Wednesday, April 22, 1998

Of hunting, killing and lessons to kids

By Bob Greene

BANKS, Miss. -- As Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, sit in their jail cells in Arkansas, people in that state, people here in neighboring Mississippi, people all over the South talk about children and guns -- specifically, they discuss what is being said about the tradition in the South of teaching children to shoot early in life.

The conversation is being fueled, in part, by the widely published photographs of Andrew Golden, when he was little more than a baby, dressed in camouflage, holding firearms. Golden and Johnson allegedly were dressed in camouflage again last month when, police say, they lay in wait in the woods close to Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark., and opened fire on their fellow students. The boys' marksmanship was expert -- police say they hit 15 people in less than a minute, killing five.

Is it unfair to link the practice of training children to shoot with the carnage at the middle school? As the adage goes, guns don't kill people, people kill people. But guns do, of course, kill people -- in this case guns allegedly wielded by very young people killed people.

Getting into philosophical arguments with hunting enthusiasts is seldom fruitful -- the hunters vs. non-hunters debate is never settled, and each side usually walks away unmoved by the points advanced by the other. And hunters say that to teach children to shoot will, in the end, make them safer hunters when they grow older -- and that hunting is a perfectly legal activity.

Yet there is something about all of this.

I visit the rural and small-town South a lot; I enjoy coming here. Last winter, while I was in Georgia and South Carolina, I saw a weekly celebratory feature in a newspaper -- the Augusta Chronicle -- that startled me. I tore it out of the paper to keep, but I never wrote about it. To try to bridge the hunters-vs.-non-hunters chasm seemed futile.

But after the schoolyard killings in Jonesboro, I got out that newspaper page again.

There are color photographs of children, rifles in hand, holding freshly killed deer.

There is a beaming, open-faced child named Jarrett Reese Willis, 11, propping up a deer by its horns, his rifle in his other hand; the child "had never fired a rifle, but killed a doe with his first shot. Moments later, he killed a 5-point buck with his second shot."

Nine-year-old Russell Newman, smiling shyly and kneeling on his dead animal while displaying for the camera a rifle that seems almost as long as the child is tall, "killed his 8-point trophy buck with one shot from his newly purchased .243 Remington for the second deer of his life and his first buck. He has been hunting a year."

Cole Smith, 9, holding his kill with its chin jutting skyward and holding his rifle cleanly upright, was hunting in Jenkins County "when he killed his first deer, a 6-point buck."

All the children are in camouflage. The newspaper advised:

"You, your wife or child has just killed a trophy buck and you want a photo of it for posterity and possibly for publication in your local newspaper. What's a hunter to do?

"First, the deer's head should be carefully cleaned of blood and its tongue pushed back into its mouth and the jaws shut. The hunter should be posed as close as possible to the deer and both should be placed in an area of natural vegetation, if possible.

"Fill the camera viewfinder with the subjects, tilt the hunter's cap back on his head to remove facial shadows."

After the schoolyard killings in Jonesboro, after the 11-year-old and the 13-year-old were locked in jail, The Commercial Appeal newspaper, across the border in Tennessee, headlined one of its stories: "Well-Orchestrated Hunt Targeted Human Prey."

The paper reported:

"In this rural corner of Arkansas, the sound of rifles in the woods usually means but one thing -- hunters.

"Instead of a deer stand, the shooters across from the school had chosen to lie in wait at ground level, at a treeline.

"And instead of deer, they hunted their fellow schoolmates -- children who were marching down a sidewalk, careful not to step into the muddy schoolyard."

Chicago Tribune