Boy Scouts did a lot of good for this nation. Yes it has fallen on hard timers, but that is not the boys fault. All our nation has fallen on bad times and I fear we will never recover. Not just Boy Scouts helped shape our youth, but they were the largest. We had a DOD sponsored shooting program for young people when I was a kid. Church groups and even service clubs took an active interest in kids. Law suits, liabilities and loony people have ruined a lot of things for everybody.
When I was in seventh grade, my school had a marksman ship program where we shot .22 after school, in the gym. We were allowed to bring in our own .22 rifles on the school bus. Once at school we went directly to the gym teachers office and put our rifles in the rack behind his desk. It cost .25 to shoot five five shot strings, and a penny each to practice. We shot paper targets on our indoor rifle range. High score got a box of 50 .22 bullets as the prize and the target was displayed on the school bulletin board for a week. I won over a dozen times in my first year. Farm boys just could all shoot back in those days. I still have my Remington single shot .22 rifle and used it to teach each of my five kids basic gun safety.
That program was very popular and if you did not have your own gun you could borrow a friends gun, or use one of the two school owned guns. All it took was a signed permission slip from your parents and a quarter. If you tried to restart that program today, heads would truly explode. We never had a accident, never had any boy not follow the rules to the letter and never had a single complaint from other students, parents or school teachers. The bus drivers knew to wait until we were finished before leaving. It took less than half an hour to complete the program. It was run with military clockwork precision. Our gym teacher had been in the marines in WWII and ran a tight ship.
I miss those days and think kids today are getting short changed, all in the name of diversity, safety and being acceptably by those who seem to hate what our very nation has stood for. Had we not been those unlikable people, the entire Europe would be speaking German, Communism would be the only other government form on Earth and the death camps would have killed 100 million instead of just, just 17 million. What an obscene thought.
