There was another school shooting last week, leaving behind another haunted classroom and a community shattered for the rest of time.
This Texas school shooting came a week after a grocery store mass shooting in Buffalo. It’s a fairly standard headline these days, almost easy to overlook.
But then I see the photos of the students who lost their lives and the educators who died trying to protect them. Then comes the anger, tinged by a feeling of helplessness. Why can’t we stop it?
This moment requires the best of us, but sadly, I suspect it will instead result in another journey to the land where both “sides” talk past one another. No matter the volume or proper enunciation, understanding will remain as elusive as unicorns. So will prevention.
You ask, “So what’s all that have to do with the outdoors?”
It’s a fair question.
Firearms and the outdoors were once conjoined twins in the type of journalism I’ve worked at most of my life. Hunting and fishing were what “outdoor” meant when I became an outdoor writer in the early 1980s.
There was a time when just about every firearm regular folks owned was an efficient hunter’s tool. We built this relationship into the way we pay for wildlife management and conservation with passage of the Pittman-Robertson Act in 1937. Pittman-Robertson imposed an excise tax on firearms and ammunition and also required those funds be kept separate from the general budget, to be used solely for wildlife and outdoor recreation purposes.
Hunting and firearms sales have followed starkly different trajectories since at least the turn of the century. The increase in firearms sales since 2000 is dramatic, by industry accounts as much as 400%. Firearms sales in the U.S. were 20 million in 2021, down slightly from the all-time peak of 21 million in pandemic and protest-riven 2020.
During the same period the number of hunting license holders remained stable, dipping slightly to 15 million annually. That statistic likely inflates the number of hunters, however, as many hold multiple licenses. In an especially good quail year in the Southwest, I once maxed out at seven state hunting licenses.
There’s no longer any reliable correlation between gun ownership and hunting. The unspoken secret is that most of the increased firearm sales are modern sporting rifles or pistols — your garden variety black rifle and its variants. These firearms are rarely used for hunting. Still, the same excise taxes raised on a side-by-side 28-gauge shotgun, the quintessential quail gun, are also collected on a Bushmaster AR-15 clone.
Guys like me who use and enjoy firearms primarily because of our interest in hunting are somewhat derisively known as Elmer Fudds by folks who are foremost Second Amendment advocates, yet only tangentially connected to hunting, if at all.
Whether we’re wabbit hunters or 2A true believers, I think it’s time to take a hard look at how we use firearms and decide if we’re willing to give any of it up if it might prevent a killing spree like the last two, or the hundreds that came before them.
When it comes to dealing with the gun violence in this country, getting involved is now mandatory for every citizen, from the most avid shooting sports enthusiast to those who wilt at the mere thought of handling a firearm. Doing nothing while the killing continues is not an option.
A young man turned 18 last week, walked into a gun store and purchased a semi-automatic firearm expressly designed to kill humans. A few days later, 19 Texas school children were shot dead in their classroom. There’s nothing unique about that story anymore. The script barely changes: young man gets gun too easily, then slaughters innocents.
We must do better, hunters, all of us.