A few years ago –– before desktop computers but after the Comanche war bands were driven into Oklahoma –– I grew up south of Midlothian, Texas. Those were dangerous times. By age 9, I was trusted with a firearm. Our old family place has, of course, since been annexed.

I don’t think anyone thought that the Comanches were coming back. They were starting to adjust to the oil royalties and were busy learning how to deal blackjack. In reality they are to be commended for trading the warrior's path for astute business practices. Just in case they started south, my father gave me a single shot 410 shotgun. After proper instruction, I was allowed to wander about 90 acres of my grandparents’’ property that was adjacent to ours, armed. The pasture was soon devoid of skunks. The starlings and blackbirds also learned caution. I learned responsibility.

Yep, those were the days, armed and 9. OK, so if you have picked yourself off the floor, I just want to make sure that everyone knows I had already had practical practice in gun safety. From about age 7 on, I was armed with a real BB gun –– not the wimpy BB guns we have now and not a souped-up $400 air rifle that can shoot through an armored vehicle, but a BB gun that was still capable of homicide, at least to mice, barn rats and the odd blackbird. I know this is going to upset someone, but there were no serious incidents with the BB gun. There were absolutely no safety incidents with the shotgun.

The truth is, a firearm is easier to handle safely than a car. The firearm has safety features designed to protect the public, plus the radius of possible injury is narrower than that of most vehicles. The potential damage path of a vehicle is the width of the bumper, as long as the car is not skidding sideways –– if that’s the case, then the car can cut a swath of destruction the length of the vehicle. I am not saying that firearms in the hands of the untrained, immature or imbecilic are not potentially dangerous, but they have to be loaded, cocked and/or chambered and pointed in the wrong direction to do damage. When I was 15, my great uncle, a World War Two vet, told me that a steering wheel was the most dangerous device I would ever have my hands on. I believed him. He later served as the municipal judge for the city of MacGregor, near Waco. I am sure someone else heard his lecture.

By the time I was 14, I was trusted with a Browning "humpback" semi-auto 12 gauge. I think I actually assumed squatter’s rights to it by age 11, but I didn’t want to shock anyone. For the record, I was always a licensed hunter. Licenses were nearly free, and you did not have to get a special safety certificate then. Fathers, uncles and grandfathers took care of the safety lessons. Quail were in abundance on my grandfather’s property and we harvested a number of them. I also learned to cook them about that time. By the time I turned 16, I hunted regularly with other boys my age. One of my hunting buddies hunted with a semi-auto, another with a pump. We never knocked over a convenience store, nor did we engage in gang violence. We did dust a few coyotes, the four-footed kind.

In that horrible, dangerous era, at about age 6, I also learned to light my own fireworks. The secret is to put the thing on the ground and light it with a smoldering "punk" stick. Then you leave the immediate area. It was also helpful to make sure any projectile-type fireworks pointed away from the person doing the lighting and at least most of his friends. Fireworks displays on July Fourth typically involved my young adult and pre-adult cousins, many years later some are still pre-adult –– sometimes I wonder about myself, coming out to the country to enjoy a grand southern meal as only a grandmother could make. Thus sated with fried chicken and gravy, we had to make sure we handled our explosives carefully; after all, we were too full from supper to dodge a bottle rocket or a blast from a Roman candle. No one was maimed and no one required medical treatment. Besides, if we knew how to handle fireworks, we thought we would be ready for the Russians. The Russians never came. They now sell us oil.

Also in that dreaded era, I often carried a pocketknife to school. So did many other boys. We knew to keep them in our pockets. One day in junior high shop class, our teacher needed to cut a hose for a lawn mower engine. He asked if anyone in class had a pocket knife. Half the class did . He used that as an opportunity to teach us a short lesson about knife safety, but that was back when men were men, even at school, and certainly including shop teachers. As a freshman in high school, I also loaned my knife to a young lady in my agriculture class so she could castrate a young pig. We actually did that for a grade, kind of a lab grade.

Yes, there were knives in the classroom. There were often shotguns in the trunks of cars in the parking lot. Yet, where was the mayhem? There were plenty of fights. There was a restraint. I think it was cultural and faith-driven. I would also speculate that there was much more family influence and control. There was also a rather manly code. Nowadays some might sneer and call it macho, but it controlled violence. We absolutely frowned on the idea that anyone who was a man would bring a weapon into a fist fight. Unlike today, a fight at school was met with the exercise of reason by those in charge. An attempt was made to determine the guilty party and punishment was usually issued only to the guilty. The common practice now seems to be putting all participants in the modern version of detention, even when one party is clearly engaging in self-defense.

The older code was more powerful than all the detention, surveillance cameras, school police and metal detectors in a modern school. We need to bring that code back. Those cultural understandings, those codes, are a byproduct of society that expects its young males to exercise some responsibility and entrusts them with it. Those macho codes are a characteristic of liberty and a freedom-loving society.

Paul D. Perry

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