“A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

1
In the course of perusing various online forums and social media sites I routinely run into pro-gun people who refer to “the good old days” of less strict gun laws and a less fear-driven gun culture in the U.S.,

They often express some variation of a recollection involving how, back when they were teenagers, they used to drive pickup trucks to their local high school with shotguns or rifles just sitting in a rack inside the cab, because they had either gone hunting just before school or were going just after school. Not only this, but their trucks were frequently unlocked and the firearms were never bothered, let alone used to engage in a school shooting.

I am not doubting that this could have happened somewhere, sometime in the U.S., but I hear so many people describe this exact situation that I’m starting to wonder if it’s not some variation of the Mandela Effect happening here, i.e. - something many people believe happened but really did not, or at least did not necessarily happen to them, but the narrative has been so internalized by some people as to be indistinguishable from their objective personal history.

I’m therefore raising this question on the LGC Forum because I am hoping that, being a little more appreciative of critical thinking than certain other forums, you all can appreciate my skepticism without necessarily being outraged by it.

With that in mind, that’s the primary question: Did you, personally and in your youth, ever actually bring a gun to school inside of a pickup truck? And if the answer is yes, please also answer the following sub-questions to help me better understand how prevalent this experience may have truly been:

1. When were you in high school approximately, e.g. - early 60s? Late 80s?
2. In what part of the country did you attend high school?
3. Did you hunt before or after school, and what type of game specifically were you hunting?
4. If you left your pickup or guns unlocked, did you feel like this was in contravention to what you were taught about general firearms safety?

Please understand that I don’t mind if I’m completely wrong about this and there was, indeed, a time and a place in this country where this kind of practice occurred, but given that I was raised in a very liberal town of around 60,000 in the late 1980s (Santa Fe, New Mexico) I have absolutely no personal frame of reference for this kind of experience. Thanks in advance for any contributions you can make toward my understanding.
- pzc

Re: “A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

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You and I are pretty close in age and smallish western town HS geographic location. Never heard of not locking your vehicle no matter what was inside because... it was HS... and someone might have snuck inside your car and smoked dope or whatever.

I heard that same story (rifle in the unlocked truck) from men of my dad's generation (when I was in HS) claiming that, back in the 1950s, it was no big deal. Of course, the 1970s saw a few serial killers in my region, so everyone locked doors after that.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Re: “A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

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In rural Texas that was not unusual in the 1950-60s. I would go with my parents to visit relatives on their ranches. Every pick they drove had a 3 position gun rack in front of the rear window. the top rack would have a walking stick or cane used to herd cattle into a chute. the second rack carried ether a bolt action of lever action rifle and the last portion carried a rope on one hook and a hat on the other hook. They never locked the pickup normally they left the keys in the ignition. That was even done when they went to town at the feed store or barber shop. Hell even during the summer theybleft the windows down because it didn't have A/C in the truck. If they had a truck for the boys to drive to school it was teated the same way.

When I was in high schoolmate 60s, in Fort Worth I was in Jr. ROTC. Occasionally we would take guns to school but leave them in the Sargents office until after school when we would go to the LBJ national grasslands camping and hunting. Otherwise we didn't take guns to school.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: “A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

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It's true here. Late 80s. Not really in a window of the truck but in the car trunk or behind the seat. Sometimes they had their dead animals from checking the morning trap lines too if they got up late.

I made a gun rack in shop class for one of my projects and a knife sheath for another project. I brought the knife to school to fit it. :o

We had a gun rack outside in a building and a closet in the house. We didn't lock the doors. Safe storage really isn't anyway. It's safer storage, but most anything can be defeated easily if you know how and have some tools. Security by obscurity works almost as well if you just lock your doors and spread things around.

My niece is on the high school trap shooting team. I'll ask her what they do with their guns now. My guess is keep it in the car and don't talk about it. She definitely needs to drive with her shotgun at some point to get to the trap range; now that she can drive.
Brian

Re: “A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

7
I went to High School in Tidewater, Virginia. (Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk area.) This was the late 60s early 70s.

You locked your car. People did hunt before school. Many kids drove trucks, but I never saw a rifle or shotgun in a rack in the school parking lot. It would have been noticed.

I also spent a lot of time down the GW Waterway and in Mathews County Virginia. Hunting there was just about universal. People drove trucks and had gun racks, but they locked their trucks.
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Re: “A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

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Michigan, both peninsulas, through graduating from HS in 1981. Some schools had 4H shooting, most had hunters safety classes the same way schools had drivers ed. Guns in trucks, and guns checked with the principle and kept in a closet until after school. There were a lot of excused absences during deer season as well.

Eighth grade science teacher had a boa constrictor in the classroom that we fed mice, and he (teacher, not snake :lol: ) taught taxidermy to a few of us during lunch. We kept critters in plastic bags in the freezer in the teacher's lounge until we took them out to skin. Yes, sharp knives were part of the process.

Fact. :beer2:

Re: “A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

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Mid 1970’s in Humble Texas, yes seen, not personally done. Rifles in racks at school parking lot. No idea if they were loaded or not. People went hunting or shooting either before or after school. Not a myth.

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Last edited by sikacz on Sun Jul 12, 2020 9:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
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"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!" Loquacious of many. Texas Chapter Chief Cat Herder.

