....can high school seniors sign up to “hunt” an adversary with Nerf guns. It happens every year here when our local police come out with a social media heads up that if you see someone chasing or shooting each other with Nerf guns not to worry since it’s “Senior Assassin” time. Each kid that signs up gets assigned an adversary to hunt and the last man or woman standing is the winner. They all chip in $10 and the winner takes all. It’s awesome and the kids follow the rules.

Our daughter made me laugh my ass off when she said I saw Preston Stuart running down the road without shoes being chased by a kid in a full gillie suit with an “Awesome Nerf Machinegun”. Kids having good clean fun that isn’t politically correct.....just like the good old days. There’s winners and losers and keeping an eye on your surroundings and having your Nerf gun at port arms ensures that you continue to stay in the fight. Being glued to your iPhone is certain elimination. 😉Each person has an anonymously assigned assassin after them just as they have one that they’re stalking. When you’ve been shot you’re out and a new name is assigned to the victor, should he choose to accept it. 😁. These are farm kids from good middle class families and hunting and firearms aren’t scary around here, they’re tools and it’s been my observations of the high school kids I’ve seen move on up throughout the years it gives me great hope that there really is hope in today’s youth. My little area is ubiquitous with small towns throughout this great nation, north, south, east and west there are good kids that buck hay in the summer or work cleaning out stalls. McDonald’s is actually an entry level job for a young high schooler instead of a career for the Mexican McDonald’s Mafia. Trap shooting is offered as a sport and opening weekend means attendance is down, it’s understood that “family business” includes family bonding time.

With the endless cacophony of the 24 hour news cycle I like to know that it’s not necessarily all lost, there’s a huge patriotic and quiet group of young men and women that will continue to build this country into greatness or fight those who seek to destroy it.

That sounds like a lot of fun!

Sounds like a blast.
The pillow biters would have a total meltdown on that one for sure....

dave

I know. 👍. I also like that there’s money involved. 😂. If you don’t come in first you lose!....no second place or participation trophies. It is student led and organized, years back the snowflakes tried to stop it and there’s always some dumb bitch that recently moved from the city to the country and want to impose their beliefs on our rural life. It didn’t take long until the district realized that not only did they not have the community’s support, they had outspoken opposition and eventually they knew it was hopeless so they just asked the students to follow certain rules of conduct which are perfectly reasonable, like not shooting your target in the back of the head in chemistry😂. The local snowflakes melt and then dry up ....... they are met by significant resistance. There are most of the big families that first came and settled this area from Norway and other Northern European countries whose descendants still live here. They built the roads, rails, bridges, ferry landings mercantile businesses and logging ports. Those pioneer families from the late 1800’s carry weight in this community. Our friend still lives in the farmhouse he grew up in and his grandfather built around 1898. I’m proud to live in a community that has such pride in their history because the pride shows.

Our daughter’s friends laid in wait doing surveillance for 4 hours yesterday. 😂on the target. I’ve seen kids outside the movie theater in town in full camo laying in the bushes of a parking strip. They are very dedicated and in all the years of this “tradition” I don’t recall a single problem.

MAGA hats are worn with pride to Friday night football games and there are some big USA flags as well as Trump flags flown from a staff in the bed of the pickup trucks ON CAMPUS.

Gee if only your town was the average American town.... and snowflakes were foreign immigrants that quickly left and went back to where ever they came from.....

almost modern version of Norman Rockwell America.

What a great post Aces!

How many participate on average?

Same contest goes on around here except they use water squirt guns and there are teams of 2 students. Actually any form of water spray qualifies as a “kill”. Garden hoses, water balloons and so on. If one of the team members gets “shot” then the whole team is eliminated. It’s been 15 years since my boys were in high school, but what I remember most was the constant looking over their shoulder paranoia wondering who was out to get them. As far as participation goes, it seemed like there were 30-40 teams out of a graduating class of 250.

Sounds dumb.

They don’t do that here!

Cool story. I graduated in 1980, and our variation on this was blowguns shooting plastic beads from craft stores. The "rich" kids bought pre-made blowguns, and the rest of us fashioned our own out of whatever small tubing we could come up with. Keep it short enough, and you could slip it up a long sleeved shirt, or cut a small slit in the leg of your jeans "carry concealed". You'd be surpised how fast you can unload a pretty good mouthful of those beads in "full auto" mode while someone's guard is down when they step out of their car in the parking lot at school.

The Octogenarian Contrarian.

Sounds fun.

We used to park our beat up hot rods in front of the court house & watch unobtainable girls drive by.

There was a movie about this many, many years ago. Only, they used "real" guns in the movie. Was it Ursula Andress that had a "pair of 38's"? Remember one German clicked his heels and set off a bomb. Anybody know the name of that film?

