Boy Scouts, the National Rifle Association, and the Domestication of Rifle Shooting

In the action film, Spy Game (2001), the CIA agent played by Robert Redford asks Brad Pitt’s character where he learned to shoot so well. “In the Boy Scouts,” replies Pitt’s character, dead serious. And so did I, and so did tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of other boys. In Tim O’Brien’s first memoir of the Vietnam War—If I Die in a Combat Zone (1975)—he confesses he also learned to shoot in the Boy Scouts.¹ My experience was all target shooting or, in some cases, skeet shooting, with .22 caliber single-shot shotguns—a sport in which, personally, I harmed not a single clay pigeon. I never shot a gun again until the summer of 2006, a good forty-seven years later, when once again I loaded, aimed, and fired a .22-short rifle at a Boy Scout camp and did pretty well. My body and mind remembered the earlier experiences, the quiet concentration of the aim, gently squeezing the trigger rather than pulling it, and then catching a whiff of gunpowder and hot brass as I worked the bolt to eject the spent shell and insert a new bullet into that small hole. Slide the bolt forward, lock, prime the firing pin, and begin the concentration all over again. Power, danger—as exciting to the man as to the boy.

Thinking about the Boy Scouts and guns brings conflicting images to mind. For critics of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), critics who see the BSA as a paramilitary organization, rifle training seems to fit the image of little brownshirts doing marching drills and practicing violence with firearms. For those who see the Boy Scouts as an organization advocating world brotherhood and an appreciation of the living world, rifle shooting seems oddly inappropriate. Parents, already worried about the toy guns and first-person shooter video games their pre-adolescent sons embrace, must cringe when the postcard from Scout camp relates their son’s day on the rifle range.

The image of pre-adolescent and adolescent boys shooting rifles at Boy Scout camp evokes especially complex feelings in the wake of mass shootings in safe suburban and school settings. A series of school shootings and the daily gang-related shootings and deaths in urban areas in the 1990s began to fuel the moral panic about adolescent boys, aggression, and gun violence. Filmmaker Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002), the Academy Award–winning documentary about the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado in 1999, indicts the National Rifle Association (NRA) for creating easy access to the sorts of guns used by students Harris and Klebold in that mass shooting. The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, shocked the nation enough to spark an intense debate about guns in American culture, but that tragedy—in which twenty children and six adults died at the school—came on the heels of a mass shooting a few months earlier in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado. Again, the NRA found itself pitted against gun control organizations (or “gun safety” organizations, as they prefer to be called now), from the decades-old Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence to the more recent Political Action Committee created by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and to Americans for Responsible Solutions, created by former representative Gabby Giffords, herself the victim of a mass shooting during an event at her home district in Arizona in January of 2011. In none of the debate over guns and the NRA has the century-long partnership between the NRA and the BSA been raised.

Although these shootings raise many issues for public debate—including issues of gender, social class, ethnicity, the sociobiological roots of male aggression, the easy access by children and adolescents to extremely dangerous weapons, the effects of popular culture on teen violence, and the adequacy of mental health detection and treatment programs—these are not my topic here, except as my focus on the BSA narrows the inquiry by gender and social class...