|
| | | | |
|
|
Growing up country
by Robert A. Waters
Most country people grow up with
guns. In fact, city folks don't understand that firearms are a necessity for
farmers, cattlemen, and other rural residents.
I spent much of my childhood on my grandparents' 200-acre farm in central
Florida. They raised me until I was eight years old. After we moved away, my
brothers and I spent every summer and Christmas vacation on their farm. As soon
as high school was over, I moved back to the farm.
My grandfather owned shotguns, rifles, and handguns. They weren't there for
window-dressing--they were tools, like his backhoe and plow and tractor.
The farmhouse sat in the middle of a migration route for snakes. In central
Florida, that meant 6-foot-long diamond-back rattlers. Each spring and fall my
grandfather would use his shotgun to kill rattlers that invaded his yard.
On one occasion, when I was a teenager, my grandfather and I drove his Ford
Fairlane back from town and parked in the driveway. As we got out, we spotted a
rattler coiled in the sand about ten feet away. My grandfather pulled his .45
semi-automatic from the glove box, handed it to me, and told me to kill the
snake. After five shots, the only thing I'd killed was the dust around the
rattler. My grandfather then took the gun, aimed, and blew off the head of the
snake.
Most country people know how to shoot.
In addition to growing beans, corn, peas, watermelons, and countless other
vegetables, my grandfather raised chickens. Foxes, raccoons, hawks, and
predatory critters of all stripes would make occasional raids on the henhouse.
Chickens are important to farm people--they provide eggs and meat. If my
grandfather heard the chickens squawking in the night, he'd get up, put on a
headlamp, and shine it into the chicken coop. Any fox or raccoon trying to get a
quick meal would end up dead.
My grandfather also raised cattle. But deep in the woods lived a pack of wild
dogs which saw newborn calves as an easy meal. These dogs were vicious roamers
that would kill anything that moved. When they began to slaughter my
grandfather's calves, we would go back into the woods and hunt them down. It
probably sounds cruel to city people, but cattle, like chickens, mean a
livelihood to many farm folk. And wild dogs aren't like Spot and Fluffy--they're
mangy, rabid, ruthless killers.
The Depression left lasting scars on my grandparents. They talked of being
unable to find work, of having no money, and of surviving on what my grandfather
could grow and kill and catch. (In addition to hunting, most country people also
know how to fish.) Cat-squirrels were on their menu during the Depression. The
meat of a squirrel is the color of charcoal. It's greasy, foul-smelling, tough,
and tastes like sulfur. But if you have nothing else, you'll eat it. In fact, my
grandmother developed such a taste for the rat-like creatures that even when she
was eighty-years-old she would ask me or my brothers to go out and kill a
squirrel for her.
After my grandfather's mother died, her house (a quarter-mile from where my
grandparents lived) was abandoned. It sat on a hill near U. S. Highway 27.
Vandals, rogue antique collectors, and transients would invade the house,
stealing and destroying everything they could find. Over the years, they set
several fires inside the house, eventually burning it down. As long as it stood,
we would check it daily. We always took our handguns for protection. On more
than one occasion, a belligerent intruder would suddenly become reasonable when
he saw that we were holding firearms.
And that's how I grew up. Thinking of guns not as some evil instrument made for
killing but as tools for protection.
Guns helped my grandparents and millions of others survive the Depression. They
were used to kill predators which would destroy crops and chickens and cattle.
They were there for self-defense if needed.
I learned to shoot when I was 10-years-old, though I never became the shot that
my grandfather was. I've owned guns most of my life. So when I hear some elite,
city-bred anti-gunner talking about banning firearms, I remember my
grandparents.
I later went to college, moved to the city, and got a job in town. Things
changed over the years: hawks are now an endangered species in Florida; to kill
a dog means to risk a lawsuit, a fine, or even jail; and most of us don't raise
our own food anymore. To pull a gun on an intruder in a vacant house nowadays
would be inviting a civil suit, if not criminal prosecution.
Growing up with guns gives one an entirely different attitude than the
politically correct gun-banning mentality. I can understand how someone who was
born and raised in Los Angeles or New York City or Washington, D. C. would be
unable to comprehend what life is like in rural America. What I don't understand
is how gun-banners like Diane Feinstein, Charles Schumer, and Rosie O'Donnell
want to mandate to farmers and ranchers that they cannot own guns.
I still have all of the guns my grandfather left me.
They are an integral part of the culture I grew up in. They are a part of my
life, and part of what I know and believe. They are my heritage.
I will fight to the end to keep what is mine.
Also from Robert Waters
|
|
|
