For rural folks, what was the usual progression of firearm ownership for kids?

Red Ryder bb gun at 8, high powered pellet rifle at 11, access to .22 rifles at 11, access to shotguns at 13. We also had a shooting team in middle school,this was around 1989. I did not own large caliber firearms or handguns until I was an adult.

@ARE_you_kidding _me Nice. I didn’t reach Red Ryder class until age 10. I never had a pellet rifle. I had access to shotguns Ithaca Deerslayer at about age 13 but it was so powerful and expensive to shoot I hardly ever used it – maybe once or twice.

I recently purchased a Benjamin Marauder pellet gun. Making up for my childhood?

I had a step-family that thought they were more rural than they were.

All kids got their first pocket knife at seven years old. That start target practicing with the adults as soon as they can hold a gun. They’re bought a gun soon after. They have to prove they are ready to go on the annual family deer hunt by shooting a squirrel (then eating it).

No bb guns are all, because they’re dangerous.

I grew up in the city of Chicago so guns were not something I got to be around. I did get a wrist rocket at 8 and that sling shot could do some pretty serious damage especially launching ¼” nuts. Finally did get a Red Ryder BB gun at 11 and the only training I had was don’t point it at anyone EVER and if you do it will be taken away. I never did. At 12 I shot my first real gun when up in Wisconsin my Uncle who had guns handed me a 38 revolver and said shoot that stump over there. I pulled the trigger and I was not prepared at all for the BANG and recoil that pistol made. I would not fire another real gun until my 20’s where my girlfriends friends were all gun nuts including a couple ex-army guys who had every weapon imaginable. The gist of my story is I never had formal gun training and kinda wish I did back then.

When my boys were 10 and in the Boy Scout program they were eligible for the Sportsman shooting badge and my wife recoiled in horror when I told he of the outing to the Sportsman club. I said to her would rather our sons learn how to handle, care for, shoot and shooting discipline from certified NRA firearm trainers or would you rather they learn about guns in some friends basement or garage. They both went on the earn their rifle and shotgun merit badges.

Scouting where I grew up came with quite a bit of firearms training. They had us loading black powder, shooting clay pigeons and the whole deal.

I had a sling-shot at age 9, a BB gun at age 10, and a .22 at age 14.
(To me, a air rifle is a BB gun.. Never knew or thought there was a difference.)

I got my first BB gun at age 10 then shortly after that got my first pellet gun by 13 had my first 22 and at 14 my first 12gauge because I fell in love with trap shooting.
But was in my late twenties before getting into pistol shooting.
Oh and most of you know I am from western Canada.

@kritiper My first air rifle could shoot a projectile at over 600 fps, for comparison a red ryder shoots a bb at ~300 fps. Velocities > ~400 fps are considered lethal.

We used the term “air rifle” to mean low speed stuff like a Daisy 105 Buck. Single stroke lever. It shot BBs but not very far. Look at the Daisy Model 33.

The Red Ryder was a big step up.
There were multipumps that were scary fast but I was not strong enough to pump them more than a couple of times. The big boys could do it ten times. Those were lethal.

Maybe the terms are regional.

Did any of you cause trouble with your weaponry? Except for the kitchen window that broke when a BB ricocheted off the planter on the porch. .

Yeah but just once took a side window out on a fellows junk truck,and yes no one was in it and it had been parked for months,but I did have to fess up to it.
Boy my father gave me more shit that the fellow did,he just shrugged and told us the trouble he got in with his first BBgun.

My mom almost shot her own foot. That was comical.

I opted out of the squirrel hunt ritual, and “my” 410 bolt action stayed in the closet unless step dad wanted to use it.

I did help butcher the deer, since I’m pretty handy with a knife and mammalian anatomy.

@Seek The kids act responsibly. It’s untrained adults that are dangerous.

@ARE_you_kidding_me Meaning… is that (FPS) the difference between a air rifle and a BB gun?
It didn’t matter to me about FPS as long as I could kill small birds with the thing. My first BB gun was a cheap Daisy that held over 300 BB’s (loaded by turning the barrel end to open the magazine) and cost me $4 in 1963. Over three years or so, I killed 300 birds. Later, I got a single pump Crossman that had more power. I killed 300 birds in 1 year, as many as 10 a day.

