I had a shotgun and .223 in the back window gun rack of my truck through middle school and high school (started driving at 14 with a school permit) with shells and rounds in the glove box. Nothing was ever locked where I grew up either; homes, vehicles, businesses.
Granted I grew up in a town with under 1,000 people and the closest ‘city’ to us was an hour away and had a population of 25k.
That was forty years ago and I feel a lot differently about things and the world is a different place but when I grew up more students and teachers had guns in their vehicles at school than didn’t. Everyone hunted, I pulled off and shot a coyote in pack that was stalking around one of my teachers herd of cows on the way to school one winter. I took the coyote into class and gave it to him since I had him first period.
That just gave me some deep seated nostalgia, I forgot how much I enjoyed that week off of school we’d get. I feel so out of place trying to get my sons raised up sometimes. My entire grade size was never over 37 and that was with five combined towns going to the same school. We live in a town of fifty thousand people in a different state and everything feels so big to me even though I’ve lived here nearly twenty years. Anytime I’ve stayed in a real city for more than a night or two my anxiety goes into overdrive, I don’t know how people do it.