Yesterday dad and I went over to the local shooting range and fired off a few shots. It was the usual good time with one difference: he brought his old 20 gauge shotgun that his parents gave him when he was a boy. I’d never fired a shotgun before, just pistols and a .22 rifle, so I approached the shotgun with a little trepidation. I held the gun in my hand, chambered a shell, locked it in place and cautiously shouldered the gun just like dad told me. Then I took aim, squeezed the trigger, and…MAN what a kick! That shotgun was like nothing I’d ever fired.
The amazing thing is that dad got the gun when he was 11 years old. He told me about how he and his friend used to go hunting with it and shoot small game for food. He even checkered the stock himself as a teenager, and did a very nice job of it. Now keep in mind, this wasn’t out in the boondocks somewhere, but the suburban outskirts of Cincinnati in the 1950s. In a similar situation, how many parents today would give a powerful shotgun to an 11-year-old? Living in an era when kids can’t ride a bike without a helmet, what would people think about a gun-toting preteen walking down their street? Good grief, somebody call the authorities on those parents! And that kid…off to juvi with him!
The hippies of the ’60s claimed that they were ushering in a new era of freedom, and we who live in the aftermath of that era certainly like to think of ourselves as liberated. But are we? When I consider the matter, it seems to me that sixty years ago kids had a much better claim to freedom than most youngsters today. The same goes for the adults too.
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