Your Journey to Firearms

wiscoaster said:

... I'm a very strict and conservative interpreter of the U.S. Constitution and have been concerned for some time about the bit by bit encroachments upon our Constitutionally-enumerated rights. I felt that a right not exercised is a right in danger of being lost. So I purchased my first handgun mostly from a motivation to exercise my Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms ...

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Exactly my rationale for purchasing my first AR15. Bought one in the early years of the Clinton AWB. I am not overly fond of the AR, preferring bolt action rifles. But I'll keep an AR or two for the sole purpose of exercising the 2A.

I grew up in a very anti-gun family in a very anti-gun state. I remember being fascinated with firearms at 5 years old, and perhaps even earlier. I liked Nerf guns, water guns, and other toy firearms. Would run around and shoot my friends with the toy ones. Another friend once brought a lever action cap gun to daycare. I somehow knew that this was a more "serious" toy and we only pretended to hunt with it and not point it at each other. My first time sending a real bullet through a real firearm was an M16A2 at 19 or so. It has been an addicting hobby ever since.

My childhood home didn't have any firearms when I was a youngster. I got a Daisy BB gun when I was about 8 or so and after a couple of years moved up to a break action pellet gun. Then in the early 60s when I turned 11 and joined Boy Scouts, the summer camp included a 22 rifle range that I used daily during my week there. The next year I got a Mossberg semiauto 22 with a 4x scope from Santa and I thought I was on my way to becoming a big game guide in Alaska or something. Instead, a few years later, I got very familiar with the M16a1 and M1911a1 in the USMC. In the decades since I got out, I've been accumulating long guns and handguns. Nearly 70 years old now, the day is approaching when I'll need to thin the collection. Some I'll give to my son and my nephew, as both have some interest in firearms. The rest (except for a select few) I'll probably sell.

First time is with my maternal grandfather at about 4 years old shooting a M1 Carbine he had. He held it and I pulled the trigger. Both sets of grandparents were farmers with the shotgun by the door and hunting was in my DNA so to speak. Helped gramps reload at about 8 and still do both after about 60 years. Got a couple firearms over the years as well.

My journey started on two roads. My Dad was a quail and chukar hunter through and through, hunting throughout Nevada and Arizona every chance he got with his Dads Weimaraner, Ludwig. When I was old enough to shoot he taught me using his Marlin 39A Golden Mountie and Colt Huntsman .22’s in the desert outside of town. My parents divorced when I was 8, so I could visit Dad on school breaks and shoot with him then.

Dad had a lot of guns, and he gave me an Ithaca 66 .410 when I turned 12 and a Savage 1899 F in .308 when I turned 16. (Both are gone, the Ithaca to a friend for his boys first gun and the Savage sold to pay bills in college.) Most of his guns are now mine as he quit shooting his centerfires and only keeps the rimfires for rabbit control in his gardens.

My Mother was raised on a 1,500 acre ranch in Camp Verde, Texas (Kerr/Bandera county, it straddles the county line). I spent at least two months every summer there beginning at age 2 all the way until I was 18. A rifle or shotgun in the gun rack of the green Chevy pickup was a daily sight, depending on the season (deer found a ‘94 .30-30, turkey a Model 12 16 ga, etc.) or the reason (calving/lambing time it was a scoped Rem 721 in “two fipty sevem Roberts” or occasionally a Savage Model 20 in “Two fipty-tree toudand” as his drawl called them, for predators like coyotes or feral dogs). Also prominent was the walnut gun cabinet in the living room, man I loved sticking my nose in there to smell the walnut and gun oil .

My Grandfather taught me to shoot shotguns at mourning doves and bobwhite quail, starting at 8 with a forgotten make single shot .410 until I graduated to the Model 12 and a Lefever 16 ga double (I still have these shotguns). I also hunted fox squirrel with the .410 or 1890 pump .22 in the oak canyons that were all over the ranch. Deer and turkey season for me meant the Win 1894 and Model 12, respectively.

After my parents divorce Mom, sis and I moved first to a hardscrabble district of LA down by the harbor as she finished her PhD at USC. After she finished her studies we then moved to that gun-friendly bastion of American values, Berkeley. Bathed in the promise of the fictional nirvana the openly socialist leaders there espouse, Mom became a vehemently anti-gun liberal (At least I had visits with Dad and my two month sanity break in Texas every year.) This meant my purchases of of gun magazines, BB guns and a Beeman .177 pellet gun in high school were done on the down-low.

When I moved out at 18 I bought a Win 1894 .30-30, a 10/22 and a Browning A-bolt medallion in .338 Win Mag. I went to college in Humboldt, and kept them in the gun safe in the dorms in college (try doing THAT now!). After a year in the dorms I moved to a small dairy goat farm. When I turned 21 I bought a Taurus 66 6” .357 and an Iver Johnson TP-22. Car repairs to my 1974 impala, food and rent forced me to ultimately sell all my guns but the 10/22 to pay bills as I stumbled from part time job to job until landing a full-time warehouse job that paid 4.50-hr. The TP/22 was stolen in a burglary, I got that gun back about 4 years later.

Meeting my future ex-wife up there, I moved back down to So Cal with her in 1990 and attended the police academy in early 1991 using the inheritance money from my Grandfather to help pay for it. There has been a gun on my hip, and ones in the safe that seem to multiply like rabbits, in the safe ever since.

Stay safe.