I have a mantra I stole from the movie "Almost Famous" that I repeat each time my teenager leaves the house: Don't do drugs!
Lucky for me, he has chosen to be a straightxedge kid (yes, that "x" is intentional... it has to do with a kind of music and lifestyle choice). Straightxedge kids love hard core music so much that they don't do drugs, drink alcohol, have sex or smoke cigarettes (no weed either) to prove their loyalty to the music scene.
I'm relieved, really. I know I have no control over his choices at 17. So it's nice to think something of my values trickled down into his soul.
But now I'm wondering if I shouldn't have chosen a different mantra for my middle son: "Don't shoot guns!"
I grew up in a home where gun control was a hot topic. My dad, esteemed trial lawyer (yes, he made his fortune off of malpractice cases, but his were all the righteous ones, honest!), hates guns. He's seen too many "accidental deaths" from handguns. He's seen brothers blow holes in the heads of sisters while "playing around," he's seen angry husbands shoot desperate wives. I have too, come to think of it.
I remember living in a fairly scary condominium complex in Orange County, California, where we watched a husband chase his wife with a baseball bat, swinging wildly at her, narrowly missing her head. Wisely, she left him and moved in with her mother. One morning a few weeks later, we picked up the Orange County Register to discover that the SOB had hunted her down. He shot her in the head, killing her... dead. Just like that. Made me ill.
Not too many years before that, a 21 year old member of our church's worship team was kidnapped at gunpoint in the Pasadena mall, raped and shot execution style outside the Rose Bowl. How in the hell do kids get guns to do such evil, life-destroying deeds?
I don't like guns. I don't like the ol' "Guns don't kill people, people do" mantra of the NRA. Spare me. It's a lot more work to kill someone with a potato peeler than a pistol.
So when my 13 year old son nearly lifted off the ground when he heard there was a rifle range in the town nearby and that a homeschooling dad was teaching how to shoot guns, could he go Mom, please?.... I nearly had a coronary.
I flashed back to my dad shunning the use of Duplos in the shape of guns when my boys were little and would play at his house. I remember his shocked expression when those same boys put the Duplos down and then turned their fingers into guns to continue to play. But I assumed they'd outgrow this tendency and become respectable citizens.
How could I have known then that we'd move to "conceal and carry" country, the land of Guns and God?
So each week Jon takes Jacob to the firing range (I can't watch) and each week I admire the neat way the bullets have ripped through the target, nearer and nearer to the bull's eye. ::shudder::
Don't shoot guns! That has a nice ring to it, don't you think?
3 comments:
"don't be stupid" - or maybe "don't embarrass yourself". how's that? :)
The shooting guns thing never really took off with our family. I wasn't raised as a gun guy myself and my kids seem satisfied enough playing Metroid or other video games where shooting is involved.
Even though I'm liberal though, I'm not a gun control advocate. I'm okay with the government having more of a hands off policy with how people choose to arm themselves. I just never felt like it would do me any good to have weapons around the house.
Happiness is a warm gun... thus sayeth the bard(s).
Shooting a gun is fun. It's challenging. It's a sport.
It's nothing to be afraid of.
Of the thousands of crimes committed in the US each year with guns, few are committed by 4Hers or NRA people. Criminals use guns to commit crimes.
That doesn't mean I support the NRA and their using the 2nd Amendment to push for no gun control of any kind. No one, imho, has a "right" to have an AK47. It's a killing machine.
j
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