It’s officially deer season.

For many people, this inspires feelings of joy, excitement and nostalgia. I’ve heard my father’s stories of hunting with his father. I’ve heard my friends’ stories about family hunting trips.

Here, hunting isn’t so much a novelty as it is a part of the culture. It’s ingrained. Those of us whose families have been here for generations relied on hunting to provide for the family, and their techniques have been passed down from generation to generation. Around this area, it is rare to find someone who doesn’t hunt, or who hasn’t at least been hunting once.

I am one of those people. I am about as anti-gun as a person can get. For a girl born in Bismarck and raised in Kansas and South Dakota, this is surprising. I’ve lived on farms most of my life and am familiar with the death of creatures great and small to feed the family or decorate the mantle.

My father taught me how to shoot with a rifle when I was a teenager, not because he wanted to take me hunting but because we had a coyote problem and we didn’t want them killing our animals.

And yet, I’ve never fired a gun. I know my way around my father’s rifle and am familiar with other types of guns. I know how to handle a gun safely.

Never point it at something you don’t intend to shoot. If you drop it, don’t try to catch it. Better yet, don’t put yourself in a situation where you might drop your gun. Keep your finger away from the trigger unless you’re ready to shoot your target.

But, much to my father’s chagrin, I refrained from actually shooting the rifle he was teaching me with.

Guns have always been something I’ve disliked. I’ve lived in communities that have lost children to improper handling. Hearing about this as a child was terrifying. As an adult working as an EMT, the first death I ever witnessed (EMT or not) was from a gunshot wound. The sight of the ER doc telling the parents that their son didn’t survive is something I will never forget. Just as hunting culture has been part of my life, so has death from guns.

It is understandable then, that I detest guns. In my perfect world, guns would be as regulated and illegal as drugs like meth and crack.

But before you hunters and gun owners start yelling at me, telling me I’ll only take your guns from your cold, dead hands, let me say: I will never, ever vote to “take your guns away.”

Although in my perfect world guns wouldn’t be legal, I understand why this will never happen. My view is controversial at best. Second Amendment debates regardless, I’d be removing a cultural tradition in the Midwest. I may not value hunting, but I see how it brings together generations and continues traditions. I see how emotional the ties to hunting are.

I will, however, never stop advocating for increased gun safety awareness. Two of the three deaths I spoke of earlier were due to improper gun handling. There are options available to gun owners now, and many of them are very well put together. The North Dakota Game and Fish Department offers free, 14-hour hunter education courses both online and in classrooms. However, these aren’t mandatory. Getting a gun in North Dakota is as easy as going to Walmart, no safety lessons required. Getting a hunting license in ND requires gun classes if you’re hunting on land that you do not own, but — again- — are not mandatory for every gun owner. Sure, there is some common sense to using a gun, but there is much more than just loading, pointing and shooting.

It is for this reason I support regulation of firearms. By requiring licenses and registration, we can require safety classes. We can continue to decrease the number of needless deaths from gun accidents that occur every year. This is a goal we can all get behind, gun-owners and anti-gun people alike.

As for me, I will continue to avoid guns. I respect them and am not ashamed to admit that there is an element of fear to my avoidance. I take pride in the fact that I’ve never fired a gun, but I’m glad I know how to be safe around them. To the people who’ve made that possible, like my father and a dear friend who happens to be a gun enthusiast, I thank you.

Kjerstine Trooien is a staff writer for The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected].