my mom (born 1961) described her high school parking lot as exactly this. she described it as sort of a "clique"/social strata thing, like, guys I associate with wearing heavy Carhartt work coats to school every day and jeans with a clear indentation of a chew can (despite being under 18), would've been the kinds of guys who would proudly leave their sometimes multiple hunting firearms in gun racks in their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot, which nobody had any issue with at all.
1991, the year I was born, someone held up a class at the same high school with a sawed-off shotgun. nobody was hurt but he discharged a few shells into a wall. last I checked you could still see how rough the buckshot-riddled concrete wall still is, despite having been painted over. (interestingly, this story never made national news...)
I went on to attend the same high school and sometime around 2008 we had a complete school lockdown one Monday because a kid had left a paintball gun in his car from over the weekend... in the parking lot of the other high school across town. pretty sure he was tried for a felony.
This is what you get when everyone at every level feels compelled to "do something".
My Silent Generation father grew up in a city, which quickly turned rural at its edges, and it was routine to keep your hunting long gun in your locker to save a trip back home for hunting before or after school. Antonin Scalia mentioned carrying his .22 target rifle on the NYC city subways to and from practice.
My grandmother's high school had an elective class where they would even shoot at the school.
For instance, Japan, per capita, has fewer firearms-related suicides than the US, but it has more suicides. I’d be willing to bet it has more train-related suicides than the US. Does this mean Japan’s suicide rate would go down if they had fewer trains and more guns? No, it just means that suicidal Japanese use the tools that are available to them, as do suicidal Americans.
Britain has very low rates of gun violence. But it has increasing rates of knife violence. Is this because Brits have too much access to knives? Or is it because violent people use the tools that are available to them? Britain is cracking down on knives, but even if they make it nigh-impossible to peacefully chop vegetables in your own kitchen, British criminals will just switch to screwdrivers or cricket bats or the Millwall Brick. But hey, at least you won’t have any more British toddlers getting hurt by playing with kitchen knives.
> I wish Americans could get a feeling of how different a society without a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia feels like. Where children just go to school without security checks, amok drills and bulletproof safe rooms.
Americans a century ago were just as well armed as today (perhaps more so) and had none of that nonsense. It used to be that if you were an American teenager in a rural area, you could even drive to school with your hunting rifle still in your pickup and nobody would care.