What 12-Year-Olds Did in the 1950s That Would Be Unthinkable Today

A 12-year-old sits on the porch steps watching for the mailman because a rifle is coming for him today, not for his father, for him, ordered in his own name, paid with his own money. This is 1955 and a boy could clip a coupon, mail it to Sears with a money order, and a real rifle came to his door. It cost about $12, a quarter of a week of his father’s pay.

 Here’s what the nostalgia leaves out. No dealer, no permit, no parent. The only thing between that boy and the gun in the mailbox was a box he checked himself swearing he was old enough. That was the whole background check. The same coupon in the same magazine would one day be mailed by a man in Dallas. You have to understand what that catalog meant.

   The Sears book wasn’t a store. It was the store, the thing that came to the farm, to the small town, to the place 40 miles from the nearest gun counter. Whatever you needed was in those pages and you sent away for it. Seeds, a wood stove, a wedding ring, and back near the sporting goods, rifles and shotguns laid out in neat rows, the prices printed right there beneath them.

 Nobody thought that was strange. A rifle was a tool like a shovel or a good knife. A boy of 11 or 12 was expected to learn it the way he learned to split wood or steer a tractor.    His father had learned the same way, so had his grandfather. The gun in the mail wasn’t a child getting something dangerous, it was a child getting old enough.

 And these were mostly small guns, a single shot .22, one round at a time, cocked by hand. Fathers bought that gun on purpose because it made a boy stop and think between every shot. By most recollections, it ran 12, maybe $15. The 1957 Gun Digest listed a nicer repeating model at $25.95. Either way, one paycheck covered it with money to spare.

But, the price was never really the point. The point was the trust. Picture the transaction from the far end. A boy fills out a coupon at the kitchen table, prints his name, ticks the little box that says he is old enough, folds a few dollars inside, and drops it in the mailbox at the end of the lane. Somewhere in Chicago, a clerk opens the envelope, reads none of it too closely,  wraps a rifle in brown paper, and ships it back.

Nobody made a phone call. Nobody checked a thing. Now, here is where most people get this wrong. They hear a story like that and picture a country full of armed children running wild. It was not that. The trust was not blind. It just was not written down. The rules were real, but they lived in people, not in law.

 A father who would whip you for pointing a barrel at another human being. A scoutmaster running a range with a whistle and an unbending set of habits. Daisy, the BB gun company, even printed a code of the Junior Rifleman and handed it to boys like scripture.  The whole town was the background check. And it mostly worked right up until the day it did not because the same open mailbox that trusted a farm boy would trust anybody at all.

 If you clipped one of those coupons as a kid, stay with me. Because that exact coupon, that exact magazine, is about to turn up in a place nobody who lived through 1963 has ever forgotten. Subscribe so you are here when it does. Because the trust did not stop at the mailbox. It went all the way up. Here’s a thing that sounds invented and isn’t.

 Right up until around 1969, by most accounts, nearly every public high school in America had a rifle team. Not a metaphorical one, a real one with real rifles. And not only out in farm country, in New York  City, boys carried their rifles onto the subway in the morning, handed them to a teacher or a coach when they got to school, sat through algebra, and picked them up again for practice after the last bell.

A boy could come home with a marksmanship medal and a card in his wallet that laid out the rules of the range. The same rules as coach drilled until they were reflex. He wore that medal to church.    It meant he’d been let into something. Where did the guns come from? A lot of them came from the government.

The army had run a program since the early 1900s, the director of civilian marksmanship built to keep the country able to shoot straight.    By the ’50s and ’60s, it was funneling surplus rifles, ammunition, and targets to clubs, to scout camps, and to schools. The federal government was, in the most literal sense, arming teenagers on purpose, as policy.

Picture that coat closet by the gym. Cased .22 caliber rifles standing in the corner through the whole school day, while boys who’d never dream of touching them without the coach’s say-so filed past to third period. Can you imagine handing your rifle to a home room teacher at 8:00 in the morning now? That was the world.

Open catalog, open mailbox, open school. Now watch how fast it closes. Early in 1963, a man clipped a coupon out of a magazine. The magazine was the February issue of American Rifleman, the official journal of the National Rifle Association, the one that landed in members’ mailboxes. Cover price, 50 cents.

