I'm only laughing because I know this as fact!
Posted on 12/17/2019 5:01:32 AM PST by w1n1
There was a giant black widow on the concrete wall in my Dad’s garage when I was seven.
Shot it with the BB gun.
BB hit it, then the concrete, bounced straight back and hit me on my tongue.
Black widows aren’t that tasty!
I have two brothers and two sisters. There were five of us, two boys and three girls. We all got BB guns before we were 12. At 12 we all got our first .22 rifles, well, except for my baby brother. His .22 got pushed out a year or two after he shot Mom in the butt with his BB gun. We were raised on a farm so no danger of shooting out the neighbor’s windows or anything. My other brother had his .22 taken away for a while after killing a bird for no good reason. It’s funny how the two boys got in trouble with theirs while none of the three girls did.
They were a great first “gun” for kids to teach gun safety before giving them the real thing. Nobody shot anybody’s eye out either. Mom had plenty of padding after five kids, all two years apart, to prevent any long term damage. I can’t say that about my baby brother. He didn’t sit for about a week. Mom was sitting before he was.
We all grew up with a respect for firearms. Dad was a stickler about that.
I was shot a thousand times by BBs. I also recall a 1/4” rubber ball shooting gun that really hurt. Darts were bad if they hit a bony place — they’d stick in good. Had a couple firecrackers go off against my skin.
None of that compared to high school football.
I learned to shoot on my Dad’s Buck Jones pump action. It was the many reason I was always glad to go to Grandma’s house, as I was not allowed to have one at my house because my Mom was convinced I would “put your eye out with that thing.”
I'm only laughing because I know this as fact!
I’ve got three rifles by the front door for different levels of threat. BB gun to scare off small animals. .22 cal pellet gun for a little bigger animals. .22 rifle for real threats. And then if the end of the world comes I’ll run to my arsenal for the fun stuff.
I played with Protestant kids as a Catholic and we never knew a thing except we all went to church on Sunday and were best friends through childhood.
No one taught us about differences or any of THAT shit .... actually, regarding each other, no one taught us ANYTHING ..... WE LEARNED ALL ABOUT ME AND US BY OURSELVES !
And we certainly knew enough to never shoot a BB, or throw a rock, or swat with a stick .... another kid on the head or in the face .....
What're ya', KIDDIN' ? ?
Y'might take an eye out,
AND WE WEREN'T STUPID.
My Dad and uncle found them before Christmas and shot some windows out of the school next door.
Had them taken away before Christmas.
I got a Benjamin for my tenth birthday.
Felt like luckiest kid on the earth.
I don’t know about urban legend, but I’ll tell you that our reindeer games came to an abrupt stop when I hit my big brother in the cheek.
(On the other hand, it was all fun & games when I hit the neighbor kid in the @#%&)
We had a rule of no head shots.
My dad wanted me to be able to learn how to shoot and hunt with it. It came with a v and "peep" sights on it. If you shot a rabbit between the eyes with it you killed it. I once "knocked" a sparrow off a telephone wire at 20yards.
3 years later when I was 11 I got a 20guage double barrel shotgun on my birthday!
The only time I got shot was when I was showing my 6 year old daughter how to use it. The bb hit something and ricocheted back to my forehead. I milk the “my kid shot me” story for a while.
“I milk the “my kid shot me” story for a while.”
LOL, of course it was the kids fault!
I had a Daisy in the 1970’s that was metal and wood that looked like a Winchester 1894, what a cool rifle. Even better my grandpa had a bb gun that looked like an M1 carbine. You cocked it by putting the butt of the rifle on the ground or something hard and pushing the barrel back into the receiver.
My brother and I were hammering away at a squirrel that wondered into my grandpa’s yard and it was winter and my brother got excited and swept me and had an AD into my side at near point blank range. I had a thick heavy coat on and God it still hurt! I was furious and cocked my Daisy and was ready to return fire, but my grandpa grabbed it and said it was an accident. From day one we were drilled, you do NOT shoot at anyone, no dogs, cats, red birds, doves etc... You shoot targets, blackbirds in fruit trees or the garden and you know what is behind your target and we followed those rules. Dad was a stickler on these rules.
Years later we had some neighbors who were absolute nuts. Me and my brothers were on a plateau near our house with a buddy our air rifles shooting at targets we had put up on trees. We are shooting into the woods and we are standing there talking and the buddy hears a noise behind us and turns around and looks toward the nutty neighbors houses a good distance behind us just in time to take a bb in the forehead. He goes down screaming and we hear zip, zip, zip and the damned fools are shooting at us with their bb guns and air rifles, WTH!
We hit the ground and took cover behind trees hollering what the hell is their problem. We hadn’t been close to their houses, talked to them, nothing. We had went up to the plateau a different route as to not be seen or bothered by the kooks. They kept hammering away but not hitting us and the guy that was hit in the forehead had a bloody spot but it didn’t penetrate and he had calmed down. We finally were like well crap we can’t move without getting hit but had been told over and over by our parents you DO NOT SHOOT these bb/air rifles at anyone. Finally I said aim at the ground near them or for their legs and see if we can get them to stop this idiocy. Me and another brother started popping away and the other brother with a scope eased around and got lined up on the main little douche-bag doing the shooting and he kept firing and running behind the corner between two houses. My brother waited and figured out where he was standing and the jerk stepped out and fired and jumped back and my brother fired and ricocheted it off the other house right into the guys ass and he let out a howl like a mashed cat! Guess what, they all stopped and we backed out and went home and the guy who was hit in the forehead went home. His dad paid a visit to the nuts parents that evening. Lets say we were never shot at again by these quacks. We told our parents and the other guys parents talked to ours as well and they said fine, but stay away from that area in the mountains just in case they get crazy again. We had a mountain range to use so we just moved on up into the woods a little further, no big deal for us.
Slight inaccuracy. Indeed the Daisy BB gun was all the article says, but the BB gun was not the only “precursor” to .22 firearms for youth. There were also the “pump up” and “spring air” pellet air rifles, far more powerful than the simple BB device. The progression was usually BB-to-pellet-to-.22.
The first 'pump-up' was a 1779 Girandoni Windbuchse. Fed by up to 20 round magazines in was a weapon of mass destruction by 18th century standard. It was almost exclusively a weapon of Swiss military and a bunch of hundred border guards armed with these could easily wipe out the contemporary army in possession of traditional muskets.
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