I bought a gun at Dick’s Sporting Goods. I like to say that out loud, putting the emphasis on different parts of the sentence, to hear how it sounds. I bought a gun! I bought a gun!
I was on the second floor of Dick’s looking for flashlights, exactly where the store clerk on the first floor pointed, but found myself surrounded by guns and camouflage and hunting targets. I breezed by the shelves of colorful pellets and was about to round the corner when I nearly bumped into my friend, Mary Ann, from the dog park. Her two sons were cradling plastic, camouflage automatic BB guns and ammo in their arms.
Not wanting to appear too “judgy” after the gasp I let out when I saw the guns in her boys’ hands, I admitted to her that I’ve wanted to get a BB gun for my boys one day. I pointed to her youngest and asked, “How old is he?”
“Eleven,” they answered in unison.
“What age do you think is too young for a BB gun? My 13-year old will be okay but what about Vincent? Do you think nine’s too young?”
Mary Ann announced, and this is when I remembered that she’s a Republican, “I was hunting when I was seven!”
I employed the services of her 11-year old to help me find a beginner’s BB gun among the vast selection. He led me to his first gun. A pistol. I liked the fluorescent green BBs and reached for the box of 5000. She said “That will do you for a long time.” I wondered what a long time meant. A month? All summer? I imagined it on a shelf in the garage two summers from now covered in dust. I grabbed it. I don’t want to run out.
The boys and I set up a row of soda cans on the rock wall in the garden out back and pulled up the chaise. All three of us, with equal amounts of adrenaline, sat across the chair, cheering on the person shooting to hurry up so we could have our turn.
We got pretty good at it. The proof was in the deformed cans. When Skye came home from work the fun soured. He hates guns. Probably because his younger brother loves guns and threatened to use one on him when they were teens. He scolded us for having the lawn chair too close to the target because the BBs could bounce back and hit us in the eye and blind us.
They’re 6mm plastic BBs. It’s not that I didn’t believe that they’d bounce back. They did, but not with much velocity. You could hold out your hand and catch them if you’re not the one with one eye closed, zeroing in on your next Coke can.
I urged him to give it a try. He moved twenty feet back and commanded us subordinates to move behind him. Then he aimed. I said “Back up, kids, we’ve got an amateur here.” They laughed. Skye didn’t. He doesn’t like the whole thing.
He lectured, “Did you teach them about gun safety?”
“Yes,” I said flatly.
“What do you know about gun safety?”
“I told them all the rules,” I said, hoping his would be sufficient.
“What rules do you know?” I knew it.
“The obvious ones: Watch where you’re pointing that thing, and don’t be stupid.”
He shook his head disapprovingly.
He wasn’t there. He didn’t hear me gasp and correct them when they gesticulated with the gun between turns. He didn’t hear me instruct them to always use the safety when someone retrieved the cans from the thistle behind the wall.
To make matters worse, the boys and I have our funny things we say about the gun. There’s a knob with an “S” and an “F”. We refer to the two settings as “Stupid Safety” and “Freakin’ Fire.” We put the safety on when we add more BBs. We often forget to set it back to “fire” before we aim again. One time when the trigger was stuck, one of us said, “The stupid safety is still on!” And that’s how it got its name. Freakin’ Fire got its name because we couldn’t name one and not the other.
Skye heard us joke about the gun’s anatomy and feared I was in denial of its inherent dangers. He talked us out of getting additional guns so we could all have one because “Why do you need more than one gun, unless you want to aim them at each other?”
Totally not getting it on “Gun Fun” — another term we won’t be using around Daddy. Totally not understanding how hard it is to wait your turn. There’s such a thing as too much patience because if he was impatient like us, he’d understand not wanting to have to wait your turn to shoot something.
The boys and I are throwing around terms like “magazine” and “packing a pistol.” Skye is getting more and more crabby at the sort of influence I’m being on the children. It’s not like I have an NRA sticker on my bumper. It’s not like I’m sleeping with the gun on my nightstand. It’s in the garage on the back shelf, between the Miracle Grow and the machete.
It’s an airsoft BB gun with pretty, plastic pellets. It’s a distraction from video games. That’s all it is. Not to him. To him, it’s putting our kids on a path of shattered windows and eye patches and visits from the police for shooting passersby from behind the bushes.
He saw the way I cocked the gun, aggressively, savagely, and knocked down my targets with ease. One, two, three. It disgusted him, the way watching him clean his mouth with his tongue after a meal disgusts me.
He balanced the gun in his palm as if weighing it, to see if the realistic-looking weapon was metal or plastic. Then he looked for the name on the side of the gun and said sarcastically, “Who makes this? Toys R Us? Li’l Tykes? Fisher Price?” He looked closely at it and said disdainfully, “It’s made by Walther.” Then he muttered something about that being the name of the company that makes real guns.
The name meant nothing to me. To him, it was insidious marketing of adult vices that target children in the ranks of Joe Camel, backed by lobbyists and special interest groups.
This morning I asked the boys if they wanted to go outside and practice target shooting. They were both playing video games so I wasn’t sure if their lack of response was because they were Playing Video Games or that they lost interest in the gun. Eventually I got a reply from both of them. They want to return the gun. They’ve slept on it and they’ve decided. They don’t like guns.
I guess my plans of turning the backyard into a target course, with balloons set up high and low, where the boys roll and shoot the balloon hanging from the branch, then crawl under the hammock and shoot the balloon in the compost bin, things like that, won’t manifest this summer. Maybe it’s just me who wants to do all that. It’s times like this when you have to accept that your kids can’t always be your playmates. Or worse, that you just need to grow up. Be the adult.
Maybe if the balloons were filled with water. They like water. Maybe if the last target was a piñata filled with candy. And when it fell to the ground it exploded and Skittles and bubble gum blasted out of it. Now we’re talking.
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I will tell you a secret now… I loooooooove shooting guns. I’m a good shot. My dad won marksmanship awards in the Army, and throughout my childhood, took me to deserted areas for target practice. My sister used to pay for my games at circus/fair/carnival-type things if there was a gun involved with the game because I would win her amazing stuffed animals. I love shooting. The biggest gun I have ever shot was an SKS rifle.
I have a toddler now, so I’m too scared to have a big gun in the house. But we have a BB gun to keep the rabbits out of the garden. I will only let my husband shoot the ground behind them to scare them away, don’t worry. We don’t hurt the bunnies.
Funny story. I teach 2nd grade and there was a boy that came from really tough circumstances and he and his friends would play paintball, except they would use BB guns. So I also see your husbands point. Maybe it will be best to return the gun for now and try the pinata idea in a couple of years!
My sons do the ‘airsoft’ gun thing, and have only recently kind of grown out of it. But for a few years they loved those things.