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Sunday, August 18, 2013

When Kids Tell the Rest of the Story: The Hammer Strikes a .22LR Round

I thought that all of the tell-all but tell-later stories from my sons were out of the bag by now. After all, they’re all into their late thirties or older by now. Apparently, it wasn't quite so though.

When discussing one of my recent blog posts, Surviving Childhood: A Daisy BB Gun and .410 Shells, in which I told of my own foolishness as a child, my son pulled his hip shot story out of the past. I taught all of my sons to handle guns and ammunition safely. However, there was at least one transgression that I didn't know about.

My son now told me of a time when he and one of the neighbor boys were in the neighbor’s garage capping off .22LR rounds on the garage floor with a claw hammer. To help fathom the magnitude of this, I should say that, when I took my boys hunting with a .22 rifle, they were loaded with less powerful .22 SHORTS.

My theory with .22 SHORTS was that, if there was an accidental shooting of someone, it was less likely to be fatal with SHORTS versus LR. So here my kids were popping off .22LR rounds without even benefit of the chamber and barrel of a firearm to contain the casing and direct the impact of the bullet.

Twenty-some years later, what’s the point to getting worked up about it? I only shook my head, in disbelief that they, so blatantly, failed to heed the common sense about safety that I had tried to impart to them.

“I've heard of kids doing that but I had no idea that you were doing it.” I said.

To this my son remarked, “If you had heard of ME doing it then, I might not be here to tell the story now.”


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