laststandonzombieisland

This is a bit of a rant, so if you aren’t into that, click away.

So yeah, last week I covered the story of an 18-year old rural (town of 14,000) Missouri youth, a kid named Sawyer Shepherd. This guy, a high school baseball player and fair chase hunter went turkey hunting before school (its spring turkey season like almost everywhere in the country that has gobblers). Well, he bagged one and, in a sign of the times, shared a picture of it on “the facebook” as we say in the South, then went home, changed, put the bird on ice, and went to school.

Well, here’s the thing: he forgot to take his shotgun out of his truck.

But here is the other thing: it was unloaded, broken down, locked in a case, and under the seat of his vehicle. Now according to the Federal Gun-Free Schools Act, since the gun was all of the above, and since Missouri has a guns in parking lot law, he did not break any state or federal laws by doing so. This wasn’t a case of a kid bringing a gun to school to take on a bully or slaughter his classmates. This wasn’t an active shooter. It was a rural hunter that was not prohibited from having a firearm with a non-functional legal gun secured in a vehicle– accidentally on school property.

Now back to the story.

Somebody dimed old Sawyer out and made an anonymous call to the school that the third-baseman had said gun in his truck on school property (the parking lot). When the school asked him about it, he came clean and the cops were called. Then, since he violated school policy, he was immediately suspended pending possible expulsion— just a few weeks from graduation.

It kinda struck me because growing up in the rural south, as a high school kid in the late 80s and early 90s, I often had an unloaded shotgun in my vehicle as we would go dove hunting in September-October after school with my friends and, like Shepherd, turkey hunting on those cool spring mornings before school. Of course, that was back when the school had a supervised rifle team that I was a part of as well– even shooting .22LR Remington Model 40s on campus (The pearl-clutching horror!) and we also shot on Fridays (Mossberg 42s) in JROTC– IN CLASS!

So I wrote it up for Guns.com from local news reports and it was some of the first national coverage the story got (Guns.com has nearly a half million social media followers and gets something like 2~million page views a day).

Then other outlets started picking it up (including the NRA who put the Guns.com piece on their news feed) and the youth’s lawyer told me that, when the school decided to let the youth come back and play ball, attend prom, and most importantly, graduate, he said that they got calls and emails from all over the country who saw the story and wanted to help.

“Without the help of supporters, it would have been a more difficult battle to get Sawyer back in school,” he said.

The truth is, I think stories like this should be told. So I intend to keep doing it.

(Steps off soapbox, gets back up on high horse, well, more of a mule actually…)

Thanks for reading.