You know @roamer_1 I was just thinking about my youth when I would grab the Sears or Monkey Wards catalog and page through the sporting goods section and picking out, in my mind, all the pistols and rifles that I wanted that they sold all the time never dreaming that once I grew up they would no longer be available from them. I am so amazed that back then we played cops and robbers, cowboys and indians and army all the time with our lifelike toys and none of us ever thought about actually killing someone no matter how angry we were, we dealt with bullies by either fighting them or avoiding them not killing them. I can't recall of too many shootings as a kid but looking at this site
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States#1940s
I see there were a number in the 60's most notably the University of Texas tower shooting. Most 'mass' shootings in the 60's and before were actually criminal like the St. Valentines Massacre Vs crazies. It really wasn't until the 70's that the crazies really started in earnest, wonder why that is? You now even in the latter part of the sixties when I was in junior high in Buena, CA I was in the California Cadet Corp(got me away from a crazy Kiwi science teacher) and we drilled and marched on campus with plugged 03' Springfields and no one blinked an eye and crazier yet we practiced marksmanship firing .22's into cast iron bullet traps on the tennis courts only thirty yards from a main thoroughfare protected by nothing more than a chain link fence.
Now just a bit over 50 years later a child gets arrested and threatened for drawing a picture of a gun or chewing a pop tart into what someone thinks is the shape of a gun in school! How far the communists have forced us down their path. I have often thought I would love to go back to the fifties but I would be happy just to get back to the sixties.
Sorry another winding road of verbosity.
I see that same thing
@GtHawk , and I attribute it to family breakup and the general feminizing of society, especially as it interfaces young lads.
A man will let his boy get hurt because of the lesson in it. Women just ain't wired that way. A man will let two boys fight till they do something to warrant pulling em apart... Like putting the boots to somebody or picking up a tool... And will see to it the fight stops on a tap-out. A woman sees all fighting as naturally bad.
This leads to boys not knowing where the lines are... and being stifled against every instinct, when he does blow off and rebel, anything goes... Because the old bull wasn't there to teach him how, nor is he there to put the lid back on.
Same goes with guns and the outdoors... Important as all get out for a young man to be blooded. As much a rite of passage as winning a fight. Important to learn to track wounded prey and how not to leave em wounded in the first place. First time you have to track a wounded elk for three days, you'll be damn sure of where you put your shot.
But all that tends to not intersect a woman's world, where even here, she'll hardly ever get further into the hunt than the camp, and most of them won't go that far.
Along with that, a general movement of society away from the land, teachers and administrators being overwhelmingly female, and the feminine society starts to reject gun culture as all bad, because killing and fighting are always bad. But that's a good part of what a man IS.
Even here, where country women are still women, the general tendency is for the man to do the dispatching and evisceration (on the farm for instance), with women helping in the butchering. and really overtaking the man when it comes to wrapping and storage.
That is what drives it, I think. Men need to get back in the education game, and be part of family and church - Hard to do anymore.
