I'd graduated from Webelos to Tenderfoot less than a year before this installment of "Scoutcraft" (right) appeared in the April 1969 issue. At camp a few months later, I'd fire a gun for the first time -- a .22 Winchester Model 52 with peep sights.I was 12 years old.
Before we had political correctness, universal psychotherapy and other forms of wussification, a rifle was a tool and marksmanship was as much "Scoutcraft" as knot-tying, whittling and firebuilding. For any self-respecting American boy, hell, handling a rifle was an essential part of growing up in the Heartland.
My dad took me shooting shortly after I returned from Camp Buckeye that year. We drove out to the farmstead where he was born and raised, parked the car and trudged through tangle to the edge of a sandstone quarry.
It was the very spot where his father once taught him to shoot.
To my adolescent delight, we spent the morning bagging tin cans, one shot at a time. We took turns plinking with a well-loved Winchester Model 67 -- fittingly, the first gun that my dad ever fired.
I remember noticing how much my father enjoyed himself that day. It wasn't until many years later, when I had boys in my own life, that I understood why -- it was a rite of passage.
That Model 67 is mine now. I think I'll take my 15-year-old spawn to the range soon and give him a turn with the old single-shot .22.
Checking the calendar, though, I see that it's not 1969 anymore. Our culture has changed -- for the worse, in my opinion -- along with what boyhood means. There's no rewinding that.
Move these items out of the "expected" category and file them under "endangered": inspirational ads for Winchester, Remington or even Daisy in the pages of a magazine for boys; encouragement to become a Junior Member of the NRA; tutorials on how to be a crack shot.
A boy who wants to learn to shoot raises more eyebrows now than he does smiles. In some places, a dad who hands his boy a gun -- even an air rifle -- risks having his name inscribed on some nanny's list.
Writing a couple of years ago about vanishing traditions, I concluded,
"We've lost so much more than we've gained."That commentary on our society, sadly correct though it may be, shouldn't prevent independent Americans from raising our children the way they ought to be raised.
(This classic Winchester ad appeared in the August 1967 issue of Boys' Life.)
