Lay off the Boy Scouts, would’ja?

Lay off the Boy Scouts, would’ja? May 21, 2015

National Review, which does try to be sensible for all that my left-of-center readers might think otherwise, thinks they’ve got a new scandal brewing.  The Boy Scouts, they say, are becoming a bunch of sissies, by banning water gun fights, or any sort of shooting (e.g., paintball) that’s directed at another person rather than at a target.   The @NRO twitter account is now trying to get a tweet with an image with water guns and the text, “Fact:  The Boy Scouts just banned water-gun fights because squirt guns are ‘simulated firearms.’  Share if you think that’s ridiculous!” shared and viral.

Here’s what I have to say about that:  lay off the Scouts.

The NR article links to a blog post at the Scouting magazine website — it’s a magazine I know well, what with my husband being a Scout leader — which itself got a lot of angry comments, with the same “Boy Scouts is turning into a bunch of P.C. sissies” opinion.

But — look:

Boy Scouts do a lot of shooting sports.  Rifle is one of the standard first-year camp merit badges, and shotgun in the second year.  At the Cub Scout level, the BB gun shooting is always one of the highlights of the weekend camps.  My husband, last year or so, had planned to attend a training session to be a shooting range supervisor, so he could take the boys to the local camp on a Saturday.  One of the annual scout outings is to the national guard base at Marseilles, where they do more actual and simulated shooting.

And safety is crucial.  You can’t rely on boys using common sense in the way that you can assume it of adults — heck, even adults have been known to fire their guns unintentionally.  The number one rule is never to point a gun at anyone, ever, and, though it may seem to be going way overboard to prohibit waterguns, at the same time, for an organization as at-risk, in liability terms, as the Boy Scouts are, I’m not going to get upset about it, if safety experts believe that boys are best able to handle real firearms safely if they are drilled into following the same rules all the time.  I’m perfectly fine with boys, in the context of a scout outing, settling for dousing each other with hoses or buckets.

By the way:  Boy Scouts also learn to build campfires and keep them going, and how to use an axe and a pocketknife safely.  They also tent-camp and cook and clean up afterwards, and learn about KYBOs.  And they are boys, I’ll remind you.  Now, granted, the closest I’ve been to a scout outing is the family picnic, or the drop-off before an outing, when the boys are all over-excited and chasing each other in the parking lot.  (Pick-up, on Sundays, is a lot more subdued because the boys are generally suffering from lack of sleep.)  But I’ve heard stories:  never any injuries, but adults, and older scouts, working overtime to keep it that way.

Let me also remind you that Scouts are having a hard enough time as it is, these days.  Locally, four of the Chicago area councils have had to merge into one (we presume for financial reasons — only the council on the wealthy North Shore was able to keep its independence), and each year, we get the fundraising appeal at which we are reminded that the United Way ended its funding of Scouts and we need to make up the difference — which I presume to be on account of the no-gay-leaders issue.  Right now, Scouts are taking it from both sides for having tried to split the difference on that issue, and are suffering from a general lack of interest from kids who prefer travel sports, parents who fear pedophile leaders and are indifferent to the outdoors, and donors who would rather support “Girlpower”-type programs.

So save your outrage for another target, please.  Is the risk of doing real harm to the Scouts really worth a few more pageviews?


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