How long has your shop been here?
In this building, since April the 5th of this last 2004.
But you’ve been selling guns for a while?
For 42 years about. Since 1968.
How’s it changed?
Oh, the mobility of the people around here; they can travel 90 miles to get what they used to have to buy locally. And that’s mad the competition pretty fierce.
And we have people drive to Carne, Nebraska, all the way up to Cabela’s, and buy what I might have here.
But for 10 percent cheaper or something?
Well, I actually am cheaper but, and by the time that they pay their 30 dollars to drive up there in gasoline, and wear and tear, they actually pay more. But the comment usually coming back is, “well, we were going there anyway.”
“And it’s fun to go to a big store, you know.” So that is a part of the competition. And, I have a pretty good selection here for no bigger a community than we have here and that’s part of the problem.
I remember when I first came; there was a lot more people. There was a lot more people out on the farms, and there was a lot more people in town; seemed like to me anyway.
Where were they all going?
The economy in Kansas, is not really that great. And like student I’ve taught for years, they’ve all transferred out of here. They didn’t stay home.
They went where there was better money making potential, which isn’t out here in the middle of Kansas.
Any why is the economy bad here?
Well, this is an agro-business area. Always has been. I can remember when I first started teaching; I started for $4,250 a year; which wasn’t that great, but it paid the bills and so on and so forth.
And farmers were getting X number of dollars per bushel for their wheat, and they’re still getting basically that same amount. They didn’t go up, like my salary when I retired was many times what I started at.
Most of their salaries, unless they were ultra-big farmers, are stayed just about like they were back at that time.
The Farmers were pretty much getting the same amount of money for, a bushel of wheat, that they were when you started?
Dollar or two a bushel per week, yeah.
And yet their combines, and their taxes, and their equipment have gone up considerably. And their kids grew up in that environment and they were smart enough to see that this is going to be tough if you know, if you going to make, support the family and everything.
Now there are some families around, that have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think, on the surface anyway, from what I see, they’re doing all right.
And the son stayed. And they are just farming more ground.
Now you would think that with the economic situation here, the people would want to see a change. And yet, they supported the administration by quite a huge margin. Do you see any disconnect there?
I don’t know. I think different individuals supported bush for different reasons. Mine was gun control.
Purely a single issue?
Purely one issue. Cause I’m a hunter. And I sell guns. And I disagree whole heartedly with democrats approach to gun control.
What did John Kerry say that scared you?
What didn’t he say? That guy was dangerous.
But he went hunting!
That guy can’t even hold a gun right. That was all a media farce. Now you got me going.
That’s exactly what that was. That was all just twice the votes that are pro gun over the other way. And once he got elected, you watch what he really would do.
If you check his record on his voting, he was totally 100% anti-gun. That’s why I voted, I voted for Bush in order to vote against Kerry.
I’m not, I’m not totally sold on Bush either. But he was the lesser of two evils. And I think that’s the way a lot of your Kansans voted.
What scares you about Bush?
I can’t say that there is anything right now that I can think of that does scare me. I suppose there should be.
I’m not sure about the, the war, the way it’s going. But I’m not opposed to it. But I think they’re right. We need to stop it where we can instead of doing it here.
But there again that’s just my opinion. That’s not everybody’s opinion.
Mostly what we want to do is find out why there is such a large gap between the red states and the blue states. We all believe that, there is a right and there is a wrong. And we’re in favor of the right.
Well I would agree with that. Like I said, I think there is basic one issue, reasons why a lot of the people voted the way they did.
Some people around here I think you could get into the abortion situation. And I think some people were pro choice and some believed in they ought to have the right to have an abortion.
You can get into the women’s rights thing. There are some that would vote against Bush and vote for Kerry because of that.
And you go right down the list and there’s basic, fundamental reasons why everyone voted the way they voted.
But there are a lot of those, that are all democratic platform, that a lot of these people are against.
So it just kept adding up. That’s right. Now that’s my opinion. It’s just that they had too many things that mid-westerners were in favor of, and they’re against.
Because of the way they see things on the other east coast and the west coast.
The role of money in government has thrown everything away from the common man having anything to do with the government. Everybody agrees that money is having way too much of an influence on our politicians.
Well big money has too much influence on everything. It’s the big money that I’m competing against. As I was telling the fellows earlier, I can’t compete price wise on the guns that I buy.
Because most distributors have two or three layers of deals, here’s your regular dealer and then there’s your gold dealer, and then there’s the platinum dealer, and then so on and so forth.
And if you buy enough volume, you get another price cut. And if you buy even more than that you get another price cut, and I have to compete against that.
