Category: The Gun Thing

I’ve always loved guns.  Some of my best childhood memories are of taking the Diana .177 pellet rifle out to the backyard, setting up a host of tin cans, and blasting away at them until I ran out of pellets.  At a rough guess, I was shooting about 500 pellets per week.

It was my first gun, and shooting it gave me a wonderful solitary activity that was only rivaled by my love of reading.

Later, when I was about 14, I graduated to shooting my dad’s Winchester 63 .22:

Compared to .177 pellets, .22 ammo was really spendy for a boy’s allowance (even back then), so I probably only shot off a hundred-odd rounds a week.  I did that for the next five or so years, until I bought my first centerfire rifle.

Here, my memory fails me;  it was either an Oviedo Mauser in 7x57mm, or else an Israeli Mauser (the K98k, rechambered to 7.62x51mm/.308 Win in the late 1950s).

Whatever, I had both, and used them in my first forays into hunting, which only really began in my mid-twenties — although I would shoot off a few boxes for practice each month (rifle ammo was really expensive in Seffrica, even though by then I was earning a salary).

Then I moved to the U.S., and after I could buy them legally, my love of guns and shooting went stratospheric, and my gun ownership ditto.

Of course, occasional periods of poverty followed, meaning that during those times I was forced to sell a few, and at one time almost all.  And that hurt, it really did;  but I consoled myself with the thought that when my finances recovered, I could always buy replacements… which I did.

Then quite recently, my desire to own guns kinda tailed off.  Most probably, this came from getting to age 70 and the concomitant realization that whereas in the past my appetite for shooting was boundless, now it was more circumspect.  Was I ever going to go hunting again?  (no, probably not.)  Was I going to take up clay shooting?  (also, probably not.)  I’d long since quit any kind of competitive shooting as my eyesight started its decline, and even the occasional trip to Boomershoot suddenly became less appealing — maybe because of the distance involved, but that had never stopped me before.

So as you all know, when my financial circumstances recently demanded some remedial action, I started selling off my guns to anyone who was interested, keeping pretty much only the ones I could foresee myself using at least quite often (.22 rifles and handguns, etc.) or ones that I might need in certain “social” occasions, if you get my drift.

I at least contented myself with weekly range visits because their senior citizen discount made it affordable, but even those have tailed off, for no real reason.  I don’t know why that is;  I still love my guns — the few I’ve kept, anyway — but the urge to shoot them, other than for practice, has more or less disappeared.

And I’m certainly never going to restock the larder, so to speak.  Those days are definitely gone.

I’ve had many invitations to go shooting with various friends and Readers, and when I’ve taken them up, I’ve enjoyed the range time, but enjoyed still more the after-shoot coffees and so on:  the socializing part of the event more so than the shooting, which is a complete inversion of my enjoyment in times gone by.

So something that has been a huge part of my life has gone, maybe forever, and I mourn its passing dreadfully.

Maybe it will come back — I hope it does — but until then, I’m left with this hollow feeling at the disappearance of something that has been part of my entire life.

So now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read a book.