Around my parts the urbanites have taken over the state and there are no more garbage dumps. Vermont has pretty much been converted with solid-waste districts running the show. Even in small towns, there are "transfer stations" that bring dumpsters and compactors around on specific days for rubbish collections. Recycling is pretty much universal. The dumps of my growing-up days are long gone. Back in the day, though, we kids used everything from 22's and bb-guns on up to and including the family deer rifles. As for lights at night, it was anything from hand-held flashlights to leaving car headlights on at night. a couple of my contemporaries even created a lighting device made from a charged car battery and a headlight, mounted on a piece of scrap lumber. For a while, I shot rats with a 6.5 Carcano, that had a tendency to shoot about 18 inches high at close range (20 yards or so). Nobody in my town handloaded back then, and the ammo I was using was surplus military, that came loaded in stripper clips and cheap. I missed a lot of rats with that rifle. 30-30's were common, along with a lot of other levergun calibers that today are common among the CAS crowd. I remember a couple of guys that had 22 revolvers, but nobody used centerfire handguns. There just weren't many people in town that owned much besides rifles and shotguns, and everyone had those.