And I’ve only got a population base here of a few thousand people do draw in all of my customers from. Now the way I’ve hedged against that is, I sell guns on the internet.
And I have to follow all of the rules. Everybody says, “well, these dealers, they find ways to make money.” I’ve never met a crooked dealer.
The price that you would pay, most people don’t know, is too much. It’s about 250 thousand dollar or ten thousand dollar fine and ten years in prison, or 250 dollar, 250 thousand dollar fine.
Or ten years in prison, and that’s and, both, just for breaking the law. And so, all the dealers that I know don’t intentionally break the law. They’re going to follow the letter of the law in order to stay legal.
But I sell on the internet. But I have to ship from here to another dealer. So that gun is tracked all the way.
And then the person that picks that gun up, at that dealers place.
So there’s no selling guns, being delivered to a post office box?
No, no, it goes dealer to dealer.
Tell me about the gold and platinum dealer thing.
Naturally the big money talks. I’ve even had salesmen at the distributors when they call in and say “I’d like to have this gun.” “We haven’t got any.”
And yet I go to a gun show and I see their tag right on the end of a box on a gun that a fellow competitor, that’s a bigger dealer than I am, he got the gun.
Coming right out from where we were told they didn’t have any. Cause he’s a bigger dealer.
That goes on all the time.
It’s not just happening here in Sturgeon’s Guns on main street.
Oh, it happens everywhere, but that’s what I’m up against. I’m trying to survive here and my, I don’t have to make a living in order for me to do this gun shop.
My motive for doing this was to pass it on. So the kids in this town, most of which, now have been my students sometime or other and it’s their kids coming up.
I want them to have same opportunities to hunt that I had when I was a kid. Those are some of the best memories of my life, besides my family and so on.
The time I spent with my father and my brother. Out tromping around the fields looking for Quall, prey chickens, pheasants.
But you have an ethic about hunting too.
Well, that’s because of my father. And that’s something we’ve lost, is that opportunity, and fewer hunters there are, the less time the parents spent with their kids. We lose the opportunity to teach those ethics.
And my dad was one of those guys that, he was a teacher as well as a hunter. And we’d have safety breaks you know.
We’d be walking along and he’d stop us all, my brother and I, and he’d say, “check safety’s.” Well it better be on safety. Or you lost your gun hunting privileges for a while.
There was no “ifs,” “ands” or “buts” about it you know. No wishy-washy “well next time you better you know,” one time (makes click sound of rifle) put the gun up for a while.
That way you’d remember?
You bet. And I still go out there and shoot trap and if there’re two pigeons throwed, invariably I’ll shoot, and that gun goes on safety and I have to think about the second shot you know.
Cause I’ve already put it on safety. It’s just ingrained there.
And Dad taught us about the ethics of taking only so many birds out of the cubby.
Well, you were telling me earlier about when you were principal, and you worked at a high school for a while right?
Up here for thirteen years.
You were principal there?
Teacher for twenty.
So, the same school?
That same building.
So these kids must have got tired of Mr. Sturge?
I suppose they could of, yeah! Some of them had me for four years. For math every year.
But you see a difference in the attitude of kids these days? Is that true?
This is where I can get myself in trouble because I’ve told the people around here that I’ve had some of the best students in the world.
And even the worst of them were darn good kids. And they’ve gone out. I’ve rode them pretty hard. And if they did something stupid, I’ve told them about it instead of just letting it ride, I’ve told them, “you can do better than that.”
And they didn’t appreciate it at the time but the same ones come back now and talk with me and visit with me, and tell me that, kind of in an apologetic way, that they were sorry they behaved the way they did.
And I turn right around and tell them, “that’s all right. I accept your apology but you didn’t need to apologize cause you’ve turned out all right.
And that’s what it was all about. And I honestly can say, in a kind of way, I loved all my students. And I didn’t always show it. And they didn’t always believe that, but I had this desire to see those kids excel.
Do you see a difference in the kids now?
Yes, I do, but I don’t know how to not put my finger on what’s going on. I don’t know whether they’ve got too much already at a young age and when I was coming through school, I didn’t come from the wrong side of the tracks but my folks were not well to do.
But, I wouldn’t trade my folks for anybody else in the world, because they had goals, and they had our kid’s best interest at heart.
We were their responsibility. Not anybody else’s. And I had set my sights a little higher because my mother kind of you know, “you’re going to be the first out of all your family that graduates from college.”
And that was just understood. I didn’t have a choice. So I had to excel and so on, but the whole idea was too raise the standard of living a little bit.
