When I was growing up in the 50’s-60’s with the other baby boomers, I got my first gun at 12, as did most of my 12-13 YO friends. In every case I know of your dad took you to the store and bought it for you. We all had dads and they paid attention to what we were doing. Many had fresh memories of WW2 and Army training so teaching their kids basic safety was an inherent process. Yes, we took our guns to school to show off. That didn’t bother anybody, but the teacher was mildly concern with what your attention was too that day, not the gun. Nobody got shot or injured except a few rabbits, squirrels, and birds.
What’s changed? I’d start with “we all had dads, and they paid attention.” The government is constantly trying to adjust laws to address problems created by social decay rather than addressing what’s causing the decay.
I think I was closer to eight. Daisy Red Ryder. Then I got a Daisy CO2-300 rifle when I was about 10, and Dad got the associated CO2-200 pistol. Had an indoor BB trap and shot down the hall, with a blanket backstop beyond that.
I got a bolt action .22 with peep sights a couple years later (12?) to do the NRA 50’ junior rifleman program, whatever they officially called it. Indoor range, about 10 targets on a sheet, with the ten-ring about the diameter of a .22. You progressed from prone to sitting to kneeling to standing, got badges and patches for your shooting vest as you achieved certain scores.
Our instructor was an old retired Army NCO who had almost certainly been involved in some or all of WWII/Korea/Vietnam. Almost certainly had spent some time as a DI, knew how to instruct marksmanship. Good times.
I was on a bus to basic training on my 17th birthday in '66. About 8-10 weeks later they had me on the range teaching me how to fire scary 'assault weapons', machine guns and grenade launchers.
So when I was discharged 3 years later when I turned 20. After a Vietnam tour with the air mobile infantry, numerous firefights and killing who knows how many enemy, I would not have been able to buy a gun under these rules? ...... ok, makes sense /s
It think you are mistaken, and have the arrow of causality reversed.
May progressives applaud the decay. Many of them planned the decay. Their policies are the cause of the decay. From this article:
Progressivism’s ascendancy in K-12 public education dates back to John Dewey in the early 20th century. But it was Mr. Dewey’s associate, secular humanist Charles Potter, that provided the most explicit revelation about the goal to dominate the influence on the hearts and minds of children through the classroom. Recognizing that many Americans were church-goers at the time, Mr. Potter boasted in 1930, “What can theistic Sunday School, meeting for an hour once a week, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”