At 08:31 AM 7/20/96 -0400, Brad Dolan wrote:

...

Would you just hand out guns to all teenagers?

My twelve-year-old daughter asked for and received a .22 for her birthday. Her four and six year old siblings enjoy shooting it, under close supervision.

I learned how to shoot very young. My father taught me, as well as enrolling me in NRA competitions around age 14. They still have high school rifle teams where I used to live as well. But then the culture is quite different towards guns in Alaska than it is here... (For one, people do not view them as toys and/or possessed by evil spirits or the like...)

Rural America has a very different culture than urban America and urban America's recent attempts to impose its values (like hoplophobia) on us really chafes.

I bet the "National Curfew" crap that Clinton is trying to push is not going down well either. He seems to think that the problems of a small fraction of the country apply to the whole country... (But it makes for good sound bites.) --- Alan Olsen -- alano@teleport.com -- Contract Web Design & Instruction `finger -l alano@teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ "We had to destroy the Internet in order to save it." - Sen. Exon "Microsoft -- Nothing but NT promises."