Thank GOD I Grew Up In The 70/80s...

General General Discussion
1

If I were a kid today, I’d certainly be arrested.

Student Arrested with Rifle, Hundreds of Rounds of Ammo on Campus

One of the most depressing things about getting older is seeing things lost over time and recognizing that most people don’t even comprehend what has been lost. As a “for example” when my Grandfather was a kid the local hardware store sold blasting caps, dynamite and had a few Thomspons on the wall behind the counter for sale. Most of us cannot even imagine that being a normal thing. And today a kid gets arrested for simply having a .22 rifle and a few hundred rounds of ammo in the trunk of his car. There was once a time when no self respecting boy scout would be without such things and he might have scoffed at your mere 500 rounds.

When I was in High School it wasn’t uncommon for me to have a HK93 or a SP1 Carbine in the back of my Blazer and several ammo cans of loaded magazines. It wasn’t because I was going to shoot up the school, it was to save me from having to drive back to my grandparents house (where I lived at the time) to load up to go shooting after school. It simply made more sense and nobody thought a thing about it. If I was a kid today and did that, I would be arrested and it would probably make national news.

When I was younger and my brother was in High School his trunk was usually filled with Remington 1100s and a case of shotgun shells. That is because he was going to be going hunting after school regardless of what day it was. And I can remember the principal of the school standing in the parking lot behind my brothers car with the trunk open. Not because he was confiscating weapons, but because he was admiring my brothers 1100 and wanted to see it because he was considering purchasing one. Today my brother would have been arrested.

I can also remember when I rode the bus to school with a real Katana that was over 100 years old in Junior High. By this time I had been studying classical Japanese fencing for almost 4 years and had begun collecting Japanese swords. Most of my collection at the time was modern stainless steel production swords, a few circa 1937 Shin Guntos (this was back when you could buy scratch and dent WWII armory blades for about $25) and one honest to goodness pre Meiji Nihonto which was the pride of my collection. As we were studying the Samurai and feudal Japan in World History I was asked by my teacher to bring it to class and possibly give a demonstration when he became aware of my collection and practice of the sword. If that happened today I would almost certainly have been arrested, the teacher of course would have been fired and likely arrested.

And it isn’t just about guns and weapons in school.

I don’t even want to get into the number of pocket knives and balisongs I could be depended upon to have on my person on any given day. And just as Dennis the Menace always had a slingshot in his back pocket, I usually had a pair of nunchaku in my back pocket all the time. Not that I had any sinister or nefarious plans for them, I just liked to practice at any and every opportunity so I took them with me. I don’t even want to consider what would happen to your average 14 year old if he were caught in public with such things on his person. His devotion to the practice of the martial arts would likely buy him zero consideration.

I can remember my brother and his buddies preparing for a canoe/camping trip packing a Ruger .357 security six and a Remington 700 .223 rifle. Keep in mind these were 16 year olds who were armed and unsupervised for the weekend. Had they done this today, they’d have been arrested and my father would probably also have been arrested.

Similarly when me and my buddies went camping at the age of 12 outside of town on the weekend and I packed a Ruger .22 Single Six or a Walther PP so we could “plink cans” we’d have been arrested if done today. My father would likely have also been arrested. We of course never had a single incident at all.

On one single occasion a police officer who was off duty (we knew every cop in town just about) and camping with his own kid nearby walked over to investigate the shooting. He observed that we were using a suitable backstop (a 30 foot high embankment) and that we were employing reasonably safe gun handling (this was back when a 12 year old could be expected to KNOW how to safely handle a gun in some parts of America) even if we didn’t have eyes and ears on. Yes we should have brought eye and ear protection, but we didn’t. He made sure we understood that we were expected to pick up the cans and clean up our mess when we were done shooting (littering was a big social issue of the late 70s) and we told him we would and he went back to his camping. We picked up after we were done shooting and that was that. I hate to think what would happen if a group of 12 year olds went shooting today.

And it isn’t just shooting that could get you arrested today. I was given my first gun in the 4th grade. I was 10 years old when I got a Luger for my birthday and a Ruger .357 security six for Christmas. These weren’t guns that would be mine someday when I was old enough, they weren’t kept in my fathers gun cabinet. They were mine. They were in my dresser, in my bedroom and the ammo for them was in my bedroom closet.

