Did you play with your folks guns?

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BBQJOE

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When you were young, did you find/come across any of your parents guns?
Did you play with them or shoot them?
What about at friends houses?

I'm willing to bet a lot of you did, and probably did some dumb stuff.
Are you willing to share?
This may be a good learning experience for keeping kids safe.

I found my dad's .22 pistol in his bedside table, and messed around holding and pointing it but didn't shoot it. He had showed me how to handle it safely.
His biggest mistake was not telling me about wiping it down after handling.
(Not locked up whatsoever)

Later I got tore up for it because he found my rusty prints all over it.

Another time I found his .22 rifle. Also not locked up.
I can't remember where, but I also found some ammunition, again not locked up.

We had a long unfinished basement. I set up a doll at one end, and went to the other. My brother was with me.
I took a shot. The bullet struck the doll, ricocheted, and my brother hit the floor yelling I've been shot!

The bullet hit him on the forehead. Fortunately there was little energy left and the bullet didn't even leave a mark.

Last but not least, my friend and I were babysitting for a friend of his folks. The baby was in bed asleep.
We got bored and started rummaging through the house.
We came upon a 30.06 standing caseless in a closet.

We knew there had to be bullets somewhere. We checked closets, drawers, everywhere, and finally came across an ammo can in the garage.
Sure enough it held some boxes of 30.06 ammo. We took one round.

We then looked around for some good backstop material. The owner kept stacks of newspaper in the basement for recycling drives. They were all tied neatly in bundles with twine.

A few cardboard boxes were found, and we filled them with some stacks of newspaper.

I remembered seeing a television show where a guy cut a hole through a potato length wise and put it on the end of a gun for a silencer.
We decided to give it a try.

Getting behind a clothes hamper stuffed with more newspaper stacks, I took aim at the boxes of newspaper and pulled the trigger.
I know there was still an earth shattering kaboom. And I remember the spray from the potato hitting my face.

Upon examination we found that the bullet had pierced every single stack of newspaper and partially lodged in the wall.

We removed the bullet, put the rifle back in the closet, and stacked the newspaper back in the pile.

We never heard a single word about it.

I still wonder what the home owner thought when he went to recycle his papers and found a clean hole through a bunch of the stacks.

Looking back I realize how easily someone may have been hurt or killed.

If the guns had been locked up, or put well out of reach or sight, none of these episodes would have had an opportunity to take place.

But coming across the guns, and being quite young, the temptation was too much.
 
My folks had no guns, so no :neener:

Next closest thing I suppose - I knew my grandma kept a pellet pistol on top of the freezer for dealing with squirrels, but I never played with it unless I asked (elementary school age).

But, we found plenty of stupid things to do without guns that could have injured / did injure us.
 
Occasionally admired and/or fondled (observing 4 rules), but NEVER tried shooting without permission or supervision.
 
Yes, my father had an old single-shot .22 bolt action. he also had a .22 short "french dueling pistol" (the only thing I knew it was called. It had an interesting breech loading mechanism involving lifting a lever concealed in the pistol-grip). Anyway, I had shot them both before I had found them. I showed my friend that was with me. I showed him how it loaded (without loading it), and then put it away. it was kept in a cabinet unlocked uncased.
When I found his rifle, I immediately noticed that the bolt was missing. I looked for the bolt, just to know where it was, but I would never have considered shooting it, just figuring out how to put the bolt in the gun.

So my story is about the same as above: I fondled them, and admired them, and put them back.
 
I grew up in the burbs and Dad never had a gun, but I remember him borrowing a pistol from one of my uncles every year when certain picnics were scheduled at the amusement park down the street. It was a small black revolver and he always kept it in the china closet and always read us the riot act every year about what would happen to us if we touched it.

I was between 6 and 11 during these years. I never touched the gun but I remember standing on a dining room chair and looking at it through the glass, wanting so badly to pick it up, but having sufficient fear of my father back then to resist.
 
my dad had a few guns and I knew where they were, and I would take them out and look at them but I was taught very early to treat every gun as if it were loaded and so yeah, I shouldn't have probablly been messing with them, but when I did they were handled in a safe manner. and none of his were locked up, just "hidden."

as for friends, I never showed any of them the guns and none of their fathers had any so never had any issues there.
 
Played with my dads SIg p220 and cz52 when he wasnt home.

I racked the slide on the cz on an empty mag. I didnt know why the slide was locked back and was afraid i had broken it.

11 yrs old.
 
Occasionally admired and/or fondled (observing 4 rules), but NEVER tried shooting without permission or supervision.
Click to expand...

+1

All mine are locked up tight, my kids don't have a chance. :)
 
My father had/has a huge collection of firearms.

There were only two rules when my parents started leaving us alone at ages 13 (my brother) and 10. They were 1)No matches and 2)No guns.

If dad had found out we'd touched either, when they got home, there'd be hell to pay and we both knew he meant business. I shot my first revolver at 13 and my first gun (rifle) much younger. He made it CRYSTAL clear what a shot could do to someone...and made it a point to show us any animal he'd hunted so we could see the damage.
 
Dad's rifle

I always knew where it was and never once touched it, never mind played with it.
 
Never played with the guns, but did ask to see them once in a while. 4 rules were drilled into our heads since the beginning. Gotta love the Cub and Boy Scouts. My parents were both shooting range instructors for the district and just drilled the rules into our heads.

So when we were at grandparent's house and found the hunting guns in a closet there was no panic. We just left 'em alone.

Ask to go shooting and it was off to the farm for an afternoon of fun.

Taking away the curiousity helped too!
 
