What city dwellers don’t get about gun ownership

MONTEZUMA COUNTY, Colo. – “Who is this strange-looking Black guy wanting to talk with us?” Jonathan McMillan asked us, a crowd of mostly White, mostly pro-gun residents here.

The visitor was McMillan himself, director of Colorado’s new Office of Gun Violence Prevention. We had gathered for McMillan’s recent “listening tour” stop in Cortez, held at the county annex building just off Main Street.

Over dinner, served from foil catering trays onto paper plates, many of the more than 100 attendees told McMillan and his team about their concerns, mostly centered on the potential disruption of what until recently has been gun-toting normality in the rural West.

Folks here have a lot of thoughts on gun-violence prevention, beliefs that likely do not align with those living in cities and suburbs. The gathering that night was occasionally tense, even rancorous, and it featured a lot of Second Amendment rhetoric that I find tiresome, but one value did bubble up that I think anyone could embrace: the need for education.

The message from rural dwellers with many reasons for gun ownership was clear: Don’t shun guns. Get to know them. Teach your kids about using them safely.

Thanks to my parents, I learned how to handle guns when I was young. We had soda-can target practice with a .22, and we shot skeet with a 20 gauge. My mother placed a pellet gun in the downstairs bathroom. From the window, you could shoot the woodchuck that was constantly ransacking her garden.

My brother reminded me about the pellet gun and woodchuck recently. “One pump, you could watch the trajectory of the pellet,” he recalled. “Two pumps, you might sting him. Three pumps were not allowed.”

Montezuma County Sheriff Steve Nowlin (and many other older county residents I talked with) remembers bringing his gun to school, putting it in his locker and hunting rabbits after classes. Brian Hanson, retired superintendent of the Mancos School District, recalled that when he was a teacher, he once bought a gun from a student after math class.

As rural areas absorb more people from the cities, conversations around responsible gun ownership and classes for safe gun-handling are more essential, not less. Guns are ubiquitous here. For shooting prairie dogs and rattlesnakes. For hunting deer and elk. For putting down a suffering animal. For deterring predators. For fun.

Even if folks here raise their children in gun-free homes, with a shun-gun approach, the kids will likely still come across one at a friend’s house or during a gravel-road hangout after a team practice or in a pickup truck or back pasture.

This year in the United States, according to the gun-violence prevention organization Everytown, there have been at least 136 unintentional shootings by children, resulting in 55 deaths. Would your child be able to handle a gun safely?

During McMillan’s listening-tour stop, a gray-haired woman told him that her grandson called her “evil” for owning guns. She implored McMillan to bring hunter education back to schools and to “teach our kids not to hate guns.”

I wish more urbanites and suburbanites could hear these passionate appeals to be understood, from a part of the country where guns may be plentiful but mass shootings are not. Of 291 mass shootings in the United States this year as of June 13, most occurred in cities and suburbs, the Gun Violence Archive shows. If we’re talking about bans, maybe we should ban every young man who lives within a 30-mile radius of a city center from buying a gun. I know that’s absurd, but it’s the lens through which many here see the issue.

It’s true that in rural Western states, where scant resources and social stigma around mental health are chronic problems, suicide by firearm is too common. But high rural homicide rates occur predominantly in the southeast.

McMillan, who has worked mostly with communities dealing with gang violence in Denver, noted the contrast with rural communities and prefaced the meeting by saying, “There is no onesize, quick or simple solution” to gun violence.

This is especially true for women like me, moms who want nothing to do with “patriots” or preppers. Be careful about gun-owner stereotyping: We may recycle, wear Patagonia puffies and feel strongly about our preferred shotguns and rifles. We see that the tendency today is for virulent, if-you’re-not-withus-you’re-against-us side-taking. But why?

Sometimes I daydream about being a school board president. On my left, colleagues and parents are clamoring for mandatory sex education: Teach kids about condoms, birth control – for heck’s sake, not just abstinence! On my right, colleagues and parents are asking for hunter safety classes for all, including ethics and gun handling – for heck’s sake, not just, “Guns are bad, don’t touch them!” I look around the room and suggest we do both, sex education and gun education. After some grandstanding and consternation, they agree and actually seem relieved. Like I said, it’s a dream.

– – Maddy Butcher is the author of “Horse Head: Brain Science & Other Insights” and director of the Best Horse Practices Summit.