The Power of Old Men

Teaching in an age-old fashion

Our society nowadays revolves around the appreciation of women.  I don’t exactly mind that – I’m a big appreciator of women myself – but I want to say a word for the power of old men.

I recently wrote a piece for a magazine about how I came to be interested in the Second Amendment.  They wanted something deeply autobiographical, and as I thought about it, it was mostly because of old men.

My maternal grandfather, known to all and sundry as “G-Dad,” was the one who taught me to shoot.  He had learned from his grandfather, known to all and sundry as “Bud,” and so I was taught in traditional Southern Scots-Irish style.  My mother was an only child, and by the time I came along he was happy to spend some time raising a boy.  I spent large chunks of every summer visiting – my parents were in grad school and were happy for the peace – and when I visited he would take me hunting, fishing, and shooting.  The “hunting” was mostly just shooting crows, and the occasional squirrel or varmint; he grew up a city kid and wasn’t much of a hunter.  The fishing was for largemouth bass, often in Oak Mountain Lake, or Logan-Martin.  The shooting was aiming at targets in the woods, or sometimes plinking and shooting rats at the county dump.

We started with a .22 that I still have – it shoots .22 shorts, longs, and long rifle cartridges a cool, if somewhat outdated feature.  Which one we shot depended on the targets at hand; he was frugal on ammunition and saw no reason to spend on a long rifle cartridge if a short would do.  As I got a bit older, we shot with an M1 carbine, which I also still have.  It was made by IBM, part of the World War II arms-making campaign that saw all sorts of companies ranging from Underwood and Singer to Rock-Ola, the jukebox maker, providing M1 carbines to the troops.  (I wish I had a Rock-Ola, as they’re fairly rare and valuable.)

We also started shooting shotguns, first in 20 gauge (my first was a break-open H&R, which I still own), then in 12 gauge.  Milk jugs full of water made a fun target.  We shot pistols a bit, but he was mostly a long gun guy, even though he had carried a pistol on the mean streets of Birmingham in his youth, and in his early days as a traveling representative for the old Pure Oil Company.  (He once told me that he escaped a carjacking/robbery attempt on the back roads of Kentucky by shooting left handed out the window of his car at the men trying to pull him over and rob him.  As with many of his stories, it was possibly true, but definitely a good story.)

He also exposed me to the Second Amendment.  He was a lifelong member of the National Rifle Association (in his honor, I hold a Life Membership myself) and he encouraged me to read the American Rifleman magazine.  He even bought me a copy of Bruce and Esther Findlay’s guide for high schoolers, Your Rugged Constitution, which I devoured at a surprisingly early age.  (I think I was eight).  Is that why I became a law professor?  Quite possibly.

My grandfather Reynolds, known universally as “Pawpaw,” played a lesser but real role.  He was a serious hunter, unlike G-Dad, and took deer in deer season, ducks in duck season, and in his youth had taken whatever he could bring down to provide meat for the pot.  (The Reynoldses were a large, and for the most part mildly prosperous, clan in Coosa County Alabama, but “mildly prosperous” in Coosa County in the 1920s or 1930s was not really very prosperous at all.)  His living room always had guns in racks on the wall, and various country hunting motifs.  He taught me how to lead a bird in flight, a skill that I now employ mostly at skeet ranges.

While in junior high, then living in Maryville, Tennessee, I took an NRA sponsored firearms course at the teen center, where we learned about guns and got to shoot on an indoor range improvised in an underground parking lot.  The instructors were a bunch of grizzled old World War II veterans – well, they seemed old to me, but they were probably in their fifties for the most part – who taught old-fashioned riflery with a strong emphasis on using the sling for greater accuracy, and old-fashioned point-shooting with the pistol.  They, too, talked about the Second Amendment a lot, with a degree of historical and legal acumen that might have surprised my classmates at Yale Law School, later.

They had a lot of stories about the War, too, some of which might have been true and all of which were good stories.  I liked them because they reminded me of my grandfathers a bit.  They were patient and kind, even though they were also gruff and unpolished.  Good men.

My experience with these old men contrasted sharply with the academic side of my family.  My parents weren’t anti-gun – home in Coosa County from time to time, my dad would go walking out with a shotgun shooting crows, and take me along as a pretty small boy of 5 or 6.  My mother was famed for shooting snakes in the head with a Red Ryder BB gun in her youth, at a cabin her parents rented on the Warrior River.  But I grew up as an academic brat on the campus of Harvard for much of my childhood, and most of my friends in high school at Maryville were kids of professors at Maryville College and such.  And my dad was much less comfortable showing his Coosa County side when he wasn’t in Coosa County. 

It got worse when I got to Yale Law School, of course.  I remember when we were talking at lunch, one of my classmates turned to me and said “you’ve actually fired a gun?” in much the same tones he might have used to say “you’ve actually eaten human flesh?”  He wasn’t a bad guy, he was just a guy from Darien.

It would have been easy for me to go along with the general consensus on guns at Yale.  The Second Amendment wasn’t much discussed, but the general opinion, such as it was, was that it protected only the right of states to arm their National Guards, or something like that, and whatever it did, it certainly didn’t guarantee any sort of a right for individual citizens to own guns.  “Armed rednecks” were a nightmare.

There wasn’t much to base this on, really – a prewar Supreme Court opinion in United States v. Miller that was a lot narrower than people pretended, and a small amount of “scholarship” that included an article by Warren Burger in Parade magazine where he said that the idea of an individual right to own guns was a fraud perpetrated by the NRA.  Instead, the Second Amendment protected “state armies.”  (This sounds ridiculous now, but it was the mainstream academic view prior to the 1990s.)

I can’t help but think that one of the reasons I didn’t swallow all this – including the dislike of “rednecks” that lay behind it – was my learning from all these old men.  Though most of them had never graduated high school, they were teachers every bit as much as the professional educators I studied under elsewhere.

That shouldn’t be a shock, given that old men teaching young men – especially about arms and such -- has been the norm for nearly all human societies before ours.  And it’s not as if it doesn’t happen anymore, though you have to read the reporting of people like Salena Zito to hear much about it.

Grandfathers are harder to come by, nowadays, in a society where fathers are in short supply.  And old men who want to teach young men are now viewed with more than a tinge of suspicion, something a cynic might say is not entirely based on a concern for the welfare of those young men.  Boys, young or teenaged, are now mostly taught by women, and by “mostly,” I mean “overwhelmingly.”

Well, that could be sort-of fine.  Some of the most tough-minded teachers I had in high school were women, and I can only imagine what they would say about the faddish foolishness that passes for educational theory today.  Unfortunately, they’re not the women teaching boys now.

But learning from old men, like Chesterton’s fence, has been a major part of nearly every human society for a reason.  Now it’s much rarer, just another of the many Chesterton fences we’ve torn down.

How’s that working for us?