Growing up, one of the older kids in the neighborhood had a launcher, and we would go to his driveway and shoot. This was in a neighborhood, and we were shooting directly towards a house less than a 100 yards away. These days such activity would be national news. I was too young to know what we were shooting...but considering I was able to do it when so small, it must have been bird shot and maybe even a special skeet gun. But still the notion of shooting directly at that house...contrasted with contemporary gun hysteria, amazes me.
You likely never hit the house-or if you did, there was no damage. A few months after I bought my first shotgun at age 14 I fired a load of #9 birdshot into my Grandfather’s pond in order to see the shot spread of the gun’s Improved Cylinder bore(gun was intended for quail hunting). It was almost comical at how large the spread was! After that I wasted more than a few boxes worth of bird shotshells firing straight up and then waiting for the tiny lead ‘rain’ to begin falling all around me...