Guns & Roses
Guns do not regularly come into my consciousness, but this morning I got an email from a friend who hails from Oklahoma and who was home for a visit with dear old Mom. This guy is a motorcycling friend who now works as a movie art director. In other words, he is a design professional and a liberal and urban sort of guy. But his roots are in Osage country. He sent me an email with a photo of a rifle leaned up in the corner of a room (sort of looked like a utility room of sorts) with the tag line “Kind of says it all”, about his weekend at Mom’s homestead. This is a fascinating aspect of American life that is, strangely, not foreign to me.
I grew up all around the world in a combination of urban, suburban and rural locales. I spent two years in a tropical valley in Central America, where the machete was the weapon of choice against the wilds of the ever-encroaching jungle (it was literally coming at us from all sides and would sneak up on us overnight…very interesting and a bit intimidating). I lived for three years in Italy and while we lived in Rome, I was out in the country with more rural friends all the time and motorcycling into the country (mountains and shore) all the time. I never saw a gun during that whole time. I lived in Venezuela for four years where the jungle was again the enemy and where monkeys would swing in to grab your scrambled eggs alfresco if you were not attentive. No guns.
But when I would go to visit my grandfather in rural Upstate New York, he lived on a small farm with a big barn, fields of corn and vegetables and a creek and woods beyond. He kept guns and at the age of four or five I can remember being taken out with him to shoot a .22 at some target behind the barn. He told me that this particular rifle was mine and that I would get it and a Swiss Army knife he showed me, when I turned twelve. That seemed like a very neat deal to me and I was anxious to arrive at the magical age of twelve to be given these great weapons for unknown purpose.
When I was in grade school in Wisconsin, I went to summer camp one summer in the northern part of the state. One of the normal activities was rifle target shooting. We would shoot prone with .22 rifles, with bolt actions identical to the one I was supposed to inherit at age twelve. I took to shooting as a “sport” and excelled at target shooting. The camp had NRA certification capabilities and the benchmarking they used were those standards and awards. I became a Pro-marksman, then a Marksman First Class, and then a Sharpshooter. Sharpshooters came with multiple grades (I guess it was hard to find more neat-sounding names for the levels) and I got to Bar Three of the nine Bars available. There was some advanced levels beyond that, but I only went one summer so it remains a mystery.
When I moved to Maine in sixth grade, at age twelve, I desperately wanted a BB gun. My grandfather had died and that gun of mine got somehow diverted and forgotten. A BB gun was every young boy’s dream in that age and era, as well-described in Ralphie’s Christmas Story. As a side note to prove that life and art do, indeed, mimic each other, I also recall one winter day being goaded to put my tongue on the metal handle of the playground merry-go-round. Just like Ralphie and his pals, us kids in Maine took pleasure in having some kid suffer the frozen tongue punishment for being stupid enough to take a dare.
When I got the BB gun for Christmas, my mother, who was starting to become anti-gun even in those mid-60’s days, I was told not to harm anything with it and never aim it at anybody. That was a fair compromise, but I lied and immediately went out to hunt with my BB gun. I shot at birds and chipmunks but rarely got close. One time I scared a chipmunk into the house storm cellar and learned a valuable lesson. When I flung open the storm doors and brandished the rifle at the poor little chipmunk, he ran back and forth in fear and then made his decision to charge at me. Good call, chipmunk. It scared the shit out of me and I fell back, shooting a BB into the air as the chipmunk ran off victorious into the woods. After composing myself, I went out after birds and left crazy chipmunks alone.
I once and only once took bead on a bird on a wire and hit it. The bird dropped dead to the ground. I couldn’t believe it. I went up to it and nudged it with my rifle barrel. I remember distinctly the feeling that I had done something horrible. I was honestly ashamed of myself. The BB gun went into the corner of my closet, never to be taken out again. I can just assume that my mother tossed it before our next move, but I never hankered after guns from that moment on. It was an issue in Maine. I got invited to duck and deer hunting outing all the time by friends and their fathers. I was pitied as a fatherless waif, and I’m sure they all felt I would grow up as a panty-waist, but I had simply become anti-gun in one fell swoop, or one felled bird.
As I have grown as an adult, guns have not figured in my consciousness except a few times. I was once on the Champs Elysees on a business trip when a colleague took me into a gun club in the basement of a sporting goods store. There we shot machine guns (Uzis) at a target. I learned a different lesson in that they charged by the round and it only took about a second to run up a $300 bill. Not worth it. I also came across guns on a motorcycle trip to Maine (naturally it was Maine). I took a turn with some skeet and hit one double before the shotgun jammed. I took that as a sign of my perfection at handling guns and the universe’s message that I should put down guns.
Today I am going out to the wilds of New Jersey for a Memorial Day outing with my granddaughters. It does not involve guns. It involves picking flowers and strawberries. I would rather hunt roses and strawberries than shoot guns. The world simply does not need guns anymore and nor do I.