When I was a teenager growing up in Arkansas, I stored my 12-gauge shotgun under my bed. I took it out when I went with Dad to shoot clay pigeons. That wasn't back in the 1950s but rather the late '80s; even in that recent decade, I wasn't considered an outcast. Lots of kids drove to school with rifles they had forgotten to take from gun racks over the weekend. A teacher might cluck disapprovingly, but no one called a SWAT team.
Just 15 years later, my parents and my school must seem spectacularly negligent. In the past few years, 17...
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