Re: “A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

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Not in my high school in the blue Bay Area, more cars in the parking lots then than trucks. When I lived in MT it was common to see trucks with racks and many of them with rifles or shotguns, don't know if they were loaded. Guys would do some shooting after work, put an animal hit by a vehicle out of it's misery, can't wait for law enforcement they could be an hour away...
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: “A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

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I went to high school in late 60's early 70's. It was the age of muscle cars, only a liberal social misfit would drive a truck to school. ('67 Chevy step-side). No gun racks in school parking lot that I saw. Driving around town you would see lots of truck with gun racks in the back window. Only occasionally would you see guns in them.
There were kids that would shoot 22's while waiting for the bus in the morning. Just before the bus arrived, one kid died trying to do the Daniel Boone pose with his rifle.
boone.jpg
Last edited by Hiker on Sun Jul 12, 2020 11:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.-Henry Clay
Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.—Aristotle

Re: “A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

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Hiker wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 9:44 am I went to high school in late 60's early 70's. It was the age of muscle cars, only a liberal social misfit would drive a truck to school. ('68 Chevy step-side). No gun racks in school parking lot that I saw. Driving around town you would see lots of truck with gun racks in the back window. Only occasionally would you see guns in them.
There were kids that would shoot 22's while waiting for the bus in the morning. Just before the bus arrived, one kid died trying to do the Daniel Boone pose with his rifle.
boone.jpg
In the NE suburbs of NYC in the same era, NOBODY drove a pickup to school! Muscle cars, beetles, motorcycles, running junkers, dune buggies, but no pickups. One kid even had a family Edsel! Really! And the really rare one, without the "Horse Collar" grill! Closest to a pickup would be a Jeep, when a Jeep was a Jeep. Not a "Wrangler" or a "Rubicon". Pickups were work trucks. Period. No gun racks. When I worked building houses, guys had gun racks, but usually to hold their 4' and 6' levels.

I didn't have a car until I was in grad school, the same car "Harry and Sally" drove from Chicago to NYC in "1977" but rustier, but I did get my first motorcycle after I got out of college, a 1971 Suzuki 250 2 stroke twin--in pieces in my shed for 30 years! :roflmao:
"Even if the bee could explain to the fly why pollen is better than shit, the fly could never understand."

Re: “A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

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I am not sure what the point of the original post in this thread was. Something about it makes me wonder if there is an ulterior motive. Nonetheless, I recall in 4th or 5th grade taking our Daisy bb guns to school to use as props in a music class skit of Johnny Horton’s The Battle of New Orleans. Stored them in the classroom closet. A number of kids in the 80s also kept a .22, deer rifle, or shotgun on the rack in the rear window of their farm trucks or tucked behind the bench seat. Don’t recall locking doors but I am sure some did. There were plenty of the farm trucks, however, that never got locked because they were old farm pickups and no one messed with others’ tools, trucks, etc. back then (at least during the school day). Was southwest North Dakota.
Mark

Re: “A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

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i suspect a lot of the difference here is a rural setting. where i attended jr high (in the mid-60s) was basically a small town out in the sticks, surrounded by farms, woods and orange groves. a good number of the kids would go hunting before or after school. a gun was a familiar tool used to put dinner on the table or control vermin. by the time i hit sr. high (9th grade, 1969), subdivisions were overwhelming the rural lifestyle and the guns and trucks disappeared.
i'm retired. what's your excuse?

Re: “A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

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Not personally, but I saw it. It usually was not a shotgun but, rather, a Winchester 94 with the obligatory lariat. Cache La Poudre, circa 1960s. This was in the Jr. High School parking lot (not all Sr. High kids had moved to Poudre yet). And I saw one fist fight and more than a few instances of bullying in that parking lot. To my knowledge, no one ever retrieved a gun.

Smoking cigarettes, though, that there was the violation. Kid's had to cross the highway to do that. (Chewing tobacco was not allowed in class if you spit, but otherwise it was a go.)

P.S. Kids drove pickups to school when they were 13, 14 years old if they lived on a ranch or farm.
Last edited by JamesRiley on Sun Jul 12, 2020 9:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

Re: “A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

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Never owned a pickup.

But when I was young, not sure which grade but we still had show-n-tell so likely 3rd. or 4th. grade, I took my dad's 1911 and one bullet to school for show-n-tell. Talked about gun safety and how my dad like most of the kids dads had been in a war where people got shot and that guns weren't play things. The gun and bullet were passed around the class so everyone could feel how heavy it was.

The teacher was impressed so she had me go with her to a couple other classes to repeat the exercise. The pistol sat unlocked in her desk drawer until school was over and I carried it back home.

This was in Baltimore, public school, early 1950s.

But seeing shotguns and rifles in a gun rack of a pickup really wasn't that unusual though not often in town. I can say that almost every house of every friend did have either a gun rack or cabinet and quite often a 410 loaded by the back door if in the country.
To be vintage it must be older than me!
The next gun I buy will be the next to last gun I ever buy. PROMISE!
jim

Re: “A loaded shotgun in my pickup truck at school”: myth or fact?

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Fall 1967, Miss Martier's World History class. We're studying WWI. "I've got a WWI rifle." "Bring it." Next day I brought my Austrian Mannlicher 8x50r carbine to her first period class, and she kept it for her other classes--mine was third period. Cute thing was, I was not old enough yet to drive, so I slung it over my shoulder and rode my bike to school, and back. Never got stopped. Why? Did not point gun at thing I did not want to destroy. Worked out.

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