Son of a Gunner

My father was a soldier. A poor son of a Georgia farmer, he went to war because he was drafted into the army. His first taste of battle was on a stretch of Normandy’s coast, code named, Omaha Beach. He followed Patton into the Battle of the Bulge and then into Germany to liberate the Jewish death camps.

I tell you this because until he was a senior citizen he didn’t own any guns at all. I do not know if this was because of the experiences he had during the war, or simply because he felt didn’t need a gun anymore.

It’s true we didn’t have to worry much about crime in our part of rural Georgia. We would go on vacation for over a week but didn’t bother to lock our doors when we left. We couldn’t anyway, we didn’t have locks on any of the doors.

Other than my dad borrowing a gun to shoot the squirrels eating our pecans, I never saw him shoot anything. Even when relatives would come out to quail hunt he never joined in. I guess when you’ve lived through several years of hearing armament sounding off at all hours of the day and night, you kind of enjoy the serenity of the countryside.

Not that my father was a pacifist or was timid in any way, he had seen the world at its worst. He was a big man, not only in size, but in his heart. . The simple truth is, he didn’t require a gun, his lot in life was to farm the land, he cared for nothing else. But he also made sure my brother and I learned everything we needed to know about firearms.

When we were nine we received a BB gun for Christmas, and became men. This has always been a big deal to most boys in this area, not because we could now shoot innocent animals, but because we were entrusted with something which required responsibility. We learned well.

Long before we received our first BB guns we were schooled in how to handle them. We carried our cork shooting rifles around as though they were M-1’s, keeping the barrel pointed down for safety purposes. If we didn’t learn how to carry this toy we would never receive a BB gun.

From there we would graduate to a .22 rifle and thence to shotguns and high powered rifles. At any dove shoot today all of the hunters will unconsciously keep the barrels of their shotguns pointed away from any other person. They never think about doing this, it is ingrained into their memories.

I have always been a marksman. For some reason I found it easy to hit targets others could barely see. If a target presented itself under three hundred yards I could hit it. Not bragging, it is just easy for me. The same went for archery and wing shooting, I guess it’s in the eyes. Shoot between the heartbeats if you can. I realize my own experience with firearms is not typical today, but at one time there was not such an outcry against guns. The Sears Christmas catalogue always had multiple pages devoted to gun and holster sets which many an excited boy perused for hours. These were mostly cap guns with some which fired plastic bullets. The “Fanner Fifty” was the most realistic and sought after cap gun of them all. I never got one though.

BB and pellet guns also had their representatives on several pages for the older, more experienced boys to pine for. There were also cap gun sets for girls, believe it or not. This was because westerns were the main entertainment on television both for kids and adults. It sees strange to think how the young were enthralled with playing cowboys and Indians or war games when today they are seldom exposed to playing either. Especially when the controversial gun control laws are so often in the news and people are afraid to own a gun with small children in the home. I never remember a child getting hurt by a real firearm when they used play guns so much. Doesn’t really make sense to me.


But those days are dead and gone. You never see a small child decked out in their finest cowboy regalia as we once did, except perhaps on The Andy Griffith Show. At one time this would be a common sight on Christmas day as gun battles were taking place everywhere. I have no doubt this would be frowned upon by modern society as unnecessarily violent for children to partake in. It really makes me sad to think about the fun we had playing these games and how the views of modern society ensure this wonderful pastime can never be enjoyed again. Ah, progress.