Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 10, 1993 TAG: 9301120135
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Greg Schneider/Landmark News Service
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
CRAIG COUNTY: A HAVEN, FOR NOW
SOMETIMES Bob Ratliff invites friends over to his 2,000-acre Black Diamond Ranch for a little party with machine guns."It's just fun, you know, like a hobby," said Ratliff, 49. They take an old wrecked car, put it next to a hillside and "shoot it all to pieces," he said. "It's fun. If you've never seen an actual machine gun sitting there churning away, pouring lead out, you wouldn't believe it. . . . It's fantastic."
Harmless pleasure here in the mountains northwest of Roanoke, where guns probably outnumber people and the crime rate is the lowest in Virginia. Craig County Sheriff B.B. McPherson has worked two homicides in his 21 years on the job; Richmond averages that many a week.
"Something else about this county: We never take our keys out of the car or lock 'em up," said McPherson, who proved his point by leaving the keys in his 1988 Crown Victoria every time he stopped to jaw at the Hunters Den or have coffee at the Bread Basket. "You go over to Roanoke, and it's a different story."
A completely different story.
Although Roanoke has a lower crime rate than other big cities in Virginia, it does have crime. But rarely does trouble spill over into Craig - population 4,359 - where the residents view Roanoke newscasts with fear and bewilderment.
"It's real hard to understand, you know, how easy it is for one person to take another person's life without any remorse," said Tim Wrenn, a 32-year-old maintenance worker warming himself by the sooty fireplace at Broad Run Tradin Post after a day of hunting. "You know, I guess they just don't know what life and death is, I guess."
Wrenn started deer hunting when he was 12 and now owns about 15 guns, he said. He knows what a bullet can do; someone who has never seen blood from a wound or handled the carcass of an animal might not realize the seriousness of pointing a gun at a human.
"I'd say that's got a lot to do with it," agrees Lloyd Brizendine, 52, who owns the trading post. All around him, men in camouflage browse through the candy and snacks; one man with a bandaged foot even has a camouflage-painted crutch.
"I guess we just got good people over here," said Brizendine, who in eight years of business has never had a break-in.
"I think it falls back on the way people are raised," Wrenn said.
And the way people are raised in Craig is with a hunting rifle in their hands. As soon as a child is about 9, he or she will start going hunting with grown-ups. Sometime between ages 12 and 16, the child will be allowed to hunt alone.
"It's taught to us from small up to respect the guns," said Keith Ring, 64, a retired building inspector sitting with the regular morning-coffee crowd at the Bread Basket restaurant in New Castle, the county's one incorporated town.
"Most of us came up with one of 'em in his hands," said Julian Bostic, 71, a retired carpenter.
"But if you pointed it at something," said Eugene Helems, 67, a retired school bus driver, "you knew what it was for."
"You didn't point your gun at anything you didn't intend to shoot," Ring concludes.
The county's most recent shooting involved outsiders from Roanoke. In July, a city woman was at her county boyfriend's house when her husband showed up; he shot her twice in the face and once in the chest, leaving her in a coma. The shooting took place next door to the sheriff's house.
Such incidents of violence, some fear, may yet seep into Craig the way it has everywhere else.
A. Paul Meadows, 65, has worked on the Hollow Hill Farm much of his life. "The way I feel about it, the bigger the town, the bigger the crime," Meadows said. "And the farther back you get from town, the more safe you'll be. But I told my wife, the time is coming when those people are coming out here, and the more people you got, the more chance you'll have a murder."
Let the newcomers be warned, though. Ratliff, the machine gun enthusiast, patrols his farm with a .44-caliber Magnum and two pouches of ammunition on his hip.
"People in the county, they protect themselves," he said. "You're just not going to walk into somebody's house around here - they have guns. Everybody knows we have weapons, and they respect that."