Some Kentuckians who moved away, as I did as a child, tend to be a little sensitive about the state’s cornpone reputation. Deep down, writer Bobbie Ann Mason once wrote, they’re “always afraid that people are going to be surprised to see them with shoes on.” The stereotypes peddled by Li’l Abner, The Beverly Hillbillies,and Justified end up stoking an underdog pride in the state’s triumphs, and there have been many lately. At last Sunday’s Kentucky Derby, the state’s annual pirouette on the national stage, a Bluegrass horse trained by a Lexingtonian came from behind to win by two and a half lengths. Earlier this year, native daughter Jennifer Lawrence was awarded an Oscar, and the University of Louisville won both the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball championships. This week Newsweek even declared that the country’s best high school is in Bowling Green.
But one news item resonates all too perfectly with what Mason once called “urban America’s nightmares” about Kentucky. Far from the fascinators and mint juleps of Churchill Downs, in a mobile home down by the Tennessee line, 5-year-old Kristian Sparks picked up his child-size “Crickett” rifle and fatally shot his 2-year-old sister (see Talking points). Though guns made for children aren’t new, they quickly became a new marker in America’s eternal blue state/red state divide. Like most people I know, in Kentucky or elsewhere, I see guns made for children as an abomination. But I have enough leftover Kentucky pride to sympathize with the Sparkses’ neighbors, who were livid that blue state journalists would use a child’s death as a “told-you-so” condemnation of rural culture. The neighbors saw tragedy, and so should we all.
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