If an adult gives a gun to his 10 year old kid today, especially a handgun, it is a crime and he can be arrested. In my house this crime was called Christmas morning and the memories of those mornings are among my favorites. It saddens me to consider that most 10 year olds will not enjoy the quality of life I enjoyed. Nothing in the world makes you feel like you are being trusted with earned responsibility than being trusted with a firearm under your own control. And it is that lack of expected responsibility that is the reason we have so many people who are over the age of 20 or 30 who are still not adults yet today. Of course I was more of an adult at age 12 than many of those 20 and 30 year olds are today.

By the time I was 13 I was a serious gun collector who mostly focused on WWI and WWII firearms. I was doing my own research learning about the rifles and handguns fielded by the major participants and their variants and manufacturers. While I may not have understood Algebra completely, I could name all four manufacturers of the M1 Garand and most of the manufacturers of the M1 Carbine. I was also making my own deals and purchases at local gun shows. This was of course back when gun shows were collectors shows rather than dealer shows and trading was very common.

I was lucky that my father allowed me to spend a small percentage of my college money each year on guns as he knew they were a safe investment. This was back when a kid could trade and purchase firearms at a gun show. And while it wasn’t very common, it didn’t create a problem either. I was also very lucky as collectors gave me a lot of breaks because I was a knowledgeable collector. When you go looking for an '03 Springfield and you know the difference between an '03, an '03 Mark I and an '03A3 it sometimes impresses the adult collectors and they are nice to you. And of course I didn’t know everything, in fact I learned most of what I knew from those collectors and I appreciate the time many of them took to bring me up to speed. Today of course they would all be criminals and arrested for providing firearms to a child.

There were of course a few times when they had me “go get my Dad” because I was purchasing a handgun like a 1911 or a P-38 even though “I” was the buyer. Not sure exactly what the laws were back then regarding a 14 year old buying a hand gun, but suffice to say my Dad and the sellers weren’t arrested for engaging in a straw purchase for a minor child. And I know on at least one occasion I traded a handgun for a handgun without my father needing to be present for the transaction. I can only imagine the news coverage today if a 14 year old did such a thing at a gun show.

Of course to me at the time there was nothing unusual about any of it, I wasn’t a criminal and there was no criminal intent in anything I was doing. That wouldn’t matter today, I’d have simply been arrested.

And all of this takes me back to a picture that hung in my grandparents house. It was of my Dad and his little brother when they were about 10 and 12 taken in the early 1950s. They had gone down to the local Montgomery Ward in town and purchase some military surplus rifles. This was back when WWI/WWII surplus was so cheap a kid with a paper route could save up the money eventually. For $8 you could buy a Springfield '03 or 1917 Enfield, for $12 you could get one that has been “sporterized.” Either option would be less than $100 in todays money.

At any rate, my father purchased a Springfield and his brother purchased an Enfield, and they rode home on their bicycles with their rifles slung on their backs, and a GI back pack full of 30.06 ammo strapped to the handle bars. There was of course nothing completely unusual about two pre teen boys buying military rifles and a few hundred rounds of ammo. Nobody was arrested. And the picture in question was of them walking down the sidewalk the next day with those rifles slung on their shoulders, their jacket pockets stuffed full of 30.06 on stripper clips and cowboy hats on their heads on the way out of town to shoot some cans.

Nobody was arrested, my father and his brother were not subjected to mandatory counseling and psychiatric evaluation. My Grandparents were not thrown in jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor or declared somehow unfit. In fact the only thing that did happen was my Dad and his brother went to the local “shootin gallery” on the edge of town and they shot some cans until their ammo ran out and they walked back home. And looking at the picture the only thing I can see wrong is they too didn’t have eyes and ears, and those 30.06s would have been a lot louder than the .22s and .32s my friends and I were shooting without hearing protection when we were about the same age.

We were of course told about hearing protection (for some reason eye protection wasn’t stressed back then) by my father. But we were 12 and didn’t always listen, especially if we would be shooting outside. Besides those .22s and .32s weren’t nearly as loud as the M-80s we had. We’d probably be arrested for those too today.

2

Thats absolutley ridiculous. And of course it says “500 Rounds” It doesnt explain for the people that dont know about, that 500 rounds of .22 fits in a 4"x4" box. Not to mention that he probably went shooting and forgot it was there. People are becoming a bunch of pussies. Scared pussies

3

Steyr,

Your’e childhood almost exactly mirrors mine. I’ve told friends and family in the last few months that this nation is no longer recognizable to the one I grew up in. What freightens me most is to think where it will end and what we will be then.

4

I play basketball at that school sometimes. Nice neighborhood, not sure why the kid admitted he had a gun in his car. Not bright.

5

Maybe somebody told on him. Regardless it is a damn shame it is even an issue at all. The only reason we didn’t have guns in our cars when we were 12 is because we didn’t have cars.

6

He was probably being honest and thought he was doing the right thing by admitting his mistake. And was promptly punished for it, of course.

At my school, having a mere butterknife or shell casing in the car was grounds for suspension or expulsion, much less actual ammo or, god forbid, a firearm. I’ve known kids who’ve gotten in trouble because their mom put a butterknife in their lunchbag, trying to be helpful.

Drawing pictures of guns is grounds for suspension.

And school administrators, busybodies that they are, are trying to regulate the children’s activities out of school nowadays.

And to think that Dad took his .22 rifle or shotgun on the bus with him and put it in his locker at school so that he could go hunting with his buddies after school…

7

I too remember all those things growing up in the '70s in a small town. I remember during deer season, the guys that were lucky enough to have a truck, would have their deer rifles in a gun rack in the back window ready to hit the woods after school. Today they’d be arrested or have their guns stolen.

I got my first .22 rifle when I was 10 years old. An old fellow in town ran a hardware / outboard motor / sporting goods shop. He was a grochey old man but I loved going in there to look around and he sold me all the .22 ammo I wanted. The Western Auto would sell it to me too.

One thing I don’t remember as a kid is school shootings. I guess any kid that thought about doing such a thing also thought he might get has ass shot off by another kid with his .22 or deer rifle. I don’t know.

Things certainly have changed.

The news now days are full of how the president is “appointing a congressional committee to investigate” or the govenor is “appointing a panel” to ensure that this or that doesn’t happen again. Spending millions doing it. I guess it became the goverments role to protect us from ourselves when people no longer have the stones to standup for themselves or an overbearing goverment that wants to infringe on every aspect of our rights and personel lives or lifestyles.

Life seemed much simplier back then. I’ll hazard a guess and say that every generation would say the same thing.

8

I grew up in rural NC - guys carried REAL guns (thutty-thutties! :p) in their pickup gun racks, because they’d go hunting before AND after school. You could’ve armed a rifle company easily, on a typical day in our 1,300 student high school.

My best friend’s dad gave him a Colt Python for his 16th birthday - he kept it under the front seat of his pickup. He never waved it around - never showed it off - and the only reason I even knew it was there, was because he’d wear it when we went parts scavenging in junkyards (rattlesnake & feral dog repellent).

Shoot, our JROTC SAI BUILT a .22 range on the edge of campus. We’d march TO & FROM it during class with rifles slung, and go shooting AT school, and nobody had a shitsplosion over it. :rolleyes:

Oh well… time to teach the little ones how things WERE… and how things OUGHTA BE!

9

Times have changed. One time in speech class we had to do a demonstration speech, mine was how to disassemble an M1 carbine. It was no big deal. I brought it to school on the bus in a rifle case, gave the demonstration in class then took it home. No big deal.

10

Even in the late 90s when I was in high school, it was common to see pickups with rifles in the back glass and dead bucks in the bed during deer season just sitting in the school parking lot. Some kids made sure to park on the street instead of on school property, but by and large nobody ever really cared. Kids wore Buck knives on their belts to shop class, and we used to take .22 rifles out camping with us as long as we weren’t on an ‘official’ Boy Scout camp trip.

Then Columbine happened during my senior year, and everything seemed to change overnight. By the next year, all the kids in the high school had to wear ID badges at all times (with less than 500 kids in the entire school, mind you, so all the teachers knew all the students), and the exterior doors were kept locked. The students were no longer allowed to leave campus for lunch. They even removed the pay-to-play jukebox from the lunchroom (though that had more to do with the idiot vice principal not knowing what “Nine Inch Nails” lyrics were until she heard them blasting through the cafeteria).

My grandpa used to take his .22 or his 12-gauge to school with him and keep it in his locker so he could hunt on the way home and put supper on the table. We’ve fallen a long way since then.