My father stored all of the rifles/shotguns next door at my uncle's house at my mother's behest. But he kept his .38 S&W police service pistol loaded with LSWCers in his nightstand for home defense. We lived not too far from a state prison where walkoffs were frighteningly common.

I was taught early on how destructive a fired bullet can be and I knew better than to handle that revolver without him being around. I found the gun when I was 8 years old while snooping around the house. I didn't touch it but told dad were I saw it and he got a sour expression on his face. I remember him telling me to go stand outside in the yard. I thought for sure I was going to get a whipping. He came back out of the house with a watermelon from the fridge and the .38. After setting the fruit on a stump, we walked back several yards where he told me to watch. He lifted the .38, drew a bead, and blew the watermelon to little chunks with the first shot. He put it back in his pocket and looked at me with a stern expression. "Guns ain't toys. If y'arn't careful, what happened to that watermelon could just as easily happen to any of us including you." The lesson stuck - I never messed with the contents of that nightstand again. :uhoh:

He eased up though - I got a BB rifle when I was 9 and he started me on the basics. By 12 he'd take me out to pop cans with the .22 rifle if I kept my grades up. It became a treat to go shooting and guns lost the "mystique" they once held. It was just another tool on our homestead. :)
 
Guns

I grew up with guns. My father had me handling and using guns from the age of five. His guns were never locked away, and I had free access to any of them at any time. I never took one without his knowledge and consent because I knew that the penalty would be swift and harsh, and because I respected his rules.

By age 12, I was allowed to hunt small game and/or target shoot without supervision, and did so nearly every afternoon when school let out and my chores were finished. I kept a .22 rifle, a 12 gauge shotgun, and a Model 10 Smith & Wesson in my bedroom, along with ammunition for all three guns. At age 13, I was presented with an Ithaca 1911A1, which I also kept in my bedroom. I had to buy my own ammunition, or reload it with my own components, and I had to work to earn the money. There was no such thing as an "Allowance" in my house. You wanted money...you earned it. My parents came out of the coal fields of Harlan, Kentucky and Wise, Virginia and knew the meaning of honest work.

I never violated the trust that my father had in me, and I never did anything "stupid" with any of the guns in the house...and there were many...because I worked hard to earn his trust, and because I was more fearful of his wrath than I was of any cop or judge in the whole state. My father wasn't abusive, but he meant exactly what he said, and he would only say it once. My mother was pretty much the same, though she might say it twice if she was in a good mood. It was my privelege and my good fortune to have been raised by such people.

It was a different world then...
 
There was always a tiny .22 Saturday night special revolver... it didn't work, and it kicked around in a junk drawer. Not the best message to send, but I never thought about it since it was broken.

Dad made the mistake of showing us once, however, that you can take a worn down pencil and "shoot" it out of his 1911 using just the hammer. We did that more than a couple times... I'm sure he didn't intend for it to be done regularly. But for some reason, we never did it at each other.

It's funny, I don't remember ever being told to stay out of the guns... and Luke, Leia, every GI Joe, every transformer, and every Lego man, all had guns and were often valued as a toy based on how cool the gun was. But it never occurred to us to get into the real guns.

We also got a BB gun pretty early, though, and scouts had us shooting 12 gauges by age 12.
 
I don't remember ever having the desire to mess with them when my parents weren't home.

We were allowed to shoot dad's .22 with supervision at around age seven. My brother and I had our (shared) pellet rifle at around age nine and ten. We were allowed unsupervised use of it unless we got into trouble with it (we didn't).

I started hunting doves with a 12 ga when I was eleven, didn't hit many though. By the time I started driving, I could buy a couple boxes of 22 shorts and take dad's 1890 Winchester out to the dump to plink around.
 
I was given my grandfathers revolver at age 8. I was given a shotgun at age 11 and a rifle at age 13. We weren't allowed to "play" with any firearms at all. Even a minor transgression with a BB gun would get you grounded or maybe even a whuppin'. We were taught firearm safety at an early age and expected to follow the rules with no exceptions. We were shown examples of how dangerous guns are and as far as I can remember none of us kids ever played with them.
 
Unlike some of the last few folks here, i was a complete idiot when I was a kid. My dad kept his 22 bolt action rifle with the bolt out, but when my parents would leave us home, I'd get it out and run around the house with it. The stupidist thing I ever did, though was not with a gun but with a bullet. When I was about 6 or 7, one of my friends got me into a box of his dad's 38 ammo. I never even saw the gun, but somehow I got one of those bullets and left with it. Later I wondered what it would be like to see it go off, and since I didn't have a gun, I decided to try a hammer. So I set this bullet on a stump and had at it. Luckily mom came out after only a few whacks on it, screamed at me. I don't really remember much after that...
 
As a kid of around 12 in suburban NJ, I would get out my dad's Marlin 80 when they were gone, prop open the back door of the kitchen, and shoot black birds in the back yard. I never gave a thought to anyone hearing the shots. No one ever said anything, never heard a squeak from my parents or a neighbor. I only did it a few times because the last time, I put a hole through the bottom of the aluminum screen door. :eek: I used some kind of aluminum-fix-it-up goop and never looked back. I often wonder if that door is still on the house. My legacy. :D

Oh, when I turned 16, my dad let me get an '03 A3. At 17 I traded it in on a Garand.
That made shooting an M-14 and M-16 in Basic (at the age of 22) a cinch! :evil:
 
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My folks were of the no bb guns, no mini-bikes school.
(You'll shoot your eye out, or fall over on your mini-bike and die.)

Maybe that helped to fuel my curiosity.
 
My brothers and I farted around with a single shot .22 that was left in the barn for varmint duty. Never did anything as mind boggling insane as shooting a 30-06 in the basement.
 
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