Yesterday I was doing some research for "Here Sweetie, Have a Gun for Your Fifth Birthday." I could have said "for your third" or “for your first” birthday, but I decided no one would believe me. The fifth birthday was unbelievable enough.
I’m from the U.S. so I did some more research on children and hunting, this time for the U.S. As we all know, parents taking their young children hunting is hardly just an Australian occurrence. On the state of Vermont website I found the following fee schedule:
A resident or nonresident lifetime fishing, hunting, or combination fishing and hunting license may be obtained from the Fish & Wildlife Department. Fees are as follows:
for children under 1 year old = 5X current adult license price.
for children 1-15 years old = 15X current adult license price.
for adults 16-24 years old = 30X current adult license price.
for adults 25-64 years old = 25X current adult license price.
What on earth are we teaching our children! Apparently in Vermont, a one year-old child can have a license to hunt.
This week in the news is a story of seventeen year-old boy in Germany who shot and killed fifteen schoolchildren and then shot himself. He had taken the gun from his father's collection of sixteen. In Alabama in the US, a man shot dead eleven people: seven family members then three people he didn’t even know, and finally himself.
The very understandable reaction to these tragedies has been shock, anger, grief, and disbelief. How could this happen? The commonly-heard comment after such tragedies is “I never would have thought he would do something like this. He seemed like a pretty avarage kid.”
Maybe in today’s world, where children aged three and five go hunting with their fathers, where babies can get a hunting license, where teenagers play games in which they perfect their skills at killing virtual people, for many people this is the terrible new “normal.”