....So what major inflection points have you traversed in your shooting history?.... I'm just interested in hearing what you consider to be significant changes in your perspective over the course of your shooting career.
My early days were plinking with a BB gun and I eventually graduated to a Crosman pellet gun. I never killed anything with either of those, but I did put the sting on a couple of local dogs that chased our cattle. That would have been the late 1970s or early 1980s. Between ~1978 and ~1983, my shooting history was limited to dove hunting and plinking. An H&R single shot 20 gauge taught me to make the first shot count at dove hunting. A 10* day taught me that they didn't make decent warm clothes for 10 year-olds in the late 1970s. (I honestly believed I would freeze to death that day, and I didn't duck hunt again for about 20 years.)
Then the 1980s hit. My dad believed that the economy was about to collapse, and so he started preparing. What we call 'preppers' today were called 'survivalists' in my part of the world at the time. I don't know what AR prices were like in 1983, but my dad apparently thought Mini-14s were the way to go. Everybody in the family got one. It was somewhere in this time that I realized the truth in the old saying, "when seconds count, the police are only minutes away." I had neither the budget nor the inclination to start prepping, but over the years, the one thing I could never bring myself to sell was my guns. I pawned some other stuff over the years, but not the guns.
I turned 18 in 1987, and I wanted a gun for my birthday. So my dad took me to the gun show, where I picked out a 1911. I guess Dad thought I'd get myself into trouble with that, so he declined to buy it for me. He said it was 'too much gun' for me. I guess 18-y.o. knuckleheads somehow get into less trouble with .357 Mag revolvers? Because that was what he did get me. In late 1987, I headed to Europe to be an exchange student. When I returned, I headed straight to college. I couldn't have guns in either place and by the time I was done, I'd basically been separated from my guns for about 5 years. I lost interest. I hung out ne'er-do-wells. I got a job as a bartender. I got my own apartment and, of course, moved my guns into the new apartment. (Which doesn't make much sense in retrospect. I wasn't really interested in them.) Fortunately, I knew better than to tell my ne'er-do-well friends that I had guns. I was the best-armed hippie I knew. My guns stayed stashed in my closet for years. I'll bet 10 years went by that I didn't even have ammo for my Mini-14.
Eventually, I put on my big boy pants, got married and went to law school. Took a job with fairly extensive traveling, but still didn't think much about guns. And then I opened my own firm. I was in the office before dawn and left the office after dark. My parking garage was 3 blocks from my office, and I was routinely accosted by homeless people (1 in particular) begging for money. I remembered my guns, got my CHCL, and bought that 1911 that I'd wanted for about 25 years. This moved me into my early CC stage.
Now, I'm a little over 50, and I'm satisfied with my CC choices. Maybe some day I'll pick a new carry pistol, but I really don't have a reason to. I'm satisfied with what I cc and how. So over the past couple of years, I've sold off some of the guns that I don't shoot, and I've started moving in a 'quality over quantity' direction. My needs have been met, and now I can start exploring the stuff that I want. For several years, I simply didn't have the budget to do that. Almost everything I owned had to serve double duty. My 870s were hunting/HD. My pistols were CC/HD. Practice was severely limited because I couldn't afford ammo.
The other shift that has happened is that I've rediscovered the .22 that I enjoyed so much growing up. In the last 3 years, I've sold one .22, but bought 4, along with a .22 suppressor. I've put better glass on my 10/22 and picked up an actual target rifle. I'm looking forward to spending a little time with them.
