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I don’t think the concepts “puppet show” and “gun safety” had ever cohabited in my consciousness before a quick conversation my son and I had recently.
“So what’s going at school tomorrow?” I asked our two boys as they got ready for bed.
“Nothing.” Chad paused. “Oh, but we do have two assemblies tomorrow. A puppet show then one on gun safety.”
A puppet show and an assembly on gun safety. I thought a program on gun safety was, in principle, a very good idea, but I was a little curious about just what that program would be.
We live in a little town of about forty-five hundred people tucked into the Allegheny National Forest in the north central part of Pennsylvania. It’s truly beautiful country. We’re a one-stoplight town, and for most of my childhood, we were a no-stoplight-town. No McDonald’s. No Starbucks. It’s forty-five minutes to a Wal-Mart, two-plus hours to a Target. A Whole Foods? We have gardens instead. A movie theater? A drive-in.
My husband and I both grew up here, and after college and stints in Chicago and Denver, we came back. Our parents are here. Our kids go to the same public schools we did, schools that have always been closed on the first day of buck-hunting season. When we had to give demonstration speeches in tenth grade, kids rushed to claim the topic “how to clean your shotgun.” When I worked as clinical social worker, our program staff gave away trigger locks along with the smoke detectors in the home-safety kits. My husband’s concealed weapons permit sits in his wallet right next to his discount grocery card. He hardly ever puts that permit to use, but what I’m talking about is proximity. Guns and groceries. Puppet shows and gun safety.
It turned out the gun safety assembly was presented by the county Sheriff’s Office to all first- and second-graders in our elementary school. According to Chad, the assembly was presided over by a policeman and “some guy in a dumb eagle suit.” From the materials Chad brought home, I could see that “guy” was Eddie Eagle, the mascot of the GunSafe Program of the National Rifle Association. Chad said he’d heard all the take-away messages before from his dad and me, but like the stop-drop-and-roll of fire safety, repetition is good. What do you do if you come across a firearm?
STOP!
DON’T TOUCH.
LEAVE THE AREA.
TELL AN ADULT.
He brought home a couple of coloring books to reinforce the message, and as our family drove into town the next day, I read one aloud so that Josh, our kindergartener, could hear, too. The scene is set in verse: “Eddie Eagle was practicing loop-flying one day / below, in an attic, a group of kids was at play.”
As the kids root through Grandma’s attic, uncovering baseball gloves and dressing up in old hats, they find a rifle under a blanket. Eddie Eagle’s sharp eyes spot the scene: “As I was doing my loops and cruising around / I couldn’t help seeing the gun that you found.” He continues, “I don’t want to spoil your fun time today / But, I don’t want to see you get hurt as you play. A gun like this could mean danger for you / So when you find a gun, here’s what you must do … ” And in “The Night Before Christmas” style, Eddie repeats the message. Stop! Don’t touch. Leave the area. Tell an adult.
It’s fine, but what about this singsong verse would communicate to a child that a gun is any more dangerous than any other inanimate object? There is no sense of urgency here, and I feel the need to emphasize the danger. By then we’re at the ATM. While my husband is entering his PIN, I’m interrogating the kids. What is the danger? What could happen if you play with a gun? I’m confirming that they understand the dimension of lethality involved here. They say they do, but I can clearly see that I’m making them uncomfortable.
“Do you see what I’m getting at?” I ask my husband after the kids have gone back to bopping through the magic worlds of Mario Brothers on their Nintendo DSs.
“Not really,” he says, looking at me across the front seat. “You can’t make them scared of guns. They have to be comfortable handling them and confident using them correctly.” While I agree, I still want the rhyme to admit the dangers of firearms more clearly. Do you have anything more for us here, Eddie?
The only bullet in all of the materials that isn’t an explicit, common-sense safety rule is this: “The materials were presented to your child to teach safety. You, as a parent, are responsible for teaching values and good judgment to your child.” Hmm. This feels suspiciously like being referred to dietary counseling by Ronald McDonald.
A cheap shot, I know, but I think I have the right to be cynical given the overt political stance of the NRA. The 2008 presidential campaign race left us with two vivid characterizations of rural America, each implying a different set of values, both implicating guns. NRA-endorsed candidate Sarah Palin would have had us believe in the “real America”: a land of Memorial Day parades and family reunions, a place where the rabid, white, and blue grow proud and strong on freedom and apple pie, and parents recite the Second Amendment and the Ten Commandments at bedtime. At the other end of the spectrum, Barack Obama invoked a hapless, hopeless place where those of shriveled soul “cling to guns or religion” to brace against the winds of change while failing to grasp the need for a policy solution to the problem of societal violence.