@kritiper It really boils down to semantics. Air rifle means the BB/pellet projectile is fired by air through a gun barrel that has riffling in the barrel that dramatically increases accuracy of the BB or pellet. Most basic “BB” guns are propelled by a spring mechanism. Many air rifles can shoot both BB’s and pellets some are dedicated to either BB’s or pellets. Air rifles in general are a step up from BB gun plinkers most boys start out with and the air rifles whether pump up versions or CO2 powered will deliver the higher FPS that deliver both accuracy and ability to tear through their targets.

BB guns will rarely shoot faster than 300–400 fps and air rifles will go 600–1,200 FPS and that is some serious shooting speed.

Someone shared this question with their friends on fb and supposedly it’s downright shocking for some city folks. Are people really that naive and afraid? silly question

I didn’t grow up in a very rural area, nor a big city. I got my first bb/pellet gun around 11, and had a very similar experience as @ARE_you_kidding_me when it came to real guns.

@dammitjanetfromvegas I can’t speak for everyone you are referring to, but living in a big city has given me some perspective. I don’t think it’s that people are naive, I think it’s that they have first hand experience in the pitfalls of gun culture in a highly populated area.

We moved from the boonies in Appalachia to suburbia when I was around 16. The spoiled, domesticated kids who grew up in suburbia were ignorant about firearms.

@Cruiser That first Daisy of mine was a smooth-bore, and a spring/plunger with a rubber or leather air seal that forced air rapidly through the barrel to drive the BB. Not all BB guns have rifled barrels. I’ve had 4 BB guns that were all single pump smooth-bores. The Daisy I have now, (looks like a 1893 Winchester lever-action) is a single pump smooth-bore. The Crossman was the same, basically. On the other hand, pellet rifles have rifled barrels.

@Silence04 I grew up in Las Vegas with an occasional police helicopter shining a bright light down on our neighborhood. I was aware of the pitfalls. Your average person who grew up with guns is not the problem, but from what I’ve read elsewhere many people think otherwise.

@kritiper I had the Crosman 760 which also was a smooth barrel, but they now offer a BB/.117 pellet gun with a rifled barrel for less than $80.00

I had the pump master 760 also but it was rifled and had a slightly longer barrel than the smooth bore version. Only pellets really could take advantage of the rifling though.

Oooo… The Pumpmaster 760! Clearly you guys were bigger and stronger than me. I was too little to pump that gun beyond the 2nd or 3rd pump.
If I recall correctly.my little gun held 600 BBs so my dad could fill it once and let me go for ages. I clearly remember sitting on the front porch and shooting at yellow jackets that had made a nest under a corner.of the garage. Maybe it was 20–25 ft away. I would get them as they returned from their foraging trips. Cock, Pop!, Cock, pop!, cock, pop!,... for ages. My shoulders would get so tired. I’m sure I learned proper breathing, control, anticipation, patience, leading of targets… I put thousands of shots through that gun. I still had it 45 years later until I made the mistake of lending it to my nephew who destroyed it in no time.

Now I have the 2100B Classic. I use that to dissuade deer and racoon from destroying the bird feeders. It has enough power to convince them to beat it. And I am big enough to cock it as many times as I want. ;-) Although… It makes no difference after 7 pumps (I chronographed it for BB and pellets vs. number of pumps so I have the data.)

My .22 was the bolt action Mossberg 144 target rifle with 7 round magazine. Later my friend Dennis had a Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic. He had extra magazines that he would pre-load so he could blast away at up to 3 shots per second! Awesome firepower.
We learned to treat guns and property with respect.
He got his Ph.D and became a nuclear physicist at one of the national labs while I prostituted myself to industry.

Could 12 year old boys from the city be trusted with such weaponry? I doubt it. What role models do they have from age 2 and up?

I think about what would happen if we lived in an urban area. I guess we would be doing something else.
The “boy” with the pellet gun killed by police was shooting it in the park! This was no kiddie gun. It was a $200 CO2 gun with 12–15 round magazines. (I wonder where he got it.)

