Guns R Us

What hillbilly didn’t grow up with guns. I probably spent more time down the tracks and out of the edge of town with my BB gun when I was a kid than I did fishing. Then we graduated to the .22. Now Dad’s 30-30 Winchester was not something I got to play with around town like that, at least when I was a kid. When I came home one time a few years later, though, I was sitting in the kitchen talking to Ma when I heard this loud CRACK from the basement. Little brother Jim, who was still a teenager, had set up layers of tires and wood and slag bricks for a backdrop to his targets and was shooting the length of the basement. The 30-30 bullets still went through and pocked the cement blocks of the basement wall, but those were buckling in anyway because the house was collapsing, so he thought it would be okay, and kind of funny.

“Geez, Ma,” I said. “You’re letting Jim shoot the deer rifle in the house now?”  I was kind of jealous. I’d never have got away with that. “What does Dad say about that?” She threw up her hands, “Oh honey, he just doesn’t care any more.” Kids today, I swear.

Jim’s all grown up now with his own bunch of fine guns. I have some beauties too — a fine Browning shotgun, a lovely Ruger .357 magnum pistol and a Winchester 7-30 cal rifle – like to take them up to a real nice quarry in the mountains where all the other gunnies go and and we blaze away to our hearts’ content. My favorite is shooting “reactive targets,” usually those cheap cans of pop you get at Wal-Mart for like six bucks for a case. They really splatter and squirt.