Rural America is a lot more nuanced. Take our household. We are not card-carrying NRA members, and I support a variety of gun control measures. Yet admittedly, if we woke up to a prolonged red dawn scenario, it is reassuring to me to know that among the neighbors on our road, there would be a useful collection of water wells, wood stoves, generators, chain saws, tools, ATVs, horses, fishing poles, bows, a whole lot of know-how, and a whole lot of guns. It isn’t such a stretch to imagine starting a fire and sending the kids to bring home a couple of rabbits for dinner. And that sounds fine, assuming they can hit their targets, and to do that requires practice.
Practice. Practice involves repetition, a measure of autonomy, initiative, and opportunities to succeed and to make mistakes. But learning to hunt is a different ball of wax from practicing scales on a piano, so when the boys set out with free roam of about thirty acres with their slingshots and a pocket full of rocks, I hold my breath even though they can recite the rules verbatim. Ditto for when they go to play at friends’ houses and we find out the supervision of the BB guns is a little loose. My husband is right. In those cases, the kids need to be confident handling any kinds of weapons correctly.
Of course, not everyone agrees with me. Recently Penn State Public Broadcasting aired an essay written by Alison Condie Jaenicke, a mother from State College, on why kids should never handle firearms. She was faced with a dilemma. Her son’s Boy Scout camp included shooting activities, and while she considered allowing him to participate, a couple of regional news stories took her aback. In one, a disturbed pre-teen used his dad’s shotgun to shoot his dad’s pregnant girlfriend while she slept, killing her and the baby. The other involved an accidental shooting death. These horrors clarified Jaenicke’s belief that “our nation’s gun tragedies are directly linked to our obsession with the ‘right to bear arms’ and the insistence that children learn to shoot as soon as they can hold up a gun.” The stakes are just too high, she believed, to allow kids and guns to mix.
I see where she’s coming from. Who couldn’t empathize with her perspective? Who isn’t horrified and heartsick to read an account of violence, especially an account involving children and guns that seems so avoidable? For our boys’ early childhood, avoidance felt like the obvious approach. And for those early years I lay on the sun-drenched floor of the playroom with our boys, graduating from Little People to Playmobil and beyond them all together, all the while realizing the irony that one wall away from our gun-free playroom was a six-foot-high fireproof safe filled with real guns.
Then about the time our younger son could hold up a gun, we decided avoidance was no longer the best approach, and the kids were ready to learn to shoot. We sat at our picnic table and aimed twenty yards through the field at a paper bull’s-eye target tacked onto a plywood frame. I watched Josh kneeling on the bench balancing the .22. His name written on a target in his own kindergarten handwriting, he concentrated on focusing one eye through the scope while his tongue unconsciously wiggled his loose tooth. All five shots hit the target.
As I watched his tongue wiggle that tooth, I couldn’t keep my mind from images of the blank stares of boy soldiers in central Africa, or Middle Eastern children strapped with AK-47s, or the unconscionable numbers of youths in Chicago killed by guns. Yet even as these images tore at my heart, I realized the problem.
Instead of envisioning children and far-flung lands, many miles and cultures removed, I could just as easily have pictured snapshots of my husband as a kid. In so many of those snapshots he’s holding a dead animal—rabbits, grouse, wild turkeys, fish, deer. And in most of them his dad is right next to him. They spent countless hours in the woods, in the pulse of life and its cycles.
I think of the Big Buck Contest, sponsored for years by our local Fish and Game Club. It’s always the first Monday after Thanksgiving. This year, it was cold, the kind of night where the blackness of the sky is so dense it felt like the snowflakes should be suspended in the darkness but instead fell so fast they were almost disorienting. The club served chili and coffee and raffled off a gun as a fundraiser. Hunters dragged their bucks in to be weighed and measured, with prizes to the heaviest, most points, and most inches of antler. All the deer were hung up on a rack by their antlers, their eyes glowing dully like moonstone, their forelegs jutting out at odd angles, stray ticks around their nostrils or ears. Sometimes there’s a dead coyote or two. Our kids were interested until they got too cold. The crowd filled in, a sea of Carhartts and camouflage, blaze orange, babies in pink fleece, American Eagle hoodies.
The event symbolizes years of tradition and history, a culture unto itself, and not one many people pick up later in life. Nationally it is a dwindling hobby. It’s easy to see why. Some days my husband will sit for hours in a tree stand, motionless, uncomfortable, weather-beaten. Some days it requires an almost meditative resolve; other times it takes a rugged aggression to hike far, far off the beaten paths. Good hunters tap into a predatory instinct. The desire has to run deep in a person.
