Back in 1983 A Christmas Story aired the tale of nine-year-old Ralphie Parker and his high hopes of getting a Red Ryder BB Gun for Christmas.
We mention Ralphie because his quest for firepower pretty much summed up the thoughts of most boys at that time. Slick advertising about the BB gun’s many attributes, including a lever action handle and high volume magazine had the nine-year-old wound up, much like kids today might feel about a cell phone or gizmo. But that was then.
In real life, the Daisy Red Ryder was advertised as being like the gun your dad had, adding to the notion that guns have been part of North American culture for generations. Around Christmas, for years, it seemed like every flyer that came, or guy’s store we went into, had a Red Ryder BB gun on sale shouting out to be bought and put under the tree for an eager boy.
We never had a BB gun, graduating immediately to a .22 single-shot rifle that had been in the family for generations. The concept remained the same. It was like a rite of passage.
Our conquests in the bush were limited and target practice results were just average. The swoosh of lead exiting the barrel and the acerbic smell of gunpowder lingers as a thought of good times, growing up on a farm in rural Ontario. With those vivid smells and sounds however came a learned responsibility, that firearms are to be respected and recognized for what they are: a tool that can kill or injure.
This past Christmas, for the first time ever, we actually walked right past the Red Ryder gun, decked out in its handsome packaging with all the promises of the past. In that moment – that seminal masculine moment when tradition and guns and having what your dad had is somehow supposed to collide in some magical Norman Rockwell moment – we just walked away. We almost felt sick.
Mere days earlier, residents of Newtown Connecticut were horrified, as was anyone in earshot of News coverage, that a gunman had killed 20 students and seven adults. This massacre followed on the heels of many other similar events stateside (and there have been four school shootings since Newtown). We have had our own craziness in Canada too. Such killings are senseless, only made worse since the victims of Newtown were such a tender young age.
The debate over gun ownership now rages in the United States. In as polarized a nation as we can remember, common sense does not seem to have a voice. Citing the Second Amendment, which gives American citizens the right to bear arms, the National Rifle Association and its sympathizers hang on to that right with little appreciation for the other part of the equation, which is some people can’t handle that much responsibility. Some people should not have guns, period.
In a further sickening development, some conspiracy theorists have alleged the Sandy Hook school tragedy was really a staged event to rally the public in favour of gun control. A father, obviously stretched to the limits of sanity having lost his child, was accused of being an actor. It’s hard to even imagine that level of depravity.
Our neighbours down south have a lot to work through. With apologies to Ralphie, we just can’t buy the Red Ryder mythology any more.
We’re not living in the world our dads grew up in.
