I can remember a time when we did have guns in school. I took a gun safety class while in high school since I needed it to get a hunting license under 18 years old.
And in our Senior Class play, my character needed a pistol as a prop and my then girl friend's (we've now been married for over 45 years) father loaned me his Walther PPK, complete with an extra magazine and holster (but it was never loaded) as we wanted something that would look and behave as realistic as possible. In one scene I had to make a big deal of loading the gun, and the Walther being an automatic, removing and then reinserting the magazine and racking the slide, which cocked the hammer, even though there were NO rounds, was still very effective in terms of the sound and motions, something that would have been hard to duplicate using the 'toy guns' which were available at the time). And no one thought anything of it as we kept it locked in the principle's office except when we were rehearsing and/or during the actual performances of the play.
Also, I when I was in college we were allowed to have guns in the dorm. Granted, you had to lock them up in a gun locker in the basement, but you could take them out anytime you wanted to either go hunting, target shooting (the school had it's own indoors target range) or to target shoot off-campus, or just to clean or maintain your guns. And they were not limited to only long guns. Pistols were allowed as well, but the individual student had to comply with the laws of his or her state, which meant that us Michigan residents were envious of the guys from places like Minnesota since they could legally own handguns at age 18 without a permit while in Michigan it took heaven and earth to legally own a pistol under the age of 21 and then I think it was limited to 22 cal competition pieces and only if you were a member of a recognized shooting team, which the university had (two Olympic Gold Medalists were alumni of our school).
However, in today's world anything like that would be virtually impossible, all because guns have become the 'solution-of-choice' for so many people, primarily because of both their effectiveness (military firepower) and availability.
OCU
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