Well, we didn’t have a whole lot. So I had things to look forward to. And I look around. And it’s not just here, it’s everywhere. Kids in high school have got a car and they’ve got all these other things too.
And I think there comes a point where they say, “I’ve got all this stuff. Why should I work? What do I’ve got to look forward to. I’ve already got it.”
And so that was the motivation for me to study and to try to excel. They already got it.
They don’t have motivation?
No. They got nothing to reach for. I think it’s got something to do with the ethics that we see at the top. It’s not what you say, it’s just what happens if –
Go back to “the devil made me do it.” You know way back. “I didn’t do it but the devil made me do it.”
“It’s not my fault.”
You think that affects the way the country reacts?
Yeah I do, cause I know I taught at another school after I retired when Clinton got caught and one of the boys just piped up right and class and he said, “That’s all right.” I said they ought to fire him. [I] wouldn’t be the principle if I got caught doing that you know.
And he said, “He just shouldn’t of got caught. He’s stupid. Nothing’s wrong with what he’s doing. He just shouldn’t have got caught.”
And that told me something right there. Man, we’ve really changed our morals and our ethics. If our children now believe that it’s all right to do these things as long as you don’t get caught.
So there’s part of your problem.
The large corporations have a lot to do with determining who governs. It just seems the larger money you have, the more that you can effect what’s going on, which locks us out.
Yeah, but there’s the other side of that coin. That’s like right out here in Osborne Industries, if we didn’t have Osborne Industries there’d be a couple of hundred people that didn’t have job.
So I can’t say anything too bad, or point the finger at big corporations in general because they provide jobs.
For how long?
Well, some of them play the game you know. They come in because they got the money and because they’re big enough, they come into a town like Osborne and they say, “we’ll build a factory here and we don’t want to pay any taxes for ump-teen years and so on.”
And then they play dirty pool. Once those ump-teen years are up, they go somewhere else and start the game again. And never did pay like the rest of us have to.
Like I pay taxes on this building. I wasn’t paying any more than just general home taxes down there when I was just doing this out of my house.
If you thrive on this kind of stuff you can drive yourself nuts. So I just try not to dwell on it. My wife says I should quite watching the FOX Network.
But I can’t watch CBS and NBC because that’s, to me that’s all one-sided approach.
What side is that?
Democrat. Liberal media.
Liberal media?
You bet. I like to hear both sides. That’s the way I make decisions. I sit down and I say, here’s the pros and here’s the cons. And then, that’s the way I’ve always made decisions.
So you get both sides from what?
I think I get a little more of a two sides from FOX News. And you’re going to tell me you think that’s a republican side, but I think we need to hear both sides.
If I want to hear ultra-democrat all I got to do is turn to the rest of the stations.
Well, what if I said to you that CBS news is owned by Viacom, which is a very large corporation, and that NBC is owned by General Electric, which is a very large corporation, and ABC is owned by Disney, which is a very large corporation. I don’t get where the liberal stuff comes from.
Well, I think that we might be getting into something that I really just have personal opinions about. But as I listen to those people and their talk shows and so on, it just seems to me that they just keep coming from the liberal point of view.
“Let’s don’t hurt anybody’s feelings. Let’s take care of everybody.” And they defend that. All you got to do is listen a while.
Sooner or later those commentators, like Dan Rather, and so on, it’s there. And they swear they’re being non-partisan. But it don’t take five minutes just to listen for a little while and you pick that right up. It just come through.
It’s like you talking to me. I’m pro-gun from the word “go.” Now all you got to do is say an anti-gun thing and you can get me going. It’ll just come through you know.
Their deep down beliefs come through. I don’t care. You don’t have to say it. Just your actions and how approach things. A deep down belief, deep down in your heart, it’s going to come through.
And that’s just the way I believe. You can be two faced if you want to but you’re still going to get your point of view out by your body language and by how you approach things.
So, and that’s the same way with teaching. The kids know who, who likes them and who’s really got their welfare to their best interest. They can feel it.
And you can say all the things you want to say about how you want to teach and all this business. But if you really don’t want to and you’d really rather be somewhere else, it’ll come through.
I had good teachers too, who were fired.
Because they didn’t dance to the same drum right? I know, I was the principal.
Yeah, it all comes down from the top. Everybody thinks the principal’s in charge, but there’s a school board above him.
Right, that’s exactly right.
Can we hear more about your feelings toward problems with the liberal point of view? What’s wrong with us liberals?
For one thing, we can’t afford you. Now, here we’re just talking about my gut feeling again and just the way I see things.
And, I think we’ve got too many programs taking care of too many people that need to get off their butt and get to work. But the other side of that coin is we need a supply of, to come with enough jobs so they can get to work if they want to.
