Encouraging Kids to Pick Up a Gun

The dead doves stack up in a limp little pile at her side.

She handles them gently. Not gingerly, gently. She is a gentle girl. Tall and blond, a bit shy to smile, so quick to rub the ears of her goofy spaniel, Pete. She likes horses and adventure stories. Beanie Babies, she says, are dumb. She’s 11. She loves to draw cartoons.

And she hunts.

Handling a gun is as natural to Aubrey Manes as brushing her teeth.

Well, almost as natural. Her dad doesn’t hover every time she brushes her teeth. When she picks up a gun, he hovers.

“Be careful where you point it, kid. . . . OK, Miss Aubrey, go ahead and load up. Just point it off away from here. . . . Here you go. . . . Don’t move. . . . Right in front of you! Get him! . . . Shoot!”

That’s hovering.

Aubrey doesn’t seem to mind. Dad hovering is part of hunting. And hunting is part of life.

That’s how many families in the Midwest--and the South and the West and the Northeast, too, for that matter--see it. They read about kids with guns shooting up schools, shooting up grocery stores, shooting up one another. They don’t get it. These are not the kids they know. Not the guns they know.

In their worlds, kids with guns are most often a good thing.

They see a kid with a gun and they think: He’s learning responsibility. She’s gaining a new respect for life. He’s bonding with his father. She’s connecting with nature. Then they think: Wish I could have fresh game for dinner, too.

Hunting, all across rural America, is a family sport. But it’s a sport in jeopardy. Fewer and fewer people are hunting. Fewer and fewer kids show any interest. A 1995 survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation found that only 25% of hunters were under age 35--down from 48% a decade earlier.

Animal-rights activists welcome this trend. To them, hunting is legalized barbarity, no better than baiting roosters in a cockfight. They also fear that hunting warps young kids. Teaches them it’s OK to kill. Makes them too comfortable with death.

Out here, however, folks like Rob Manes, Aubrey’s dad, feel with a passion so deep they can hardly articulate it that hunting is good for a family. So they let their 3-year-olds tag along to duck blinds. They buy their kindergartners BB guns. So they take their second-graders target shooting. Enroll their 9-year-olds in hunter education. And when their 12-year-old bags his first wild turkey, they’re as proud as if he’d gotten into Harvard.

Teaching kids to hunt, they say, is one of the best ways they can think of to raise good kids.

Opening Day of Dove Season

It’s quiet out here on opening day of dove season.

So quiet that Pete, the brown-and-white spaniel, sounds jarringly loud as he pants and wheezes his excitement. He bounds around, wiggling. His floppy ears twitch.

The air feels wispy sweet.

Aubrey’s sitting on a low hill, polishing off a chocolate-glazed doughnut and trying to blend in with the white wildflowers that offer her only camouflage. She’s wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap. Her gun, a Savage single-shot 20-gauge--her dad’s old gun, from when he was 11--rests across her knees. Pete slobbers on her shoulder.

“There he is, Aubrey!” Her dad’s voice, sharp and low.

She looks up. Spots the dove circling the murky pond in the pasture where they have permission to hunt. “Right in front!” her dad barks in that same urgent whisper. She struggles to a crouch. “Shoot him! Go! Shoot him now!” Her gun is raised. She aims. Then sags. That’s not a shot she can make, and she knows it.

“Aaah, he’s too far away now, kid.”

She sits back on her hill to wait for the next one.

Waiting is a big part of hunting. At least, the kind of hunting that Rob Manes believes teaches his children values.

His kind of hunting is not the macho sport of redneck stereotype.

You don’t storm into the woods, pop open a beer and blaze away at anything that moves. You’re patient. You hunt only what you want to eat. You retrieve every animal you down. And you never shoot at an animal if you think you might wound but not kill. Better to come home empty-handed than to injure an animal and watch it crash through the woods in pain.

At this point, hunting’s critics step in, brandishing a big scarlet H for hypocrisy. Oh, sure, they say, talk all you want about ethics. You can’t wiggle out of the raw, sad truth: You’re killing an animal, and you’re doing it for sport.

Hunters respond: You’re right.

Although some rural residents do subsist mainly on the meat they hunt, most of the 14 million Americans who hunt don’t need to shoot for their suppers. Manes and his friends concede it would be easier--and likely cheaper, too--to drive down to the supermarket and buy shrink-wrapped hamburger and not ever think of the cow who was slaughtered to provide it. But they prefer the taste of fresh game.

And they’re absolutely convinced that the animals they shoot live better--and die more humanely--than the ones who provide our steaks and our chicken nuggets and our Sunday morning bacon.

It’s an odd philosophy to twist your mind around if you haven’t been raised with it. But these hunters insist they respect, even venerate, the animals they kill.

Let them explain: If you spend two days tracking a buck through the forest, crawling through mud and struggling over thorn bushes, you’re bound to respect the animal. You’ll learn much about his world. And you’ll surely appreciate the venison he provides when it finally lands in your skillet. Opening a container to get at your Big Mac just doesn’t give you the same sense of connection.

Aubrey’s dad hopes hunting will give her an honest understanding of how she fits into the food chain. He expects she’ll learn patience and perseverance, too. And then there’s his selfish motive for encouraging her to hunt; he so enjoys this time with Aubrey, the talking and the listening, the waiting and the shooting, the sitting side by side eating doughnuts as Pete romps in a dew-draped field.

Sure, they could bond just as well by camping.

Aubrey could learn patience from bird watching.

They could hike to study the great outdoors.

Critics of hunting always point that out: children need not pick up a gun to get fresh air, exercise, time alone with dad.

