of us ever said a word about this we were dead. None of the guys was willing to report this, I went home and told my parents. They wanted to call the police, this freaked me out and I told them that the cops wouldn’t do anything, they called the sheriff’s department anyway. I told my friends that they were going to have to say what they had seen. One of them apparently trying to curry favor or immunity, told him. This guy was going to kill me if he got the chance. My parents called the sheriff”s department again and said they needed to get it rolling as far as doing something.
By this time the man had reported being accosted by a madman, they came and took a statement from me, my parents had called my friend’s parents and had them bring my friends over to the house so that we could all be talked to at the same time. The Sheriff called for backup and a few units went over to Denny’s house and arrested him. He was held in custody, tried as an adult and caught several years. If the cops had not acted this would have turned out very bad.
I have to be honest here, had I not told my parents and they took action, there is not a chance in hell I would have, this guy had us way too scared. This is part of what the willingness of people to intervene when they hear threats and unhinged talk.