It’s too early too know if that desire will run deep in our boys. A couple of years ago, one didn’t even want to see a dead animal; last fall, both climbed in the back of the truck when their dad brought home an eight-point on the last day of archery. They dared each other to touch the fur, then the ears, then the eyeball, and finally the blood from the abdomen that had been sliced open when it was field-dressed. By the time my husband and his dad started butchering, the kids each had a sawed-off foreleg, flexing the hoof to watch the tendons rise and fall with each bend. They learned a little anatomy, where the meat we eat comes from, and that no natural food comes in the form of a “nugget.” Lately they’ve both been itching to go with their dad after squirrels and spring gobblers.
Though I have my own bow and we spend a good amount of family time doing hunting-related activities, the desire does not run deep in me. But I grew up on horseback and know how an activity can seep so deep into a person that she’s not all there without it. I understand that starting any hobby at a young age allows the fundamentals to graft themselves to a child as naturally as reflexes, and I want that for the kids. Already it’s amazing to me to see the boys handle their bows. I’ve watched them focus down the range at the Fish and Game Club, and without looking to their hip quivers, pull an arrow, knock it on the string, and draw the bow, all in one natural, fluid motion.
Last fall I went with my husband to retrieve his tree stand after archery season. We parked off a dirt logging road and hiked down a pipeline too steep for an ATV, crossed a creek then continued up a valley. After we had the stand and gathered ourselves to hike back, he described the quick kill, walking slowly and pointing. “Here’s where the buck came through. Here’s where he was when the arrow punctured his lung. Here’s where he fell. Here’s where the gut pile was.” He kicked around in the grass for remnants of the guts where he’d field dressed the animal. There weren’t any. “Coyotes must have eaten it already.”
Walking out, I thought about raising the kids to be able to do the same thing someday, and the opportunities hunting offers to develop perspectives on life that are fewer and farther between in our complex and remotely connected world. Hunting teaches kids a deep appreciation of their own agency. Making the decision to pull a trigger or release an arrow requires anticipation of a range of consequences of their actions. And that decision is the culmination of hours and hours spent in preparation—exploring unmarked country, scouting for signs of animals easily overlooked by a casual hiker, persevering in harsh conditions—all of which lead one to an understanding of his humble place in a natural order. Our boys come alive in wilderness spaces, and we want them to have a hobby that offers a way to feel grounded, to test themselves, to learn a degree of self-sufficiency, and most immediately, to spend time with us. Obviously there are a lot of ways to raise responsible, conscientious kids, and the way we enjoy most is through the outdoors, and all that comes with hunting, and that’s exactly why we’re exposing the kids early on.
The boys are, each on their own, figuring out dimensions of lethality and mortality. The other night we stayed up later than usual and caught a trailer for a typical Hollywood blockbuster, and Chad said, “I like guns, but I just don’t like violence.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean, I like guns for hunting deer, but not, like, machine guns shooting at people.”
These sort of exchanges tell me we’re on the right track, that exposure to guns at a young age is not tantamount to initiating children into unthinking culture of violence. In this way, Eddie Eagle was right. The values and judgment that go along with gun safety are far too complex to fit on a flyer.
Given the dangers, from gun accidents to falling out of a tree stand to getting lost in the woods, I’ve made an uneasy peace with raising our boys to grow up hunters, but a peace nonetheless. It’s one that grows deeper on clear evenings like the one last fall early in archery season when all four of us put on camo to scout an apple tree at the edge of a nearby field. The apples were just starting to fall to the ground, and we wanted to learn the patterns of the deer. We walked to the top of the ridge just before dusk and settled on the crest about three hundred yards from the wild apple orchard. We walked quietly, careful to pick up our feet lest we swish the grass. No bug spray lest the wind carry the scent. We set up on a bed of goldenrod and fall grasses, five feet tall in some places. We matted down in silence, passing the binoculars until the first star glowed overhead. The boys were still and quiet, watching. No deer showed themselves that night. We walked home in the dark, soaked through by wet grass and the feeling of being a very small part of everything around us.
The more I thought about the central parenting dilemma with kids and guns, the more I realized that it is the same dilemma we’re going to face with many other dangers, from safe sex to drinking and driving. When is avoidance feasible and appropriate, and when do kids need to be equipped to handle the dangers—and reap the rewards—of engaging with life? We happen to live in a culture, and have chosen a lifestyle, which forces the issue of kids and guns at what I agree is a young age. And while my kids may navigate pretty well in the woods, they’d be clueless on a subway. Context is everything.
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