PSYCHOSCAPES: Guns: From an Agrarian Tool to a Clint Eastwood Western

My father duck hunting with his prize dog Inky

Here's a little-known historical fact: Northwood had turkey shoots in the hardscrabble 1950s before the flat-landers flocked here, when farming was dying, houses could be bought for back taxes, and land could be had for one hundred dollars an acre. Here's what I remember through the fog of time:

Because my father was an avid hunter with superb aim, he was drawn like a bear to honey to these local get-togethers. Boys competed against each other for prizes, firing .22 caliber rifles at paper targets. Meanwhile, the men took turns shooting at clay pigeons (round disks flung at high speed from a mechanical launcher).

At the end of each round, the hunter who downed the most birds won a prize – but it wasn't a turkey but a scruffy, live chicken past its prime. My father was so successful we usually took home a bunch of chickens, so many we had to clean out the old chicken coop to give them a temporary home until, one at a time, we chopped off their heads for dinner.

Back in the day, before the modern era of mass shootings, there was no movement to regulate guns. High-capacity, rapid-fire assault rifles were not yet available for civilians, and machine guns were outlawed. Everything was low-key and benign. My father was a lifelong member of the NRA, which, at the time, was not political but dedicated to target practice and safe hunting.

Things weren't so polarized then.

There was still tension between city slickers and rural folks, but it was mostly amicable banter – in the spirit of who's better, the Red Sox or the Yankees. Americans were mostly on the same page, getting similar news each night from one of the only three available network channels.

To my memory, our nation started becoming more polarized after President Ronald Reagan was elected; that's when both parties started looking for wedge issues to exploit. As crime rose and mass shootings increased, Democrats pushed for gun restrictions. Republicans, on the other hand, appealing to rural voters, claimed that guns were not the problem but the solution.

But, more than that, Republicans tried to scare us – and still are – warning us not to count on protection by community solidarity and the better angels of our humanity.

They reflect the pessimistic outlook of Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, who wrote that society is 'a condition of war of everyone against everyone.'^⁠1 The Republican refrain is that danger lurks everywhere, and the only way you can defend yourself is to be armed at all times – not with any gun but an assault rifle.

From the beginning, NH gun laws had traditionally been among the weakest in the nation,^⁠2 not because of ideology but because we were a rural state with a low crime rate. Nevertheless, what few gun regulations we had soon came under assault by increasingly conservative Republicans in cahoots with libertarians and Free Stater imports.

In 2011, we passed a 'stand your ground' law^⁠3 like the one instituted in Florida that killed Trayvon Martin. Before that, an individual could only shoot a person who was actually invading their home, but now the shooter can shoot a person wherever they are if they feel their life is in danger – even if the shooter has the option of safely retreating.

Then, in 2017, NH repealed one of the few gun safety laws still on the books, voting to allow folks to carry hidden, loaded guns wherever they went without a permit. Since then, various gun safety bills have passed the legislature but have subsequently been shot down by Governor Sununu.

And it continues on to the present: this year, house Republicans defeated multiple Democratic gun bills,^⁠4 including legislation placing additional restrictions on school zones, a red flag bill, and a bill to expand background checks.

What can I say?

We have transformed from a state that considered guns to be an everyday tool like a chain saw and families attended chicken shoots as a family affair to a shoot-'em-up script from a Clint Eastwood movie.

The trouble is, now the blood is real.

xxx

anImage_32.tiff