My problem with it is, I think there is some people that don’t really want to go to work and we’re sitting there handing them the money.
We got too many things to take care of people, that in my opinion, ought to be taking care of themselves. Now there is your republican point of view.
And I think that’s why we have young people, that are not too motivated because we’ve kind of instilled in them the attitude that, “All right, someone is going to take care of me down the line.”
What about social security though? You don’t think that’s one of those?
No, I’m for social security up to a point. I’m not too sure about Bush’s privatization part of it. I just put some money in the stock market in March of 2000. Lost my buck.
Somebody made some money, but it wasn’t me. I’ve been making money, slowly, like the rest of the peons. And I took it out and thought, “Boy, I’m going to really get in here while it’s good.
Well, that was the very month, April I think it was, it started down and now it’s never looked back. And I in my lifetime will never gain back what I lost.
My dad told me when I was just a young kid, he said “Don’t ever get in the stock market son. The only winners are the big guys.”
And I should have listened.
And who are the big guys?
I don’t know who the big guys are. The ones that know the ropes and they’re in, some of your insiders who are finding out and about.
But my dad come up through the 30’s and the stock market crash back then you know. And he saw families lose their farms, and families go broke, and he just told me he says, “Don’t play with the big boys. Don’t ever get in the stock market because they’ll, you’ll wind up on the short end of the stick. You’re not big enough and you don’t know enough to counter that.”
And it proved out. And my money went somewhere. Money that I worked all my life for, and I lost it in three months.
Not all of it. But I’ll never recoup the difference. I’d been better off, just stayed there, just drawing a little bit, and have it in safer. Oh, now if I come into some money, if I’d win the lottery or something I wouldn’t know what to do with it.
Because I’m scared to try.
I used to think that I was smart enough that I could figure out how to make a living, that I could make money. I could run this gun shop and do all right you know. And that was pretty well true.
Up to the point where I invested in the stock market. That shook my confidence real bad.
We’ve done a lot of research about what happens in congress, looked over the facts.
I get sick and tired of the spin. I listen to Fox News. And they’ve got both sides supposably [sic]. And you get this guy over here and you get one side, and you get this guy over here and you get the other. And they’re both spinning.
For the good of their side or their point of view. If they just tell the truth, you know, I would much more appreciate that. And have a little more tendency to believe what they are saying.
But, I know what you’re saying too. You’re talking about the big corporations, and a little gun shop like this. I have a terrible time competing, except on the area of knowledge.
Having had many, many years of experience hunting and being around guns, because this was a thing my father passed on to me. And we grew up with guns, around guns all the time. And I just have a hard time, listening to people going on and on and on and on about how terrible guns are.
The old saying “guns don’t kill, people do,” that’s right. They’re the ones that got to pull the trigger. So blame the person that did it. And the big corporation I’m competing against, I’m not going to name any of them.
But I was told that the big corporations have enough power that they can say this is how many of these things we want, this is what we’re going to pay, and we’ll pay you when we sell them, and we’re not going to pay you any interest.
I order something. I’ve got ten days to thirty days to pay it off and I’ve got to pay immediately. I don’t dictate the price. They tell me how much they’re going to pay unless I’m big enough that I can get over in the platinums and the golds and so on.
And I’ve got to compete against those people. And the only thing I have to offer people is that it’s here locally, so they don’t have to drive somewhere else to get it.
And my knowledge. And I’m a walking encyclopedia, ballistics and things like that. I’ve studied it all my life, because that was my other interest besides being a teacher and a principal.
So, I have this thing about big corporations that I don’t like: they got to dang much power, and yet without them we got a whole lot of people that wouldn’t have jobs.
So you’re kind of caught between the devil and the deep blue sea there.
Our research shows, people want the government to protect them from people who are too powerful. It’s a balance.
Well I think there’s got to be that balance there. There are some corporations that I think are just too darn big. And they are getting bigger.
Well, they’re dictating to the government.
Yeah, they’re overly influential.
They’re literally writing laws now.
Their lawyers are.
Their language goes directly into law.
I don’t doubt that that’s true. Yeah.
I said it once and I’ll say it again. It goes right back to what I said. Don’t blame the 50 caliber gun, blame that idiot that pulled the trigger. Cause of his mentality, and the need to do whatever their need is you know.
Where they go out and kill somebody a mile away. Yeah, it’s true. You could set up some place and knock a person down a mile away.
I grew up hunting and killing. Harvesting you might call it. Quall, birds like that. I still have it in my own mind, to come to the conclusion weather I could kill somebody.
They’d have to be threatening my family or something. Something big.
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