11

I remember going out to the gravel pits after school with quite a bit in the trunk :slight_smile:
AR-15
HK91(s)
a few 22s
a few handguns about 6 or so
including a few black powder ones :slight_smile: and at least 2-3 lbs of black powder
ammo case or half case of .223 308 44 mag 45 auto 9mm and a few bricks of 22

I could not imagine today you would be labeled as a terrorist or something ?
gravel pits used to be a dump for old cars washing machines etc…
was fun to find a new thing to shoot up would bring food and stay most of the day shooting

12

I grew up in the 90s and graduated high school in 2002. Like LHS said before, Columbine changed everything. I remember in middle school and early high school openly talking with my friends and teachers about guns and shooting. I once did a report on the history of the hand grenade and made a poster board diagram of how they worked for a class. When we were talking about the Kennedy assassination the teacher referred to the “riflemen” in the class when discussing the shots.

Then after Columbine they became a bit more strict, but not horribly so. We had a kid that forgot his shotgun in his trunk and brought it to school. He was expelled and it became a hot topic around town here in Phx. But most of the community were actually in favor of the least amount of punishment for the kid.

I think today it really depends on what area of the country you are talking about with regards to the OPs topic. A couple years ago when I visited my aunt and uncle in rural Oklahoma, the neighbor kid (14 at the time) showed me around their property and was armed with a shotgun. He actually was not supposed to go out unarmed because of their feral pig problem.

13

I’d hazzard a guess that it is true. It might be each generation has gotten worse, especially since the baby boomers started fixing things in the 60s. It scares me to imagine where we might go from here in the next couple generations.

And I think I want my country back.

14

The story I heard is that he was “talking” to school administrators about an unrelated issue and he ended up telling them about the gun in his car. It’s not too far from the desert area where I and many others go shoot so it’s possible he was planning on going shooting after school.

My dad told me that when he was a kid in Minnesota, he and some buddies would be walking along I-10 with their rifles to go hunt rabbits. The sheriff would drive by and tell them not to be dumbasses and accidentally shoot each other.

Different world, I guess.

15

i think about this as well, since my son is only 3-1/2 right now. i’m wondering what it’s going to be like when he’s of high school age. when i got my AR15 A2 back in '86, i was so excited about it that i brought it to school in the trunk of my car, to show my physics teacher (who was the type you wanted to share stuff like that with). he came out to the parking lot to check it out, and just said to be discreet about it.

nowadays, idiocy reigns when it comes to zero tolerance:
http://hammeringsparksfromtheanvil.blogspot.com/2007/06/disarming-story-about-political.html

16

It’s going to take another 20 years before we fully understand the consequences of the brainwashing going on in the public education system.

By the time it is apparent it will probably be too late, because the automatons that are being mass produced will be voting as they have been taught.

17

We live in the age of insanity. What was bad is now good and what was good is now bad, it is a world upside down.

18

I remember sitting around the break room at Magnavox in 1989 talking about all manner of weaponry with people, boldly and publicly.

The worst anybody would say would be like, “Why do you like that kind of stuff?” and they’d move on to other conversations.

Now, on the rare occasions the same kind of conversation comes up, 9 out of 10 times somebody asks, “How many schoolkids are you planning on killing?”

19

I grew up in the mid-late 90’s, and early 2000s.

Talking about which variation of the M4 me and my friends wanted to buy when we got older (7th grade) actually got us similar treatment, as a kid who was found with a bag of marijuana on campus. (A trip to the principals office, with a police officer present.)

Talking about guns, was akin to talking about selling crack. SHHHHHHHH.

I hated everything about it, and shooting was a controversial issue with my family as well, as half loved 2A, and believed that ‘‘Every American citizen should own, and be proficient with an M16’’ said my grandpa, and ‘‘there wouldn’t be so many shootings if people couldn’t get guns’’ says the other half of my family.

The only reason I get so many magazines during Christmas is because the Anti-gun part of my family doesn’t know what I like, so they just buy USGI M16 magazines for me, and have them shipped to my house. I kind of don’t give them a choice.

And God forbid one of my anti-2A family members saw a suppressor I was installing once. Remembering that shitstorm made makes me cringe.

20

You should tell them that you are trying to decide on a school and then ask what school their kids go to.

Remind them that the children are the future and the future is looking bleak.