Who else would auction off a deer rifle to raise money for a security fence at an intermediate school?
Red state people would. Specifically – as is known all over the world, thanks to television and the Associated Press – the people of Lampasas County.
The news came down just before Thanksgiving. Security concerns at Hanna Springs Intermediate School – a registered sex offender had been seen attempting conversation with one of the female students – prompted parents to see what might be done. At breakfast one day at the Country Kitchen the idea dawned on some moms. A raffle, aha! But not just a raffle. A raffle with innate appeal to a locality profoundly, everlastingly, wedded to the ideal of the hunt. A rifle raffle.
And so there was procured, via donation, a 1300 Kimber deer rifle with Leupold scope. So also a Marlin “Ducks Unlimited” 22-caliber rifle. As the news spread, eager buyers snapped up 10,000 tickets. This week the relevant authorities reached into the fishbowl or whatever and produced the winners’ names. Walking off with the Kimber was no hulking hunter; rather, a substitute teacher at the school, Jennifer Beasley.
The raffle didn’t raise quite all the money for the fence, but if I know anything about the Lampasas area – and I do, given that the my syndicated column runs in the Dispatch Record, whose splendid editor, Jim Lowe, mails me the paper – the rest of the needed sum will be forthcoming. Heartiest congratulations to all concerned.
Now a confession: All I know about a 1300 Kimber deer rife is what any fool can infer, namely, that it has a barrel and a trigger, and when you pull the trigger the barrel emits a shell. I’d never held a hunting rifle until some years ago, when my father-in-law, over Thanksgiving, took No. 1 son and me out to a target range and said, in effect, here, try it. As for a Leupold scope...er, I kinda imagine you squint through it.
I’ve never quite fathomed the passion for guns that seems to inhabit Texas hearts, among so many others. The Second Amendment I support on principle, and on account of the dislike it excites on the part of people who seem to think of government regulation as the answer to all perils and vexations. Does a house full of rifles and so on guarantee your safety from unknown others who would take away your liberties at the drop of a hat? Do they reinforce sentiments of patriotism and self-sufficiency? I think they might, but I really wouldn’t know. I haven’t a gun to my name or any plans to buy one. (I make this public confession on the assumption that no reader of the Lone Star Report has designs on my homestead, my liberties, or both!)
You know what, though? I maintain now, as I have always maintained, that if you want to buy a gun, or a whole bunch of guns, that’s your thing, not mine; not to mention your constitutional right. It’s so red state! That’s what the blue-staters never will get, even John Kerry, dolled up in camouflage and blasting away at ducks (wasn’t that it?) like Crockett at Santa Anna’s infantry.
Red staters by and large come by their gun passion honestly. They intuit the need for robust defense of life and liberty against the forces of tyranny, howsoever construed. This is partly because of the stock from which they come – good old Scotch-Irish stock, such as battled the British, rolled over the Redman, and subdued the West for that which we’re pleased today to call civilization. The Scotch-Irish were – are – born brawlers, more subdued now than perhaps they were a century or two ago. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t fool with them if I were, say, an al-Qaeda member.
In George W. Bush the red states recognized the candidate likeliest to stand up with determination and persistence for the dignity and freedom of our partly dignfied, utterly freedom-loving land. Massachusetts might have started the American Revolution – with rifles, no less – at Lexington and Concord, but the oldtime belligerence seems to have moved westward, possibly to escape inundation by the incoming tide of Cambridge-Harvard types.
Last Nov. 2, in Lampasas County, Bush won 76.8 percent of the vote. Suzanna Gratia Hupp, local conservative Republican House member and a leading backer of the rifle raffle, beat her Democratic opponent, an ex-school teacher from Killeen, with 60.9 percent. You see how people feel about these matters.
Moms who pair civic endeavor with deer rifles – there’s something there worth admiring. A certain daring and fearlessness, it may be. Likewise a certain intelligent disdain for the dagger-looks and rarefied scorn of all who look down long noses at the passions of “the people”. You really have to hand it to the dashing, red-haired, up-front Hupp and her raffle collaborators – Marta Ellison and Sharon Fehmel.
Of course if you’re a confirmed blue-stater, you might prefer an alternative approach – just trying to fathom the enormous appeal, and success, of what these ladies undertook. Whatever you learn might come in handy next election. O