I saw a bunch of what looked to be junior high kids having a paintball war in the cemetery in town here this past summer. SWAT was not called out and as far as I know nobody was killed. When we were kids it was BB gun wars. Paintball guns didn't exist yet. Nobody got killed then either

My son and a bunch of his friends used to camp out at our farm and spend an entire weekend shooting paint balls at each other. I knew where they were and they were out of trouble. It was a great time for them.

kwg

We didn’t have paintball guns either and used our BB guns. We had a 3 pump maximum on the “infantry” and a 5 pump max on the sniper that was on top of the water tower. Nobody died and we killed countless hours just doing what boys do. It made playing war or cowboys and Indians a lot more fun. I remember bringing my SAA clone BB gun to church to kill time with my brother in the playground and parking lot. I shot squirrels with it and did the old shoot at the feet to make him dance trick on my brother.

Good clean fun and we never shot anyone that didn’t ask to be shot. 😂

That’s great!!!

Far out!

Paintball was a lot of fun.

We’re going to take the kids to a Zombie paintball haunted hay ride on Sunday. We get in the wagon and they take you through a giant cornfield with Zombies hiding and jumping out at you. You have to shoot them before they eat your brains (I know....not much of a meal for them in my case but I digress) ......at least that’s what I think they’ll do....ain’t never not hit one when needed but when I ran out of ammo last time we went, which was a few years ago, and when I needed to reload I was prepared to use my backup or my pocketknife. 😂. The zombies must’ve sensed my seriousness because they didn’t eat my brains.....at least I don’t think they did, I might’ve blacked out. The kids had my Six and lit him up. 😂. Good times with the most important people in my world.

Actually it’s pretty fun and with glow in the dark paintballs and black light it adds a dimension that we didn’t have as kids. As kids we didn’t get visual markers that our target was hit, we got auditory confirmation that our target had been hit.....usually “OUCH”...as we got older our sounds of being hit became more colorful.

Sounds fun!!!

That sounds like a riot!

That does sound like a good time. Wish we had something like that around here.

But, but..... They shouldn't be doing that ! That's just promoting the dreaded "Gun Culture"......... ( that's called "sarcasm" for some of the more uninformed among us).

That sounds like a helluvalotta fun! Wish we'd have had something like that when I was in school.
My boy and a few of his buddies used to get together and play Hide and Seek in the woods with paintball guns. None of those kids ever got in any serious trouble, and they've all got jobs and families now.
Small town America is still alive and well.
7mm

What Washington does that happen in??

Thanks Aces - I remember well and love that sort of stuff, and appreciate your post. Knowing where you live, not difficult to imagine the activity - probably SHS, just off the island.

Yes Sir. It’s still a good place to raise a family. Our son and his friends can take their rods and reels and walk to the little lakes and in the summer the boys will hike the little ridge behind the house and fish the streams and beaver ponds. House rules dictate catch and release for those spots but the trout in the lakes here are fair game. They have turned into very good outdoorsmen and it makes me proud. They have impeccable ethics for any age but it’s even more impressive that as teenagers they have it figured out. I was really impressed by our son this past deer season and the genuine curiosity he’s developed for the natural world. He wants to major in biology and I believe that it will serve him well and provide an intellectually stimulating career whatever path he takes within the broad scope of a narrow field. 😁

I have even heard stories about boys fishing the golf course ponds after they close for the night and catching some seriously BIG bass! That also is strictly C&R. In full disclosure the boys also worked at the golf course so it’s not total rebellion. 😁

I hope all is well with you and your family.

Great to hear a smaller town still enjoying a rural vibe so close to the vortex, aka Seattle metro area. Thanks for sharing.

I know and I also know that eventually it too will be swallowed up by the beast. It’s a choice we made for our children so that they might enjoy the innocence and inquisitive spirit of a child’s imagination. The freedom and responsibility that be allowed to stretch your youthful legs and minds. I believe that for children to play outside and remain active is vitally important to growing up mentally stable and grounded in an unstable world. The sacrifice that we make as parents for the ability to live the way we choose to live is my wife has a 1 1/2+ hour commute to work in the morning at 3:30am and a 2+ hour commute home at 2:30pm 4 days a week to the Airport. She works 4 10’s and when she’s off she’s off and it feels like a million miles away from the stupidity of the city.

This was a great place for me to grow up and I had a magical childhood. I had hardworking, loving and firm parents that encouraged our fanciful notions and let us enjoy the freedom of childhood and we’ve strove to provide the same wonderful childhood that we had. I think we’ve succeeded as our children are turning into amazing young adults that have exceeded my most desirous dreams, I just pray that they continue to follow their compass.

It’s easy for people to paint with a very broad brush foolishly believing that the politics in the capital is a reflection of the rest of the state. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of this state is red but the cities are blue and that’s where the disease metastasized. A short drive in any direction and you’re in conservative, rural America with giant Trump signs and NRA stickers in every pickup truck.

It won’t stay like this forever so we’ve hedged against the outside world by starting to build our cabins up north. It’ll be a family effort and the kids will learn to design and build their own cabin that they’ll always be able to live in. They’ll always have a comfortable home without mortgage or property tax since there is no property tax on the rural but it is serviced by all utilities which are based upon usage like power water and sewer. They can escape the chaos down here and live a quiet and undisturbed by the noise of politics and immorality of the city.