The weirdest thing I loved as a child.
Define weird!
Stuff I love is perfectly normal to me, to someone else they might think it weird.
Today with all the crazies in NRA running around with machine guns strung on their back while shopping in Wally World, I find that kind of weird. Who are they afraid of?
That's it, as a kid I grew up on Roy Rodgers, Hopalong Cassidy, The Rifleman, Have Gun will Travel, Bonanza etc. I was the kid in A Christmas Story dreaming of the Red Rider BB gun.
I had party pooper parents and never got the BB gun. I got cap guns, toy rifles, and other kinds of guns, but nothing that expelled objects. I kind of recollect a large rubber pistol that shot a ping pong ball when you squeezed it.
If whatever cheap plastic toy gun I got, fell apart and it was a while before my birthday, or Christmas I made do with a stick. I entertained myself shooting at imaginary outlaws or whatever.
You'd think I grew up to be gun crazy, and I did buy a .22 pistol and a .38 pistol, a .22 rifle and a 12-gauge shot gun. I was working at a department store selling guns in the sporting good dept. in Plainview, TX.
I found a farmer that would let me go into his field and fire them. Even with ear plugs do not fire a .22 magnum! Like an icepick in both ears.
I liked plinking at tin cans with the rifle and shot a few shells to get used to the kick of the shotgun. I left the job at the department store and became a security guard at a meat packing plant. I got the shot gun because the state announced pheasant season first of October that year and on the other side of the fence I knew of a cock and three hens nesting there.
Come first day of hunting season I was scheduled to work 11pm to 7am. I watched 20 guys show up at midnight looking for that lone rooster. So much for hunting.
When going through my divorce I needed cash and I sold he .22 and .38 for cash. I kept the rifle and shotgun until I remarried, and my son was born. Sold both of them as I didn't want a gun in the house with a small child.
Years later my father was diagnosed with dementia. Mom asked me to take his guns away. He was an ex-marine and worked before becoming an elementary teacher bouncing in bars. I took his S%W .38 that was older than me, and an AK47 that his veteran buddies convinced him that Bill Clinton was going to keep him from buying. I took them to a pawn shop. He paid $600 for that AK and I got $50 as there were eight of them on display behind the counter. He went out and fired it at the police shooting range and I went with him. I fired the .38 a few times. When he fired that AK it scared the hell out of me. The power of that bullet is horrible.
It sickens me that people use something like that to kill elementary children.
7 comments:
This was such a good post.
My parents owned a few hunting rifles when I was a kid, but the guns were kept high out of reach and I don’t believe my parents kept bullets for them in the house unless it was hunting season. (At which point bullets were kept in a locked metal box, and we kids didn’t even know where the box was stored). So they were more like a decoration than anything else.
I’m also sickened by gun violence. It is so wrong. Guns are valuable tools for hunting and the like that should never be used to hurt kids or any other innocent person.
I can totally relate to the plastic guns breaking and using a stick. You use what's handy, and, to a child with a good imagination, a stick can be so many things! 🙂
Glad we're in agreement on the misuse of a useful tool, Lydia.
That's the truth, George.
At my grandparents house my dad show me how to fire a BB gun when I was a kid. Remember running in to the house asking my grandpa if he had any BBs. Sadly he didn't.
What perturbs me is that even if I'd known you, during the years when I didn't want to wear or play with cap pistols (a BOY thing, a WESTERN thing), the adults would not have let me simply trade those cap pistols for something you didn't want.
My parents didn't really like toy guns but, since the cap pistols had been a present from someone whose good feelings might be worth money, they would have liked to snap a picture of at least one child in full cowboy regalia, aiming a cap pistol at the ceiling!
It is sickening that people want to harm children with anything.
Giving a gift to a child should meet with parental approval.
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