I have an odd story, as we never had any guns but toys in the house until I was about 11 when I got the first of several crappy Crossman BB pistols, the ones that came with BB's, pellets, and those little darts. My mom hated me even having them, and it didn't get any better after she found out (A year later), that I had been shot in the face by my best friend, when he was goofing around with his Crossman Powermaster 760. I still have that BB in my face, about 45 years later. Until I was 21, I only fired 3 real guns, a 1911 my mom's cousin had, a .22LR lever action of some kind, and an old 32 S&W Iver Johnson POS my friend found in his dead grandfather's stuff soon after he died. After we shot it, he put it back into the box, and he little brother soon found it and shot a chunk of their basement wall out with it. Oops.
When I was 21, I got hired as a security guard by a local company. There was no qualifications needed to carry a gun, so I went to a local GS inside a department store and, at the advise of a friend of my mother's, bought a Taurus Model 83. Worst gun I have ever had, by far. I soon sold it and bought a Dan Wesson 15-2, and I was hooked from that point on. It was a great gun, and did a lot to make the bad memory of the Taurus just a bad memory. When I saw the guy who advised me to buy the Taurus in the first place, he was shocked that it was so bad, and even more shocked that I had bought the DW, which he considered a "hunk of junk". At that point, I no longer paid any attention to his gun opinions. That "Hunk of junk" was flawless over thousands of rounds through it, and I only sold it because I needed cash. It's been replaced several times over, and I've never had a bad DW gun. My second Taurus, an 809, is proving to be a chip off the old block, not as bad as the first one, but pretty bad.