True enough, Manes knows. And yet.

Hunting has the adrenaline. The action. It’s a chance to feel part of an age-old tradition. It’s an opportunity to provide for your family, even if you’re just an 11-year-old girl. Camping? Hiking? They’re fun. True enough. And yet.

Rob Manes always took for granted that he would hunt with his children. Just like his granddad hunted with him.

Taking Dead Aim, and Then the Kill

Snap! Aubrey locks the shotgun barrel into place.

Huh, huh, heh! Pete wheezes at her side.

The sky cups them both like a ceramic bowl of the purest baby blue, swirled with finger paint clouds of swooning white.

A dove swoops over the distant tree line, flutters, banks, circles over the pond. Aubrey squints. The muscles along her tanned forearm pull taut.

Crack! Her shoulders, bony, jerk. She lowers the gun. Slowly.

Off on the far side of the pond, the dove banks one last, fading circle and sinks. Fast.

“You got him! You got him!” Aubrey’s dad exults. Aubrey grins. “Good shot, kid! Unbelievable shot!” Overjoyed to be useful, Pete bounds to the pond and splashes across. Sniffing through the tufts of grass on the shore, he emerges triumphant, trailing feathers, the dead dove in his mouth.

It’s a small bird, of delicate gray, with a patch of bright blue beside one eye. Aubrey takes it from Pete. She smooths the feathers. She lays it down at her side. Blood flecks spot her wrist. She doesn’t notice. Or if she does, she doesn’t care.

This is what bothers some critics of hunting. Even if they can rationalize the fate of the prey, they still cannot shake a queasy feeling that it’s wrong for kids to be so comfortable with killing. Most states require all hunters to take a 10- to 12-hour education class, which includes gun safety and wildlife identification, before obtaining a license. But few set a minimum age to enroll.

As long as a child can pass the licensing test--and 8-year-olds do--he can legally hunt.

“It’s a very serious concern,” said Michael Markarian, vice president of the Fund for Animals, a national animal-rights group based in New York. “If you’re teaching kids that it’s OK to hurt and maim and kill animals simply for fun, what type of message does that really give them?”

Aubrey, at 11, does not think it’s OK to hurt or maim animals. But she does think it’s OK to kill them, as long as she plans to eat them. Death--at least of prey--does not bother her.

Indeed, the first time she watched her dad saw open a deer’s head to remove the antlers, she begged him to give her half the brain for show-and-tell. Then she wheedled him for an eye so she could study it. She likes that stuff.

Her little sister, Lauren--who at 9 is just starting to hunt--still squirms when her dad plucks ducks for dinner. “It looks like it hurts them,” she explains, “even though they’re already dead.” Aubrey, more worldly, says she’s “gotten used to it.”

Is that, necessarily, a problem?

No one seems to know for sure.

Animal-right activists claim hunting can “desensitize” kids to bloodshed. Several academics who specialize in children and violence said they were not aware of any studies on the subject. For her part, Aubrey believes hunting has made her more cautious, not less.

She knows a bullet can’t be taken back. She understands death is irreversible.

Like her dad, Aubrey views hunting as a sacred responsibility.

It’s not bang, bang, yee-haw, let’s go kill us some doves. And it’s not the casual violence her peers see daily in the media.

“People think it’s cool to shoot at someone on a video game. Maybe it looks neat to them on TV when people die or get shot at. But it’s not like that with hunting,” Aubrey said.

Which is not to say that kids who hunt are always responsible.

Remember that photo of a 6-year-old Andrew Golden cradling a shotgun up against his chubby cheek? Golden was raised in a hunting family. His grandpa built him a duck blind. His father taught him to hit pop-up targets. Hunting was fun, a family sport. Until Andrew, at age 11, got together with his 13-year-old buddy, Mitchell Johnson, and ambushed classmates at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark., killing four children and a teacher.

That tragedy--that photo, most of all--got quite a few nonhunters thinking: It can’t be right to give kids guns. Six-year-olds should be mourning Bambi, not stalking him.

Rob Manes rejects that logic. Sure, some children are not mature enough for firearms. Some adults are not mature enough, either.

But he sees no reason to rip youth hunting because a few kids go tragically bad.

“Hunters are a cross-section of society, like any other group,” he said. “You’ll find people who are dangerous with a gun, just like there are people who are dangerous with a car or a kitchen knife.”

To teach his own daughters to handle guns, Manes, a 41-year-old assistant secretary of the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, drilled them from toddler-hood in three basic rules: Consider every gun loaded. Never point a gun at anything you don’t want to kill. Always know your target and what lies beyond it.

He hides his guns out of their reach. But he trusts his girls. So does his wife, Dedra. The way they figure it, gun safety is just another household rule, like no TV until the homework’s done.

“It’s like everything else you don’t want them to touch, like the hot stove or the television knob,” Manes said. “You make sure they know those axioms well.”

Leaving the Hunt, With a Warm Glow

In the golden light of midmorning, the air just starting to crisp toward autumn, Aubrey lies back on her hill, soaking up the day.

She’s done hunting for now. Has to get back to school for English. Already, she’s missed math and social studies. Between them, Aubrey and her dad have killed five doves in three hours of shooting. “We got a lot,” Aubrey says, sounding surprised, as she picks up the birds by their thin little legs and packs them away in a bucket. It’s not really a lot, however. Even she knows. Five doves aren’t even enough to feed the whole family for dinner.

Still, as they collect their shell casings and load up what’s left of the doughnuts, Aubrey and her dad both glow, satisfied.

“I feel good,” Aubrey says.

They walk off toward the pickup together.

And head home with doves.