Guns At School

[Elkins45]

Seen on Twitter yesterday. I’m happy to say they got dragged pretty hard for it.

 

[shafter]

Obviously I'm older than dirt but when I was a kid, going to school, guns were everyday items.
It was common for kids to get on the bus in the morning with their rifle / shotgun to either be used at "the school gun club" or to get off the bus at a friend's house after school to go hunting / target shooting.
Of course this was long before guns were considered evil, with minds of their own... randomly sneaking out & causing trouble all by themselves.
Most of us kids grew up on ranches. As such most boys had a knife of some sort on their belt. They were necessary tools... not weapons!
Oh we had typical kid fights, but NEVER did I hear of anyone even remotely threaten another with a gun or knife. EVER!
A huge factor in that... every adult had the same authority as our parents... often worse! If we screwed up, we got our backsides beat on the spot! Then long before we made it home, our parents knew all about it and we got beat again! It was always worse at home!
Nobody screwed up much!
This was both elementary and high school. If I could find my old yearbooks, there are several "gun pics" besides the "gun club photos".
Then something changed, when I wasn't paying attention. Guns suddenly became horrifying!
Arbitrarily biting a PopTart into a crude shape of a pistol became a criminal offense!
What happened to toy guns? Seriously... when was the last time any of us saw a cap gun in a toy store? Anybody?

Those definitely sound like better days, however, the kids today aren't the same as the kids back then. At least many of them aren't. As for cap guns in store they still have them in Walmart.

 

[Offhand McFlan]

I don't -- and didn't, at the time -- see 1990 as any sort of watershed. The process of polarization has been quite gradual.

Well as I did mention, long ago there was the thing referred to as the military industrial complex and that went back to Eisenhower's day and probably also had a lot to do with Operation Paperclip. I know it's been a gradual process, but there have been very prominent milestones along the way. The reunification of Germany in conjunction with the fall of communism was one of them. I worked with a dude about 14 years my senior until he died a couple years ago....and he also talked about 1990 being a really pivotal year. Every once in awhile we wake up to see that there's a new pillar in place. Really important to look at the Bush family too. The senior Bush was head of the CIA and he would have been thrust right into office if the attempt on Reagan's life had succeeded. That is very implicating! Then 8 years later he announced the officiality of the New World Order. Then 11 years after that his son was the 9/11 president. (Another major turning point in American freedoms.) It's also very important to note that every president since Bush Sr. has endorsed the new world order by name except for Trump. That is quite a collective effort, and explains why the media went all out for the jugular in trying to oust Trump from office. Because he was threatening to overturn decades of work that included many operatives both in and out of the public eye.

 

[herrwalther]

I was at the very trail edge of guns in schools being the worst thing imaginable. According to antis. In high school it was very common to see my friends with hunting rifles hanging up on the back windshield of pickup trucks, in the school parking lot, during deer season. Knew students that would come in Friday dressed in hunting camo, go hunting all weekend, and show up Monday morning in the same outfit. Lucky ones had deer blood in spots, others didn't. Columbine shooting happened when I was in school. Didn't change the gun attitudes in my town. Even if it was very upstate NY. To this day my high school doesn't have metal detectors at the doors.

College was another story. My alma mater did and still has hundreds of genuine M16A2s on campus. About a half dozen select fire MP5s and the same number of M14s. But somehow we don't have a competitive shooting team. Made a lot of headway getting that solved when I was there but never finished.

 

[Robert]

There is far too much politics in this thread for me to even want to begin to prune it. We. Don't. Do. Politics. We are done here.