Joseph in a tree in Moscow with his toy muzzleloader.Clark Myers sent me an email today. Perhaps I forwarded it to some of you. It was a new story about a boy of 10 who had been arrested and arraigned on charges of terrorism for bringing a $5.96 toy revolver to school in his pocket. He didn't threated anyone with it (How could he? It's a toy!) He didn't even pull it out of his pocket; another kid did.
The boy who owned the little thing liked it because it looked somewhat like the single-action revolvers of the Civil War period which had been his class's subject of history study for some days. I suspect it looked more like an 1873 Colt cartridge revolver than an 1860 Colt Army which loaded with loose powder and ball, but he's only ten, after all , and the essential differences might have been lost on him.
I hope the absurdity of this situation is obvious to everyone. If anyone who reads this thinks even for a second that this is the way for adult authority figures to respond to children with toys resembling weapons, then please resign from the human race right now. There has never been a generation in human history in which the children, especially the boys, did not play at what their fathers and older brothers had to do in earnest. It may be seen as sad. It may be seen as being a self-fulfilling prophecy for children to indulge in such play. But it still happens in everyone's childhood to a greater or lesser degree.
If the people who arrest 10 year old boys for carrying toy revolvers and high school girls for leaving a cake knife in her locked car in the parking lot had been in power in Franklin, Tennessee when I was a child there, there wouldn't have been a single male child left at home in the custody of his parents. We played with cars and trucks. We played with electric trains. But the thing we did most often was play at some form of combat. Cops & Robbers. Cowboys & Indians. World War II. With our toy ships and airplanes the combat shifted to a different realm, but it was still a vividly imagined contest in which it was kill or be killed.
In the fifties, most movies were westerns, World War II stories, or crime dramas. Cold War dramas and "creature features" were also seen on the bill. And in every one of them, good guys employed firearms to save good people from bad people or bad creatures. It never occurred to anyone in legislature or in society back then that we should not grow up to own and use firearms, and always as a force for good.
In our little central Tennessee town, the most honor you could have as a little boy was to be "The Grey Ghost" in play. There was a half-hour show on every week in which this Confederate officer would fool and defeat any number of Union soldiers and save the day for noble citizens of Virginia. I was often Colonel Moseby. He really existed, you know. John Singleton Moseby so dominated several Virginia counties that Union forces called them "Moseby's Confederacy." Sometimes I was the Federal leader who fought for Union and against slavery. I knew both sides, because I lived in the south and my mother's people had fought for the North. We felt enobled to play the roles of people on both sides of American conflicts, because we knew that they had played a part - an important part - in the building and shaping of our country.
Years later, when I would read Stephen Vincent Benet's short story The Devil and Daniel Webster to my U.S. History classes, I tried to convey some of that feeling to them. When Jabez Stone is put on trial for his soul in his own kitchen, Mr. Scratch, the Devil, promises a jury of real Americans. And they are, too! Yet every one was seen by regular white settlers as being a villain of the worst stripe. Traitors, murderers, leaders of massacres, and witch-hanging religious zealots filled his jury box, all with the blue fires of hell still upon them. Surely they would do whatever Satan told them to do. But Dan'l Webster didn't complain. He recognized in each of them a person who had made a powerful contribution to the history of his young nation. Good, bad, or indifferent, they were all Americans and had earned a place in her History.
We used to look upon Americans of consequence as being that way. They were people of decisive action. And we wanted them represented that way. That's why John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Gary Cooper, and Charles Bronson were our heroes. For those same reasons, Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, Bruce Dern, and Strother Martin were our favorite bad guys. Jack Elam, too! If you saw his crooked gaze in a western, you knew that you were in for a thrilling confrontation between good and evil. Not an unarmed discussion, but a final, decisive confrontation in which good people risked everything, even their lives, to see to it that their society was not dominated by evil persons.
Evil! Yes! People did not hesitate to call bad things bad. Today we are told to be tolerant of "alternative lifestyles" and "foreign religions." So we tolerate them. And what happens? We are attacked in our own streets and in our own places of business. Thousands die in a single day. If some people lose a free, democratic election, they throw organized tantrums in order to hurt people they don't even know, marring their places of worship and destroying their businesses. and professions.
I have known men who remember carrying bird guns and deer rifles to school with them in the morning, storing them in the "cloak room" at the back of the classroom (remember cloak rooms?) and retrieving them at the end of the day so they could hunt on the way home. It was as common as rain and no one thought anything about it. You know how many
"school shootings" they had back then? Yes, you know. It practically never happened. Good people were armed and expected to be so. Good people were expected to oppose that which was wrong. Today, many are afraid even to "allow" them the means of self-defense, let alone of taking an active hand in the fight against evil in their communities. We are becoming a weak, coddled people who seem to expect the police agencies to do that which the Supreme court has said more than once they are not to be held liable to do, namely to protect our lives.
Well, if they are not to be held responsible to protect us, then who is? The only possible answer is "ourselves."
