I had an uncle who when he was young, shot another boy with a .22 caliber rifle. The boy was sitting on a fence post, and though the whole story was never made clear, it seems my uncle shot him in the area where the boy sat on. Other uncles in the family occasionally kept their cars on the road by stealing gasoline out of another cars gas tank. There was a joke between them that one of the uncles could tell the grade of gasoline by the way it sounded when he tapped his knuckles on the tank. If someone tried to steal gas from a farmer, and mistakenly filled their car with diesel fuel, well they paid for the fuel, cleaned the barn for a few days, and their car problems from the diesel fuel in their car’s gas tank were usually punishment enough.

On the other side of things, when they were children life was more serious. Many children had serious chores to do. They had to milk cows, clean the barn, and tend the garden. An adult finding a child doing something wrong, generally treated that child the way they would treat their own children. Everyone knew and accepted they deserved what they received as punishment when caught. They also knew they had no one to blame except themselves for what they did. There was little tolerance of blaming others for individual wrongs.

As I was growing up things had changed, but not too much. I remember going out to a close by gravel pit where the teenager’s parked at night. We would look for the old cars where the back doors opened backwards. This meant the door handles were close to each other. While the occupants were busy doing what teenagers did in gravel pits at night, we would tie the door handles together with rope or a coat hanger. Once that was done, the car was fair game to rocking and pushing as we knew the driver could not get out to harm us.

I shot a friend in the thumb with a BB gun when I was about nine. The BB made its way under my friends thumb nail up to the joint and stopped right under his skin. He screamed and yelled for a few minutes and his Mom was pretty upset, and probably scared too. I thought I in serious trouble, but once it was clear I was just trying to shoot a frog he was holding for me and it was not intentional…. Well let me just say I got off pretty easy, considering. Stealing gas was still pretty common when I was a boy. In my neighborhood where I lived if someone had a car, they either had a locking gas cap, or left little gas in the tank over night. Police were rarely called for gasoline thefts.

When I was eight years old, I was old enough and I would go to a boys camp for a month at a time during the summer. I earned my way to camp by selling candy door to door for almost a month in the winter after school and weekends. When I was eleven years old I was old enough to go on ten day canoe trips. I went with twenty or so other eleven to thirteen year olds, and one Adult who was our guide. The canoe trips took place in the wilds between the Minnesota and the Canadian border. We went across the lakes and portages three to a canoe. At sixteen I was off camping alone for days at a time. I owned a few rifles and a pistol in my teens and fired off thousands of .22 caliber rounds while plinking at rocks, cans, and bottles.

Many children today have little exposure to guns other than television and movies. Lovers lane is where sick people hang out waiting for victims. The only outhouse todays children see is at a park or a fair. Children probably rarely if ever hear of a classmate stealing gas, but whole cars being stolen is the norm. I am curious at how much our ideas about what is and is not acceptable have changed in less than half a century. Along with our thoughts on who is responsible when kids do something wrong and, placing the blame somewhere else is okay. I do not think the basic tenants of our lives have changed at all, just the way we think about them.

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