Is Gun Ownership Returning to Normality?

When I was in high school, back in the early 90s, guns were still a normal part of life in the South. In fact, it was normal to look out in my high school parking lot and see guns hanging in the gun racks of folks’ pickup trucks. My school, a small, private school in a city surrounded by rural areas, was full of hunters. Monday morning was a time when the guys–and yeah, some gals–would sit around homeroom and talk about their time in the woods and what they got. 

Still others would hit the wood before school. That included the headmaster, who once brought the turkey he had bagged to school to throw in the fridge at the football stadium so he wouldn’t lose the meat.

We joked that if you shot a deer and had to track it, it was an excused absence.

Guns were just normal to us. No one considered grabbing a shotgun out of someone’s truck and shooting up the school, even though school shootings were on the news. Those were gang-related, and we weren’t gang members.

Then things started to shift culturally. We saw the Brady Bill pass a year after I graduated from high school. The federal assault weapon ban came just a year later. The tide seemed to be shifting on guns, and not for the better.

Over at America’s 1st Freedom, though, law professor and Blog Father Glenn Harland Reynolds, aka Instapundit, notes that things are changing once again. And yeah, it’s still not necessarily for the better.

So, guns are common. But are they really normal—by this, I mean are they normal in the way they were in my grandfather’s day? Well, I’d say we’re now seeing the beginning of a new normal.

When I was a kid, you could walk into the Sears at the mall and they’d have a gun department, with both long guns and handguns. Catalogs listed them, and Christmas ads in magazines—including kids’ magazines—extolled .22 rifles or .410 shotguns as suitable gifts for boys and girls. Sometimes the ads pictured entire families proudly displaying new guns around the Christmas tree.

High schools had rifle teams, even in New York City. A New York Post retrospective remembers: “Many of the city’s public high schools had shooting clubs and a few even had gun ranges on their premises, according to accounts from the Department of Education and others.” (You can find photos online of teams carrying their rifles to a match as they ride the subway or posing on the school steps with their guns.) Elsewhere, high schoolers would hunt on the way to school or on the way home, leaving their guns in their lockers. Pickup trucks in high school parking lots had gun racks, sometimes with rifles or shotguns visible.

Summer camps and Boy Scout troops inevitably taught riflery, and even my junior high school had an after-school shooting program staffed by NRA volunteers. And none of it was controversial. The “gun culture” was just part of the general culture, as it had been for over two centuries.

Nowadays, after decades of political and cultural attacks from the far Left, guns are common, and there’s a booming gun culture, but it’s different. Interestingly, an increasing number of schools do have shooting teams again. The Scouts still teach riflery, as does 4H, the NRA Youth Hunter Education Challenge (yhec.nra.org) and others. And today, an increasing number of folks, even on the Left, are buying guns for self-defense. But also today, guns are treated as a political statement by some, or they are kept in secret by others who are perhaps afraid of what their friends or neighbors might say.

Of course, Reynolds recounts a time at high school not dissimilar from my own experience.

As for Boy Scouts, my one year working as staff at the local Scout summer camp was spent working the rifle range, where we used single-shot .22 rifles to teach basic marksmanship and gun safety, under the supervision of the rangemaster, who was an active duty Marine. I had a blast working the range–pun fully intended–and it was very normal.

I honestly don’t know if they still do it, but I do know that shotguns in rural school parking lots isn’t what it once was.

And yeah, a lot of people hide their guns.

A few years ago, I floated a suggestion to make July “Gun Pride Month.” I wanted to try and normalize gun ownership and for people to be proud of exercising their Second Amendment rights.

Some folks actually accused me of being a fed who wanted to collect data on who owned what.

The reason I bring this up is that it’s hard for guns to be normal when people are too concerned about gun control to even acknowledge having them. We’ve all heard the joke about those “tragic boating accidents” that wipe out entire gun collections. I don’t mind them because no one actually believes them for a moment, but if people are concerned about even showing that they own guns, it’s hard for them to be normalized.

Normality matters, too,  and we’re not there. Not by a long shot.

It’s a lot harder to ban something that seemingly everyone has and enjoys. They have to stigmatize it, first, and anti-gunners have and continue to do so. Reynolds recalls Stephen Spielberg even removing guns via CGI and replacing them with radios for the rerelease of E.T. Federal agents can’t even have guns in the movie these days.

But we do have them. 

The question is, how can we maintain our privacy while normalizing guns?

Can we?

Well, to a degree, I genuinely think we are.

Reynolds recounts seeing a woman at the gym hoisting a 15-pound barbell to her shoulder. “Practicing for 3-gun?” he asked her. 

“How did you know?” was her reply.

People are embracing guns more often than you might think. I’ll give you one bit of anecdotal evidence I recently ran across involving a man and his therapist. The man, a middle-aged white dude from the South, mentioned a harrowing experience with a potential stalker to the therapist. The therapist, a middle-aged black woman from the South, listened and said, among other things, “Stay strapped or get clapped.”

She also offered to bring her own gun to provide backup should the stalker try anything.

Yeah, I think the culture is starting to shift back to where guns are normal and no longer the purview of older white dudes. That’s a very good thing. I just wish it would hurry up a bit so we could, hopefully, put an end to some of this anti-gun nonsense. I’m more than a little sick of it.

Editor’s Note: Keeping and bearing arms aren’t just normal acts that millions of normal Americans do every day. They’re fundamental rights protected by our Constitution. 

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