> The PTO shaft is a spindle on the back of the tractor which drives things like your flail mower, wood chipper, etc.
... and kills/maims anyone with lose clothing trying to step over it!
... and kills/maims anyone with lose clothing trying to step over it!
I mowed using a Farmall H on a family farm when I was about 12 y/o. I don't remember ever having deadly serious conversations with family members up to that point in my life. All four grandparents, aunts and uncles-- it seemed like everybody-- sat me down, looked me dead in the eye, and told me sternly and bluntly "you turn off the PTO and see the shaft isn't turning before you get off the tractor. Every. Time."
All of them knew somebody who lost an arm or leg or got killed when they got pulled into a PTO.
That was probably the first time I'd ever been given the opportunity to operate a machine that would fucking kill me if I shirked on respecting it. I will never forget the tone of that communication.
Rural kids are put into situations where they are expected to rely fully on themselves, with life-or-death consequences, from a young age. When your pre-teen is driving a machine on their own that could easily kill them or those around them, giving them a .22 rifle is just... normal. It's not at all the same situation as a kid the same age who lives in an apartment and who may have never been in a place where no one would be close enough to hear them if they screamed for help.
I can't wrap my head around the idea that a large number of people who live in cities seem to want to extend childhood through age 25. My daughters are 12 and 17, and between them have over fifty animals directly depending on them for survival. It's just... foreign.
Wish I could move; I could sell this overpriced place and almost retire.... not under my control
Why, if I may ask?
come to the city, farm boy, and we'll give you a corner you can sling the brown from and we see how you do. we find something fo yo daughters to do too*
*i have absolutely no street smarts, country or city, but I do watch Law & Order and know how to pound a nail and know what to grease the maitre d' to get into the hottest restaurants in town. and beyond that i got friends, some of these guys know people who know people, just sayin
Urban dangers are other person.
A kid gets hurt hiking, "They were unlucky."
A kid on a scooter gets hit by a car, "Why weren't the parents watching?"
Rural values independence, Urban collectivism.
In the Urban situation you can emphasize with both kid and driver.
I lived on a farm for a year as a young kid (farmer rented a couple of trailers on his land). I remember one day I was hanging around the hog pen watching the giant hogs mill about, probably contemplating trying to pet one. Mr Austin came by and sternly told me to not to reach through the fencing, then knelt down and showed me his ear, which was missing a big chunk.
Rural folks might learn to respect a PTO or the varmint rifle by age 10, but city kids learn how to navigate the bus routes and subway. They learn how to walk on crowded streets, how to live among a lot of different people, including dangerous people(and how to avoid the conflict).
It's all quite interesting. Different kinds of toughness, different kinds of mental fortitude.
The first learn that nature is always present and doing its best to kill you / wreck your harvest, and that it is only through man's intelligence and social bonds that we thrive. I would argue a corollary of this is that one cannot tolerate malicious or grossly neglectful people around.
The second group learns that other people are a liability and that bad actors are just a fact of life to be tolerated and worked around.
Both approaches are clearly optimal for their respective environment. The former seems like a stronger foundation for building a civilization on, though.
Your civilisation is being destroyed because a largely rural constituency is able to clean a rifle in 60s but appears to have no critical thinking skills when it comes to a certain New Yorker.
Yes it’s good to learn how to be resilient in nature, but it’s also important to learn how to get along with and manage relationships with larger groups who are not always to be trusted.
The point missing from this discussion is that because of hysteria over stranger danger (not supported out by any real evaluation of or changes in risk) and because we allow cars to dominate our urban spaces, city kids are being denied opportunities for independence they previously had. That’s the real change that’s happened … and we’re replacing real urban experience with corporate attention economies.
It's really mainly in the suburbs where neighborhoods are choked off by bike unfriendly freeways and no for-hire transit.
> The second group learns that other people are a liability
Sounds like nature is simply survival + entropy and sometimes that leads to mixed incentives. Rural folks also understand people are dangerous. Per capita violent crime and murder is higher in Rural areas.
That's why I find it interesting, they're different expressions of common survival needs.
> a large number of people who live in cities seem to want to extend childhood through age 25
This is not great, and a more complicated problem of percieved danger.
Right now all 'city' offers is a shittier deal and pray they do not alter it worse. Obviously that's not politically viable way to get agreement and part of the reason why gun control advocates think "nothing changes."
When the 'country' finally got sick of it then you wound up with state pre-emption against local control being passed in most states because it turned out that bargain was a fraud.
So what I would propose, is if 'city' really wants to loosen up the gridlock, they should bring something serious to the negotiating table. Like ending the GCA and NFA in 'country' and in exchange state pre-emption gets nixed so 'city' can pass tighter laws there.
So to answer your question:
> Cant you all just pass some laws that apply to your place only? Why does it have to be a trade.
Here is where we are at. State pre-emption stops 'city' from passing stronger local control. And federal law stops 'country' from passing weaker local control. To break that gridlock 'city' and 'country' have to have something on the offering table for each other. That is why it has to be a trade.
America's biggest obstacle to meaningful gun control is the groups and people pushing gun control the hardest have no idea what they are legislating. That's how we got nonsense bans on stuff like slings and bayonets, or trying to specifically ban AR-15s while functionally identical guns would remain legal.
And the second obstacle, which isn't far behind, is nobody trusts the US government enough to want to disarm themselves. We already got a police state and the largest military in the world and absolutely zero reasons in living memory to trust the government to look after its people instead of abusing them.
And frankly, I think any gun control measure in America is completely worthless and will only do more harm than good if the majority of gun owners don't trust the government enough to protect them all the time and aren't willingly turning in their guns. US citizens have enough guns to arm the entirety of themselves 100x times over so even if you could seize 95% of guns with magic, that's still enough blackmarket guns for 100+ years of insurgency with zero additional production. Personally I think we would do better to focus more on improving the lives of average citizens so they don't want to blast people randomly.
Take your .22 rifle. Many truly rural families would feel that this tool was essential. Same for having knife on you. We have lived where there are rattlesnake and coyotes as an almost every day thing. Not so much rattlesnakes but certainly coyotes. In fact bear and cougar were not out of the question. The idea that I would allow my kids to wander on the property without a .22 in their 4 wheeler seemed risky. They were expected to know how to shoot just as they were expected to know how to ride a horse, and drive a tractor unsupervised. We taught them to be safe and could not have run our ranch without our girls taking on some big dangerous responsibilities.
We have also lived in big cities where the idea that many of the liberties we enjoyed in the country were insane in the city. The idea that any random teen should be allowed to drive a 80hp tractor around or carry a gun or a fixed blade knife was insanity. Just as allowing my kids to run down the sidewalk or play unsupervised in the park after dark was insanity. On our fist day after moving my eldest daughter ran down the sidewalk and was hit (but not injured) by a car coming out of a driveway.
She just had no clue about how cars in a dense city moved. There just are different life rules that apply in different situations. Guns can be critically important in one environment and absolutely insane in a second. Same goes for driving a tractor that could kill you or a family member or going to a park after dark.
Unless people understand that a different environment might require a different set of norms or even laws we can't have a productive urban/rural conversation. Of course I can drive my ATV along your fence line. You probably can't even see it from your home or hear it. Though you can bet my dad asked your dad for permission 40 years ago. Try running your unregistered, unlicensed ATV through your suburban neighbor's yard and you will find out why there are important laws preventing you from doing what was perfectly fine in the back country.
An exposed, spinning shaft seems benign but once it wraps you or your clothing around the shaft it pulls you in and destroys you in a flash.