Arsenal of guns brought to elementary school, half of students found carrying knives

November 3, 4:54 AMLA History ExaminerCharles Nichols

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The author as a Cub Scout

The fact that this would be the lead story on every television news show and make the headlines of every major newspaper across the nation today, and it didn’t forty years ago, is proof positive that there is something fundamentally wrong with modern America.

Forty years ago, I attended elementary school in the South Bay of Los Angeles.  My school lay east of the railroad tracks but west of the freeway which meant my community was decidedly blue collar.  Neither inner city nor middle class.  The residents were either moving up the social ladder or moving down.  The border of the high crime areas of Los Angeles was five miles away.  Murders rarely occurred in our town but it seemed to be a preferred dumping ground for gang members from the inner city and serial killers to dump their victims.  Probably because it didn’t have its own police force.  The town was patrolled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department stationed in one of the aforementioned high crime areas which is where the screw ups of the Sheriff’s department were sent.  Twenty years later, twenty of the twenty five officers stationed there would be sent to Federal prison for torture and drug related crimes.

My community was predominantly White, Hispanic, and Asian.  Surprisingly, there was very little gang presence.  The lone Mexican gang was more of an extended family of criminals living on the same block as did an extended family of white criminals.  The white family wasn’t called a gang of course, they were just called “white trash.”  One of the reasons there weren’t many gang members is because the fathers in my community would have given such a severe whipping to any of their children who started acting like wanna-be gangsters they wouldn’t have walked for a week.  That is a presumption on my part, the thought of becoming a gang member would have been inconceivable to the children in my community and of my generation.  Gangster Rap and middle class White boys acting like they’re from the hood lay years away in the future.

Instead, we spent our idle time pitching pennies and listening to Creedence Clearwater on the cheap portable Japanese radios which flooded the market in the 1960s.  We attached a playing card with a clothespin to the wheels of our Schwinn bicycles so that as the spokes of the wheel turned when we rode, it made a clicking sound in lieu of the sound of a motorcycle we were too young to ride.  We didn’t spend our time playing video games, they didn’t exist.  We would spend our summers riding our bikes to the beach or walking along the railroad tracks to look at the horses that were stabled there.

We also carried knives.  Carrying a knife was a rite of passage for boys of my generation.  To be given a Cub Scout pen knife was a way your parents told you that they trusted you, that you had made a significant step towards manhood.

We would have our Cub Scout meetings after school, on Fridays as I recall.  The days we had the meeting we were allowed to wear our Cub Scout uniforms to class and were allowed to leave a few minutes before the bell rang to attend our meeting.  Meetings always began with an inspection.  Was your uniform in order?  Was your neckerchief on properly?  Was the slide polished?  An important component of the inspection was that we had to take the knife out of our pocket and demonstrate that we knew how to safely open it, close it, and otherwise handle it.  Did we know that when we whittled a piece of wood that we were to always cut away from ourselves?  Did we know how to sharpen it properly on a whetstone?

 At one of our afterschool meetings, on school property, the Scout leaders brought an NRA instructor and a dozen or more rifles and shotguns of various makes and models.  Lever actions, bolt actions, single shots, pump actions.  We were taught the proper handling of a firearm, how they were loaded and safely unloaded.  What to do in the case of a misfire.  We were taught how to hold the firearms in a kneeling, standing, and prone position.  We were taught how scopes worked and how to adjust them.  Although there was no live fire practice, because by that time it would have been illegal.  This wasn’t the case for my mother’s generation.

As a high school student in the mid-west during the early 1940s, students would bring their rifles to the high school and practice shooting them as part of their rifle club in preparation for competitions with the other high schools.  The only homicide my mother can recall that occurred in her town was a tragic accident.  A man accidently shot his son in his living room in the middle of the night.  His son had gone off to fight in World War II and returned after three years, when the war ended.  He had climbed through the window of his home in the middle of the night intending to surprise his father who did not know he had returned from the war.

Just a couple of weeks ago in Delaware, a six year old boy faced 45 days in reform school for bringing a combination, spoon, fork and knife which folds up (a kind of Swiss Army knife).  In upstate New York, a 17 year old Eagle Scout was suspended for 20 days from school for keeping a two inch long pocket knife in the trunk of his automobile along with his sleeping bag, water and a ready-to-eat meal.  The school called the police and tried to have him arrested, the police officer replied by saying that he can’t arrest him, he wasn’t breaking any law.  The principal suspended him for the maximum 5 days allowed to him, the school superintendent, who did not even bother to attend the disciplinary hearing tacked on an additional 15 days suspension.  When I was in the eighth grade, I had brought several scalpels to class to dissect a frog; my fellow classmates had brought razor blades to do the dissection.

So, in three generations, we have gone from school boys bringing rifles to school and shooting them on school grounds in competitions, to my generation, where every school boy carried a pocket knife and learned how to safely handle a firearm on school grounds, to today; where a “spork” or two inch pocket knife can get a child or Eagle Scout in hot water.

It is said that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result.  Not only do voters keep electing these same kind of lunatics over and over, they keep giving them their tax dollars.  Which makes them even more dangerous.  Over 200 years ago, a wise American said that “Government is Evil.”  Nearly thirty years ago Ronald Reagan said that government is the problem and not the solution.  Here’s a thought, instead of throwing your tax dollars into the coffers of these bureaucrats; shut them down.  The world won’t end and your life will be better without them.