Let me try to lay out my biases here as best I can.
I grew up in southern New Hampshire, which was basically “the country” quickly being absorbed into suburban Boston. Driving to school through a subdivision, I once had to wait for a moose to cross the road. I played Class S soccer, meaning “small” high schools. We’d often have to drive two hours north for games, and sometimes a kid on the other team would have a hunting rifle mounted in the back window of his pickup truck in the parking lot.
My dad had a gun off and on through my childhood. Mom was always worried about us getting hold of it, but he kept it hidden, and none of us five kids was ever very interested. Dad taught me to fire his .22 rifle across the dirt parking lot and into the forest outside our home and business properties he owned along a country highway. We had these great woods out back, with an old logging road for cross-country skiing. Mostly my brother and I and our friends built forts and played war games back there. “I shot you!” “No, you didn’t!” “Yes, I did!”
I did actually shoot a kid once, in the butt with a BB gun. He was wearing jeans, so it didn’t hurt THAT bad.
What does all this mean? One thing I’m saying is that I was a rural kid. Kind of like Vermont’s Bernie Sanders hasn’t been able to take a gun-control stance in line with the rest of his leftward views, I get where a lot of my gun-owning friends are coming from. Firearms provide recreation and even sustenance in rural America.
As a country boy who
