(Blogger’s note: We are not making this up.)
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Maybe the first thing you noticed about him was the large woven cowboy hat resting on his ears, tilted back just enough so that his bushy mustache enjoyed the sunshine his eyes were missing.
Maybe it was the long-sleeved plaid shirt and leather vest, a fashion dictated more by circumstances than weather on this warm spring day.
Maybe it was his leather chaps glazed in dust from the knees down, legs making a “chiff” sound each time he took a step.
But it was the pistols hanging at his side the kids stared at. As he walked back and forth in front of the crowd, no one bothered to gaze at the frontier façade behind him. Eyes were riveted to the long-barreled sidearms tucked into weathered brown holsters.
Nothing commands the respect of 200 fourth-graders like a gun that could take someone’s head off from 100 feet.
Fifteen minutes earlier at the Arizona Pioneer Living Museum, a park created to educate visitors about life from 1867 to 1903, two gunshots echoed across the desert, signaling it was about time for an important historical reenactment involving frontier justice.
Prior to that, the children had been wandering (under the careful eyes of chaperones who wondered who the hell thought it was a good idea to spend a day in the desert in a month not a member of winter) among log cabins, a one-room schoolhouse and a large steepled church, the only building you could see from the road (which tells you where the pioneers put their money).
Kids were scattered across 20 acres until those gunshots were fired. As soon as the sound died away, every 9- and 10-year-old headed toward the demonstration area.
“We must hurry so as not to miss the historical reenactment,” the children cried. Well, actually they didn’t say that. It was more like, “Dudes, come on, the gunfight is about to start! I’ll bet some guy gets his head blown off!”
They ran around the farm and skirted past a large pig in a small dusty pen, conditions that would convince even PETA that a future as pork chops would be more humane.
They raced past the sheriff’s office without even glancing at the man hanging from the gallows, a sight that held much interest earlier in the day.
“Hey look, that guy’s hung,” several kids shouted.
Well, maybe. We’ll never know for sure, will we?
Finally, with high noon approaching, the cowboy strode in front of the crowd that was perched on narrow wooden benches, the sun beating down. This time a silver badge gleamed from his vest, and two men of a rather dubious nature stood in the shade of the undertaker’s porch. At least you had to assume it was the undertaker, given the guy displayed in a pine box.
“See the dead dude?” one boy whispered to another. “That’s what they did in the olden days when it was too hot to dig a hole. They kept them there until, like, nighttime.”
“No way,” said his friend. “That’s how they advertised. It’s like a sign, only better because everyone notices a dead guy.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
Voices lowered as the sheriff faced the group, everyone silent when he spoke.
“Welcome to the Arizona Pioneer Living Museum,” he said in a cowboy drawl, a cross between John Wayne and Fess Parker. “We hope y’all are enjoying your day and thanks for coming to visit. Uh, can everyone hear me?”
Those in the center who nodded and muttered yes were drowned out by those on the sides shouting “No!”
“OK, then, good,” the cowboy said. “Now before we show you a certain part of life in the Old West, y’all need to know something.” He unsnapped his right holster and withdrew a gun that could easily be mistaken for a cannon.
“How many of you know what this is?”
Uh, that’d be everybody, sheriff. What you have here are 200 kids who, since the age of 3, have witnessed a minimum of 5,829 violent acts each, through TV and video games. Not only do they recognize a gun, many could probably build one from scratch. And a few probably have.
“This here’s a gun,” the cowboy said, raising his voice to be heard over the chorus of “Yeah, it’s a gun!”
“But not just any gun,” he continued. “This is a Colt .45, the gun that transformed the west. It did a lot of good in the hands of people who knew how to use it and respected its power.”
“And a lot of bad in the hands of people who learned how to use it,” whispered a teacher.
The sheriff paused, twirling the gun on his index finger and then tossed it to his left hand and back again.
“Now before we go on, we need to make sure everyone here knows what guns are for, and what they aren’t for,” the sheriff said. “Because it’s one of the most important things you’ll ever learn.”
Now if you were to poll these 200 kids on what guns are used for, 98 percent would strongly agree with the statement, “For shooting people.” The other two percent would be at the gallows, poking the hung guy to see if he was real.
“A gun,” he continued, “is for keeping people safe. But you need to know how to use one or you could hurt someone.”
It is probable that when the inventor of the first firearm wrote up his mission statement, it included the phrase “to hurt someone.” The sheriff, however, had discovered an alternate use for a weapon. Perhaps his gun came with a force field.
“Take this gun, for example,” the sheriff said, lifting the weapon to chest level. “This is what’s known as a single-action trigger. Now watch what happens when I pull the trigger.”
He pointed the gun away from him, this thing that keeps you safe, and squeezed the trigger with his index finger. There was is a dry click heard only by the kids in the first few rows.
“Nothing happens,” he continued. “You know why? So you couldn’t accidentally pull the trigger and shoot. You have to pull back the hammer if you want to fire the gun.”
Apparently gunslingers in the Old West were very clumsy folks, pulling their triggers when they didn’t mean to. Or maybe it was because no one had yet figured out how to make a gun with a trigger that both pulled back the hammer and fired the gun (a problem since solved).
