Sounds good, and familiar, to me.
When I was almost 15, but most of my classmates were to be 14 for some time yet, a half dozen or so of us decided to go pheasant hunting one afternoon. We all had 12 or 20 gauge shotguns. We rode our bicycles, along a major thoroughfare, in a city of over 100,000 people, with SHOTGUNS ACROSS THE HANDLE BARS, mostly, but not all cased. And of course shells in our pockets.
No one as much as batted an eye.
When I was about your 10 or so, I would often ride out to my Great Uncle Sam's place (it was sooo cool having a real Uncle Sam), for some target practice, sometimes on pests, other times just paper and cans. By myself. Or I'd ride over to that cousin's place. I did get stopped by policeman on foot patrol once as went through the "business district", maybe I needed to buy more BBs, I don't recall, of what had once been a town of it's own. He asked where I was going and what I was doing. When I told him, he said, OK, be careful. Today, or less than a year ago actually, a kid in that same town, although not so near the edge, got suspended from school for showing friends a non working BB gun, well off of school grounds.
It’s really sad that we haven’t preserved the America of our youth for our grandchildren...
I’ve a 17 year old grandson who really seems to doubt some of my stories of “how it was”........
I’m convinced we had the best of all possible worlds....which now seems to be lost to a society I don’t even recognize as American........
But we’re all so much *safer* now that such things aren’t allowable under societal norms. < /s>