 The coupon was an ad for Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago, a mail-order house that sold surplus military rifles by the crate. He filled it out under a name that wasn’t his, A. Hidell, and had the gun shipped to a post office box in Dallas, Texas. The rifle was a war surplus Italian carbine, $19.95 for the gun with a scope on it, about $21 once you added the shipping, a couple days of a working man’s  pay.

 The man’s real name was Lee Harvey Oswald. On the 22nd of November, 1963, that mail-order rifle was used to kill the President of the United States. It came to him the same way the 22 came to the boy on the porch. He printed a fake name. He checked a box. Nobody asked. Nobody called. A rifle arrived in the mail.

 For a few days that November, the whole country grieved a president. Something else shifted, too, more quietly. People looked at the catalog on the kitchen table, at the ads in the back of the hunting magazines, and for the first time, the open mailbox didn’t look like freedom. It looked like a door anyone could walk through.

And here is the part that matters most, the part that keeps this from being a story about villains. The people who moved fastest to end it weren’t the gun haters. They were the gun people. When Congress finally took up the question of mail-order guns, the National Rifle Association’s own leadership went before of and said the mail-order trade had to stop.

 Their own magazine had carried the ad. Their own members had built a whole world on those coupons, and they stood up and agreed that a country where anyone could have a rifle delivered under a fake name was a country that had to change. President Johnson put it plainer than anyone. He said the new law would stop what he called murder by mail order.

 The $10 surplus specials shipped to a name on an envelope, no questions asked. Sit with that for a second. The men who loved these guns most, who’d learned them at their fathers elbows and handed them down to their own boys, a lot of them looked at what happened in Dallas and said quietly that the open mailbox had to close. Not because someone forced them, because they’d seen the cost.

 It closed on the 22nd of October, 1968. That’s the day President Johnson signed the Gun Control Act, 5 years, almost to the week after Dallas, after Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been shot, too. And what it killed, specifically, was the coupon. The mailbox at the end of the lane could still hold a letter, a catalog, a check.

Never again, a rifle. After that day, a licensed dealer had to stand in the middle of every sale. A dealer had to see you log it, keep the  book. And a dealer could no longer hand a gun to a child at all. The box you checked yourself, the box that said you were old enough, stopped meaning anything. From then on, somebody had to check it for you.

Think about the boy on the porch. In one autumn, the thing he’d done at 11 became a thing that was simply no longer possible. Not harder. Gone. Do you remember the last thing you ever bought by mail without showing a card to anyone? And once the mailbox closed, the rest of it started going, too.

 You could watch it happen school by school. In Chicago, the big high school rifle league, 30-some schools that had crowned a city champion every December for decades, shot its last championship season in 1963  and 1964, and then let it go. A few years later, in 1968, somebody broke into the rifle room at one of those schools, and the army came and pulled every last rifle out of 36 Chicago high schools.

 The coat closets emptied, the racks came out.  By the end of the decade, the teams were mostly memory. Nobody passed a single law that said school shooting teams must end. That’s the strange part. They just stopped feeling normal. The whole invisible scaffolding, the fathers, the coaches, the code printed on a card, the town that was the background  check. It didn’t get repealed.

It thinned out quietly, the way a thing does when the world around it stops agreeing that it’s ordinary. A boy who would have carried a rifle to school in 1958 was, by 1972,  a boy nobody would let near one on the grounds. Picture that empty rack in a locked school basement, chalk dust in a row of dark slots where the rifles used to stand.

There’s a man alive right now, well past 70, who still has that first rifle, the single-shot  .22, the one his father ordered him out of the catalog when he was 11, that came in brown paper to a mailbox on a dirt road that taught him to stop and think between shots. He’s kept it through every move, every lean year, every time somebody offered to buy it.

 It sits in the back of the safe, a little rust on the barrel, the stock worn pale where his hands went. He will not sell it. He can’t always  say why. And the coupon that bought it, the one he checked a box on, the one that made  him feel for one week that whole summer like the most trusted boy in the county, that coupon can never be mailed again.

The rifle outlived the world  that sent it. So, let me ask you, what’s the one gun still in your safe, the .22, the shotgun, the rifle somebody put in your hands before you were old enough to buy it yourself? Who gave it to you? And what year did you come up in?    Tell me down below.

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