The Boy Who Wanted a Gun: Seattle’s Satirical Take on Sunday School Prizes

The juvenile weekly papers which offer a nickel-plated revolver and a box of cartridges to any boy who will obtain eight new subscribers, supply a very fit companion for the little gentleman. The nickel-plated revolver has taken a deed of adoption over the American youth. This promotion of the practice of putting revolvers in Christmas boxes would really have been disastrous from the spiritual arming of the nation properly had it not been for the fortunate fact that the beast lives, as a rule, over, as the ordinary scholar is supplied with but one lesson Sunday for the at the condition of the but- and as boy's revolvers cannot be less than one dollar and a half, the process of getting by withholding the money which journey to lift the pa the purchase to a cost attainable degree. And so it is fortunate that philanthropic publishers have arranged to equip boys with suitable firearms upon the same means that the boys shall help to nourish and feeding literature among the young friends.

Those two good objects are attained. The diluting influence of the Sabbath School books which point to death by drowning as the inevitable result of going fishing on Sunday is largely overcome, and a spirited boy is enabled to prepare himself to shoot in his tracks any one who assaults him. The boy is afforded an opportunity to discover from the weekly the fact so cunningly concealed from him by his natural parents, that life has few pleasures comparable to that of killing Indians; that if society were not so sensationally de-moralized a pirate would be regarded as a respectable person, and that the ideal heroism is that of Coyote Jack of Poker Flat, who swears in six different dialects, drinks raw whiskey by the quart, hits a bull's eye at ninety yards, and sustains himself by robbing stage coaches when he cannot persuade any body to gamble with him while he has tramped cards up his alters. Obviously this country must have a great and glorious future when its youth have instilled into them by the press such impressive lessons as these.

We may, however, while warmly endorsing the efforts of the publishers of the boy's weeklies to supply the young with trustworthy weapons of defense, suggest that an effort should be made to reduce the number of required subscribers to four, and to throw in a pistol belt with the revolver. The tailors, with indelible assiduity, neglect to make the hip-pockets in the boy's trousers deep enough to hold a serviceable pistol, and the young people are compelled to hang them inside the waistband where they are not available when an Indian happens to attack a boy while he is going along the street on an errand, or when a boy is suddenly charged upon in his book yard by a grizzly bear or a scaly saw-saw. We look forward confidently to the time when every American boy above the age of six will have not only his own revolver but his own bowie knife, and when all obstacles will be removed from the path of the youth who desires to enter upon the career of a ROYAL STATE MAN.