Once Upon a Time When Guns Were Okay. . .

by Jack Lee

One of my best childhood memories was when I rode my old bicycle to the river bottoms with my BB gun. What an adventure. I must have been about 7 or 8 and I was usually accompanied by two or three friends around the same age. We would explore, with some trepidation I might add, the mysteries of the underbrush and densely treed lands near the Feather River and Jack Slough.

There was hundreds of acres of flat land along the river between the twin cities of Marysville and Yuba City. The river bottom went unimproved until the late 1970’s for good reason, it tended to flood every year before the Oroville dam was built.

Sometimes around December the brown swirling river water would rise and overflow its banks and on really bad years it would rise to the top of the 40′ levees. When that happened the Feather river looked like what we imagined the Mississippi must be like all of the time. For a little kid those high-water times were pretty scary because the only thing separating the town from a torrent of muddy flood waters was that old levee.

But, in the dry summer times the river bottom land made for the perfect playground, especially for us Marysville boys. There was plenty of room to build forts, both on the ground and in tall oak and cottonwood trees or hack out paths through the blackberry bushes. We played explorers hacking through the brush or we took on the role of Indian scouts from the latest western movie we had seen.

The ancient river bottoms was a fun place and it was home to numerous jack rabbits, cotton tails, squirrels, skunks, possum, red wing black birds, meadowlarks, orioles, etc. On the larger end of the animal population there was even the occasional deer. I’ll be there was probably a mountain lion or two that came down from the hills for the deer, but in all my years of exploring the river area I never saw one. It didn’t mean we were NOT on the lookout, we absolutely were. We even went so far as to invent stories about animal attacks on unwary kids just to scare ourselves. We had stories about every sort of stalking fanged predator our young minds could invent and this of course convinced us that we in danger every single minute (almost). Hey, it was part of the fun! However, it was reassuring that we were armed with our BB guns and sometimes cap pistols, even if we didn’t understand we were really not armed at all.

As I grew up my Dad’s .22 Winchester, Model 1890 pump, replaced my trusty Daisy BB gun. Then some years later in my teens I bought a .303 British bolt action rifle of the WWII era. That was a quit a leap forward from a .22 to a powerful 30 cal.

As I recall, I just bought that old surplus rifle from a store and walked out with it. Back then there was no paperwork and no ID required, I loved those days.

Starting around age 6, the escalating training, education and experience with firearms made me appreciate and respect the sport. And when my age allowed it, I took numerous firearm safety courses from the NRA, which at that time was required to get a hunting license. Our firearm safety training in the 1950’s was first class too, because the men instructing us were vets from WWII and Korea.

For the most part kids today will be deprived of that great experience and all the adventure because the world has changed, and not for the better at least in my mind.

Wherever you look there are no trespassing and no hunting signs. Hardly any land around here remains in its natural state. The development of open wild lands and the tendency by overly protective mothers and fathers to never give their child a toy gun means kids grow up not knowing or caring about wild lands and about guns. I suppose to some extent this has contributed to later generations relying more virtual adventures than real ones and also on the armed part of government to protect them.

This is why I think firearms in the hands of civilians in the US are on the decline. Ownership is often looked on as a sign of ignorance or paranoia. The restrictions on purchases, the required gunlocks, gun safes for storage and the paperwork contribute to greatly to a deterrent to gun ownership. No doubt there are many who might otherwise enjoy shooting sports, or having a little home protection, but they are intimidated by the rules, regs., their costs and the lack of places to use the firearm.

Firearms have been getting a bad rap for decades and that’s slowed ownership too. Whenever one person out of 350 million does something evil with a firearm, its an instant knee jerk, “I told ya so” by the anti-gun lobby! If its bad enough, we get another new gun law. Never mind that the laws only work on the law abiding – not the criminal. So, a bad event is like an indictment on the tens of millions of people who DO act responsibly with a firearm and that’s the unfair part of it. If we treated cars the same way we would likely all be riding buses or bicycles.

When I was at the last Chico gun show I noticed most of the vendors were getting up there in years. They were mostly from generation, children born in the late 40’s or early 50’s. This validated my concern that firearms are losing their appeal to the newer generations. It’s just another sign of the times we live in. And it’s a shame. Fortunately we have the last hold outs of young and old who appreciate our 2nd amendment right and they can still be found on shooting ranges across the USA When we see the public ranges being pushed out of existence it’s pretty over for shooing sports and maybe a lot of other things too.