First shot - How old were you and what was it

Eight or nine. RedRyder BB guns. Foster brother and I packed them everywhere we went on the Ohio farm.
First propellant fired bullet, 22’s at Boy Scout camp.

Went off to the service at 19, Navy, no firearms training so didn’t fire “Guns” until late 20’s when a friend talked me into joining a gun club. The rest is history.

i learned to shoot with my brothers 4x scoped .22 cal air rifle. i shot small birds, toy soldiers, small fruits swaying in the wind with it and rats( this was in another country). maybe 10 to 11 yrs old .

my first real centerfire shot with a pistol was much later. my father had an old BHP that was rusting away, as a kid i remember him tucking it next to the handbrake of the car during trips. Martial law was declared and it stayed inside the house after. My older brother had shown me how to field strip it. ( unsupervised- my father had no idea must have been 13 to 14 yrs old, how unsafe is that) by then we knew never to point any gun at anyone even if unloaded. I was the only one oiling that gun periodically. it was never loaded but there were loose rounds in the same drawer. around 20 yrs old i decided to shoot a round in our backyard. we had reinforced concrete fence walls so good backstop. i made sure no one was to go outside for the next few minutes. i had painted 3 white dots on the sight with typewriter correction fluid. must have been 12 to 15 yrds. i shot at a S26 milk formula can with a cup and saucer hold(hey that is what i saw on tv). i had dryfired that gun a lot of times by then with a pencil in the barrel. i hit it dead center in the middle of the logo(3×4 inch oval logo). next shot i thought i did poorly as it was off by about 5 inches. i stopped after 2 rds. i still am thrilled that my first real shot hit the "bullseye". that was around 1987. when my father passed that gun along with a shotgun was passed onto my brother.

when i visited in 2009, my bother showed me the gun, the white dots i had painted with the correction fluid was still there.

in spite of that, i actually did poorly with my first 9 mm handgun an xdm. it took probably more than a thousand rounds before i could shoot it where i could see where my shots were landing. after several hundred rounds experience with the xdm which i still coudnt shoot properly, i bought a cheap metroarms 1911. first time out i shredded the center of the target at 10 yds. i found the trigger on those older style guns better than the mushy long take up triggers of the striker fired guns.

great stories...

I was 8. My mom kept a double stack Beretta .380 under the bed in the box...and the we found it...

My older brother checked the chamber to see it was empty, then it was off playing cops and robbers, with my older brother doing most of the dry firing "click click click" but in our minds it was going bam bam bam.

we did this 2 or three times, then my mother figured out we were playing with it....

So, she took us to the range. HOLY CRUD that pistol was like a fire breathing dragon to me...I shot all over the paper ( and totally missed some as well)...learned to respect that firearm. My older brother was a natural, made decent groups for an 11 year old. It took years of practice to get "better" than my brother....not sure I was ever really "better" just had more time to devote to the sport.

Cant remember which came first. (Chemo brain) Grandpa took me out handed me a Brazilian single shot 12 ga. Think I still have a bruise from that one. And boy scout camp 22 bolt action.

Pistol was my friends dad took us to the woods. Let us shoot a raven 25 auto.

5 or 6 - my grandfather's Remington Model 41 Targetmaster (.22 single-action bolt). I still have it, fully functional, with its well-worn but otherwise spotless 82 year-old bore.

Seven or eight for a hangun (.38), maybe 9 for a rifle, 12 for Jim Beam.

I was 8 or 9, and was already a Daisy BB gun "marksman", when Dad took me shooting with the Wards Western Field bolt-action single-shot .22 rifle that had been his first rifle as a kid. It's now sitting in my safe, and reminds me of Dad each time I open the door.

1949, 5 years old, shooting Dad's Remington pump .22.

Daisy's was about all we had a kids. Dad had a 22 rifle for anything trying to get at the livestock or chickens.
We lived too near of a dynamite plant to be shooting off guns, other than maybe shotguns.
My brother came home on leave from the marines once, with a 7mm bolt-action of some type. He let me shoot it with him into a hill in the woods. I was a teenager, that was my 1st real experience with a rifle.

Very similar to post #1.

My grandfather let me shoot three rounds from the snubbie,,,
That he always had in his Levi jacket pocket.

Probably an Iver Johnson,,,
He always called it his "owl head" pistol.

Aarond

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No firearms in our home growing up; my parents were not anti-gun, just not their thing. The first I remember shooting was when I was 10-11 years old, a bolt action .22 rifle at the farm of some family friends. I have no idea what it was.

To young to remember.

13 years old. Remington 20ga semi-auto. Ducks in Cairo IL.

A Stevens 39B 410 shotgun when I was about 10, at some starlings. I have no idea how old that gun is, it has no serial #. That was 50+ years ago and I still have it.

Age 7 with my dad's supervision and his Marlin 60.

12 or 13, pump bb/pellet gun I’d saved for but didn’t have enough so mom chipped in the rest. Shot unsupervised 90% of the time. Remember shooting at the gutter on the house and the bb came straight back at my head, lucky for me I was quick back then and saw it coming and ducked off to one side and it missed me.

I was probably 9 or 10 when dad let me shoot my great grandfathers 20ga SXS. This was made in the late 1800's or early 1900's. He was born in the late 1850's died in 1952 well into his 90's. This was actually my primary hunting shotgun until I was 16 and could afford to buy a shotgun of my own. A few years later I figured out that it had Damascus barrels and was probably not safe to shoot. But it did account for a few squirrel, rabbit and quail when I was a kid.

I so want to let my kids and grandkids shoot it just once. But the risk just isn't worth the reward.

@jmr40, could you load up some light loads just for the experience?

When I was about 12 or so my much older brother , who had just become a sheriff's deputy , took me to a range and let me shoot his service revolver. As best as he and I can recall it was a Colt in .38 sp. Paper punching got boring so we found a couple of beer bottles in a trash can and tossed then off the high bluff into Lake Michigan and tried to sink them with gunshots.
Big brother was a good shot - he got a hit. I could not hit that bobbing target , but I clearly remember the thrill of sending up those plumes of water ; made me think of depth charges in a war movie.

I was five or six, it was a .22, and resulted in a dead squirrel.

Airguns since about 7 or 8, shot my first powder burner at 11, a nylon 66.

I think I was about 9yo or so. Summer camp on a military base in VA or MD? "Camp Yokomico" or something. We were shooting those giant GI training .22LR rifles prone at maybe 15-20 yds? I shot ok. My little brother who was about 6-7 and couldn't hold up the gun on target by himself so they let me hold my fist/fists under the forearm for him. He shot better than anyone else in the group. They made a big deal of him beating the 9-10 year old's. I was his hero for a little while there.

Around 8 or 9; German Diana break barrel .177 pellet single shot rifle, a WW2 bring back. Supposidly used to train at the end of the war when ammo was in short supply.

It was given to my brother. Wish I had it. My brother let his son play with it, who left it somewhere....never to be found again.

Jeepers.................
I hope this quiz is graded on a curve!

The older one gets makes memories harder to achieve, at least for me.

I would have to say I was definitely pre-school.

I recall going to a rifle range with Dad. Remember our family going to gravel pits to shoot. (Mom and Dad and my sister and me)

The gravel pits would have been my first shooting experience, but surly with some help with "Who knows" what were being shot that day.

Nearly six decades ago...........

Also, Mom popping off crows at 200 yards with a 219 Donaldson Wasp.

DUST! she told me. (@ 4200 fps, one would hope so!)