Bang! You’re dead! Ah, to go back to the innocent days of childhood when Cops and Robbers was a favorite game amongst us children. At that when I was a boy we were far more interested in shooting marbles than we were each other. Come to think of it, I don’t recall that children shooting each other was some rite of passage back in those really, really old days of my childhood in Kern County. Toy stores were filled with cap guns of every description when I was a boy and I had several, and there were G-Man kits with badge, handcuffs, and fingerprint powder so kids could identify with Dick Tracy and Gangbusters and our motto was Crime does not pay! My oh my, how the times have changed.

One of the truly big events of my childhood was earning my genuine Daisy Red Ryder Carbine by selling Cloverine Salve and garden seed door-to-door, and my cap guns were all but abandoned thereafter. Once I had that childhood dream of every boy my age in my hands I then actually belonged among the Riders of the Purple Sage and could shoot it out with the bad guys alongside Tom Mix, The Lone Ranger, Red Ryder, and Hopalong Cassidy, though the best I could really do at the time in place of the real thing was to walk out into the alkali and sagebrush fields surrounding Little Oklahoma in Southeast Bakersfield and plink stinkbugs and grasshoppers. Nevertheless, in my imagination so long as I was carrying that Red Ryder Carbine, cocking, aiming and shooting it I was transported to that mystical world, that special and all too soon to pass domain of fantasy and make believe belonging to childhood, in which so many other children like me dwelled.

However, making the transition from childhood to real guns designed to kill has a very long tradition in America. From the time of colonization on our history as a nation has been steeped in bloodshed and even Henry Thoreau recommended boys should shoulder a fowling piece and learn to shoot. Our Founding Fathers recognized the liberty of our nation could only be maintained by an armed citizenry prepared to do battle against any tyranny of government, which was the basis of our Second Amendment right to own and bear arms.

But whether rocks, sticks, bows and arrows, sword or gun play, children in all cultures, primarily boys, are raised with the idea of battle being a part of that culture. And the worst part is a warrior culture breeds the concept there is something honorable and heroic about doing battle in wars, romanticizing the idea that killing people is the correct thing to do. For our species to even survive in the face of such brutal conditions in the past makes this sensible, but the hope has long been civilization would eventually displace such violence. However, when conditions deteriorate for any nation and it becomes a question of survival the veneer of civilization is quickly stripped away.

Much like the monster in Forbidden Planet that Morbius said he felt was never far away, such is the monster human beings have always had to live with. The monster of the wars men make is known by the battles and bloodshed outwardly, but that unseen monster not far away is always at the ready to pounce even in the most civilized of cultures.

As a nation America has a long history of glorifying violence, of romanticizing wars, honors and laurels going to our most illustrious heroes, monuments built, stories written and films made doing homage to Mars, and even the Psalmist thanked God for “teaching my hands to war.” Yet the sanest of minds realize violence only begets more violence, and a civilized society that permits violence to be romanticized in any fashion cannot long remain a civilized society.

When I was a boy it didn’t enter my mind to take either my cap guns or my Red Ryder BB gun to school. Children way back then were taught better, and we knew the proper place for such things. This had changed considerably when I became a teacher in Watts during the 60s and I did carry a gun to school. But I quickly realized the dangers pupils and teachers faced in that environment were going to become the same dangers in schools across America.

As an expert gunsmith and a handloader of several decades now, being born to guns and hunting being a part of my childhood I am a steadfast member of the NRA and proponent of Right to Carry. But now the present lunacy of encouraging teachers to carry guns in their classrooms is nearly beyond my comprehension! But I can understand the events in our culture leading up to such a thing, and none of them are encouraging for our survival as a civilized society. You simply cannot encourage barbarism and violence without reaping the whirlwind.

One might think children being recruited by barbarian nations for their armies and as homicidal suicide bombers only a peculiarity of such nations, throwbacks to the time when even children were taught the lessons of the survival of the fittest against the brutal times and circumstances in which they lived. But now the barbarians roam the streets of America and attend our schools, and children are being taught by Hollywood and TV, so-called games that violence is to be an acceptable part of their culture!

It is no longer safe to walk the streets of America, and it all goes back to the difference in the culture in which I was raised and what has overtaken America in its place. Like the old Bugs Bunny cartoons with which I was raised, we children knew that despite the violence they were only cartoons and did not mistake them for real life. But when perverted cartoons began to intrude with a different form of violence actually intended to promote violence in real life, ah, that was something quite different.

For all its deficiencies my Norman Rockwell generation was able to muddle through with a system of education that actually taught Johnny to read, write, and cipher, a generation that held teachers to certain standards and schools were a place of discipline and safety as well as instruction. That has long been betrayed and traded for a failed system of education in which none of these is true.

But for those of us who experienced Norman Rockwell’s America, for those like me that experienced as a teacher what was happening in our schools during the 60s the trend forecast was not that difficult to make. As to safety for children in the schools, that went the way of an entire society that began to act as though it actually hated children! And now we have come to the sorry pass where it is even a matter of debate as to whether to arm teachers! God help America because no one else can when Bang! You’re dead! is no longer a game children play.