One of the kids on the block had an Armalite AR-7 Explorer.
Imagine our surprise when we were in the movie theater and saw James Bond using the exact same take-apart gun in From Russia with Love !!!

I don’t think my family ever gave guns to kids. I never had one anyway.

—@LuckyGuy I have the Charter Arms AR-7. Love that rifle!

I always wanted an ar-7 although my go to .22 is a 10–22

@Cruiser I have one too. :-) Made by Henry in the new NJ factory. I spoke personally with Anthony (Yes, That Anthony!) and got one of the newly redesigned ones. “Every part has been improved.”, said the Man.
I am at about 300 into the 500 round break-in period.

@ARE_you_kidding_me The 10/22 is a present day classic. There are so many options and ways to trick it out. (But you knew that already.)

Yeah, it’s fun to deck them out. Someone at the range had one set up in a bullpup stock with a red dot. Shooting a 22 never felt so “right” I may get a 2nd just to do that conversion. Maybe the AR-7 ..ughh I have too many already.

@Cruiser Interesting. I have a Crossman 760, rifled.

@LuckyGuy My only complaint is the jamming I did experience with my rifle. I had to file down the breech/bullet seat to minimize the jams I experienced and perhaps coincides with these “redesigns” you speak of. For the record I purchased my rifle in 1984.

@kritiper I had to search high and low for rifled 760’s and it seems Crosman did sneak out a few limited production runs of rifled 760’s in years gone by but then seem to be rare events. Lucky you! :)

@Cruiser Yes, the rifled Crossman is extremely accurate when using pellets.
On another subject, type of rifle: I had a Winchester.22 semi-auto when I was a kid, and it had a 8 shot clip/magazine. After many, many rounds, it jammed a lot. Never could get it to work right. Many years later, a friend of mine had a Colt .22 (semi-auto, tube fed) that also jammed a lot, like almost every time. I took it home and looked it over very closely. The place in the magazine where the bullet would slide out and into the chamber was worn just enough to make the bullet stand straight up during loading causing the jam. I squeezed the worn area together a bit with pliers and a .25” bit of unthreaded bolt stock, and resized the mechanism just enough to keep the bullet in the proper loading position during reloading. No more jams. I now think that if I would have tweaked my old .22 the same way, (it loaded directly out of the clip) it would have ceased to jam, too.

@kritiper The AR-7 jams on me too and according to the forums you need to chamfer the chamber little by little until it no longer jams but not too much or you could mess up the accuracy.

My AR will only jam if I use sub-sonic ammo. Everything else flies throught it flawlessly.

My big brother and I both got BB guns at the same Christmas. I was eight and he was ten. About that same time, we began target practice—shooting bottles and cans off fence posts—under our grandfather’s supervision using his .22 rifle. Two years later, we shared a .22 rifle for rabbit and squirrel hunting: I was ten, he was twelve. Two years after that, we were sharing a 10 Gage over-and-under. Damn near took my arm off the first time I used it. I think I killed an old refrigerator and a couple of road signs with it. Then we moved to Florida and we both lost interest in guns.

I went duck hunting in some salt flats once and didn’t like it at all. I don’t like killing birds and it was cold, damp, you had to sit still and not talk. Fuck that. I wanted to hang at the beach and listen to Led Zepplin. I went on a Reindeer hunt with a bunch of guys and their 30.06’s in northern Sweden on a clear, sunny day at about -50F. Fuck that, too. I don’t like killing mammals. And my piss froze before it hit the ground.

I had to shoot a wild dog last year that was coming at the chickens. Used an old .22 Remington rifle. That wasn’t so bad. I usually put a round or two in big sharks before we bring them in over the rail and into the boat. That’s just fuckin’ common sense. I keep an old, beat up 12 Gage and a .40 auto on board for the odd irate pirate, but beyond that, I have no interest in guns or killing anything but fish.

@LuckyGuy I think you may be right. I do have more issues with the shorts now that you mention it.

.177 Pellet gun at 10
.22 repeater at 12
Winchester 30–30 at 14

after that I was on my own for guns, if I wanted one I had to buy it myself.