Brian Gevik talks about the history of guns in South Dakota with audio excerpts from SDPB's Heritage of Arms.
Lori:
Tell me a little bit about Heritage of Arms, and when you do a documentary like this, you do travel the state and listen to people's stories and you learn so much. Tell me some of what you heard from people across South Dakota.
Brian:
Well, I spoke with several museum curators around the state and I asked them if they would just describe the kinds of historical guns in their collections, and talk about the importance of those particular guns and then of guns overall in history.
And the idea was that maybe understanding something about the history of guns in America and how contemporary Americans think about that history, that it might be a way to understand why so many Americans feel as strongly as they do about guns and gun ownership.
Gary Enright:
Well, I think it was one of the most important tools that a pioneer had, whether they were gold seekers or farmers or ranchers or whatever it was. There was so much danger in the west. This part of the country still had grizzly bears. So there was a need for protection, the acquisition of food. There were no grocery stores or SuperValus out here.
Bill Hoskins:
You never knew what was going to happen when the wolf would be at the door or you needed a little more meat on the table. If you think of even the Laura Wilder books, Pa had his gun.
Larry Bradley:
I'm sure every household had one, if not more firearms. It was a necessary part of everyday life.
Reig Reiner:
We really do hold on to the gun because I think of what it symbolizes. Independence, it symbolizes overcoming adversity. There's the man versus nature aspect of a gun. All that is encapsulated in this tiny little thing, really. So there's a lot of meaning in a gun.
Darrel Nelson:
The firearm, which was a very different kind of machine in the day, they weren't rapid fire devices. The firearm was the perfect technological extension of all those social dynamics of protection and hunting and service to the country. Do those circumstances still apply? Does the firearm extend us in the way that it used to? We talk as if it's the same situation, and I would argue that no, it's not.
Reig Reiner:
You can argue whether they were good or bad, but they certainly were crucial in our history here. And I believe people hang on to them and keep them because they want to keep those stories.
Lori:
Brian Gevik, who did we hear from there? I recognized Bill Hoskins.
Brian:
Yeah. Well, we heard it first from Gary Enright, he's the director of the 1881 Courthouse Museum in Custer. Bill Hoskins, as you mentioned, the director of Siouxland Heritage Museums. Larry Bradley, a USD professor and a volunteer director at the W.H Over museum in Vermilion. We heard from the late Reig Reiner from the Journey and Pioneer museum in Rapids. And lastly, Darrell Nelson from the Days of '76 Museum in Deadwood. [crosstalk 00:03:57]
I was just going to say that there's one thing that wasn't really mentioned here, that was the experience of the people who served in the military. I spoke with a pair of world war II veterans in the documentary, and they were almost completely indifferent to guns. And these were guys that had used them a lot. These guys, they were just tools to get the job done. I met other veterans who still enjoy shooting and they really like shooting the kinds of guns that they had access to in the service.
Lori:
Yeah. When you visited some of these collections and I ask this because I used to work for the Siouxland Heritage Museums, and I remember some of those stories, the individual artifacts that had these heartbreaking, encouraging, and really fascinating stories, anything come to mind?
Brian:
Well, it's very interesting to see a flintlock rifle that was carried in the Revolutionary War. Brought into battle at Bunker Hill. One of the volunteers who came from his home and got together and fought there. As you say, there are many other kinds of guns in those collections. Some of them with pretty dark histories, some of them quite ordinary.
Most of these museums also have a lot of what I guess I would call conflict guns or conflict weapons. They have machine guns, they have [panens 00:05:25] for crying out loud, almost every kind of gun that you can think of. And one thing at the W.H Over Museum, there's an example of a punt gun, which is almost a canon, but it's mounted on the front of a small boat called a [inaudible 00:05:36]. And they were used to hunt ducks commercially called market hunting.
These guns fire a pound of lead shot out onto a body of water covered with ducks. You'd fire once in the morning and gradually put it, you'd spend the rest of the day picking up ducks. Now those guns were banned state by state as early as the 1860s. And those were some of the first guns to be banned. There was a federal act in 1934 that banned short barrel shotguns and so on.
So many measures, ownership of certain kinds of guns to protect gun owner rights over the years. Then we get to the Brady bill in '93 and we get the first assault ban, I should just say the first assault rifle ban. And that expired in 2004 and since then state and local governments have passed all these various laws, either limiting gun possession and opened or concealed carry. And so where you live has a lot to do with what's legal and what's not.