“Ya see,” the sheriff said, pumping the trigger, “there is no way this gun can fire. That makes it one of the safest guns in the world.”
A gun that can’t fire is safe. The children nodded. Of course. So if you only made guns that can’t fire, they’d all be safe. And that’s how guns keep you safe. Brilliant!
“So what you need to do to arm this gun is simple,” the sheriff said. “You need to pull back on this little thing here on the back, called a hammer.”
The old cowboy placed his left palm flat on the rear of the revolver and moved his hand toward his chest, as if petting the pistol. Another click.
“See how the gun is now cocked? It’s ready to fire.”
The kids smiled at knowing how to subvert that pesky little safety mechanism.
“But before I pull the trigger, you should know that this gun doesn’t have real bullet.”
An audible sigh of disappointment rumbled through the first few rows. The rest couldn’t hear and were oblivious to the revelation, eyes still glued to the cocked gun.
“We here at the museum use blanks, which make a lot of noise but no bullet comes out. But they can be dangerous too if you’re not careful. Watch what happens to this soda can.”
The sheriff leveled the weapon at a Pepsi can on a nearby table, placing the barrel inches from the innocent cylinder. A split second after a loud bang, the can was airborne, landing 20 feet away with a clatter. Another victim of random violence.
“Now imagine what that can do to you,” the sheriff said, retrieving the can and turning it slowly to reveal a small dent, pausing for effect. “And that was just a blank. Think of what would have happened had it been a real bullet. Because most guns don’t have blanks.”
A frightening revelation, that connection between guns and bullets. The sheriff had the crowd in his sights now, and was about to draw down.
“That’s why we like to have with little talk with y’all before we do out little reenactment,” he said. “I know what we do here looks like fun, but guns were never met to be toys.”
Tell that to the hundreds of factories in China churning out plastic pistols for the millions of kids packing artificial heat. No doubt, however, the sheriff spent many hours researching his facts to come to such a shocking conclusion about the gun-toy connection.
“And here’s what you really need to know,” he said, holstering his Colt .45. “Guns can be dangerous, especially in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what they can do. Children especially.”
Especially.
“So kids, if you ever come across a gun, you need to know thing – don’t touch it. Tell an adult. Because you may come across a gun almost everywhere.
“You see, there could be a guy driving down the road, and he has a gun. But then for some reason he decides he doesn’t want it anymore. He just rolls down the window and tosses it out. And that man has just created a problem.”
This scenario not only likely, but common if you think about it. The aforementioned man may just have gone through the drive-thru at McDonald’s ordering the Big Mac with fries and a Coke. And little did he know it was Be Safe Meal, part of a promotion between the fast-food giant and the NRA. As he turns onto the main drag, his eyes on the road, he digs into the bag and encounters something cold and metallic.
Pulling it out, he discovers a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun of undetermined origin (or a .45 magnum, had he supersized his order). And the hungry driver – a draft-dodging former hippie who took so much acid in the 70s it scrambled his brain chemistry to a point where he is now a supporter of gun control – rolls down his window and tosses it out.
And this man has just created a problem.
“Maybe you’re walking down that same road,” the sheriff said. “Probably on your way to school. And you look down and there’s a gun. Or maybe you’re on the playground. Or in a park. Maybe even you’re on backyard. And there it is. A gun.”
Perhaps the gun industry should concentrate more on proper waste-management techniques than on enforcing the Second Amendment due to this proliferation of disposed guns. People put out a black can for their trash and a blue can for their recyclables. Maybe what’s needed is a red can for the excess weapons, be they pistols, rifles or plastic explosives. And such cans should be equipped with a child-safety lid, one at least as sophisticated at the single-action trigger that made the sheriff’s Colt .45 the safest gun in the world.
“The fact is, you can find a gun almost anywhere,” he said. “That’s the plain truth. And when that happens, what are you going to do?”
There are questions you just don’t ask 9- and 10-year-olds. One of them is, “Do you want one chocolate bar or five chocolate bars before dinner?” Another is, “Would you like me to do your homework, though it means your learning will suffer?”
You also don’t ask kids, especially kids in large groups, what they would do when handed the life-altering power of a gun.
“I’d use it on Travis,” whispered one girl. Another boy said, “I would make sure we’d have recess all day.”
After an ill-conceived pause, the sheriff spoke amid the growing volume of conversations.
“Exactly,” he said. “You’d tell an adult. And you would not touch it.”
Yes, the children nodded. We would not touch it. Of course. To do so would be folly.
“So if you find a gun while you’re walking to school, or on the schoolyard, or even in your own backyard because it can happen anywhere, any time, what are you going to do?”
“Tell an adult!” they answered overwhelmingly, aware of the cadre of teachers sitting among them.
“That’s right. Excellent. Now we’ll begin our demonstration of how bad guys were handled in the Old West.”
For the next 10 minutes, the sheriff and two outlaws shot it out on the dusty streets of the Arizona Pioneer Living Museum, no doubt convincing children that guns, including those left behind on schoolyards and playgrounds or tossed from passing cars, were certainly not toys.
