Do you still have your childhood gun?

No, and your question makes me wonder now where it went after I moved out of the house.

We lived in the ‘burbs, so there was no real place for me to shoot (and I couldn’t drive myself until I was of age), but Dad gave me an old bolt-action single-shot .22 rifle, showed me how to use it (including how to use the strap to steady my aim for a standing shoulder shot) ... and set up a mini shooting range for me in the basement of the house. I shot targets placed on a 2×12 plank at about 20 yards or so.

Fun times.

I’ve never owned a gun of my own.

My step father had a bolt action .410 shotgun I liked back in the day, for shooting soda cans in the backyard.

I was going to inherit my grandfather’s 1903 Springfield 30–06 he got in the army. But since the falling-out I doubt that will happen.

I’m fine with not having guns in the house.

Oh yes, but it got bigger & way more potent.
“This is my rifle, this is my gun”
“This is for fightin, this is for fun”

Hmm. I grew up in rural America, but for some reason neither my father nor grandfather felt the need to arm me as a kid.

* shrugs*

My first real gun was a a single shot cooy and no I don’t have it but would you believe my mother still does.
But I do still have the 870 wingmaster my dad got me for Christmas when I was 14 and that gun still looks and fires great to this day even after about 15,000 rounds through it.

I grew up in a small Texas city. We never had guns in our home. When I was around 13 my best friend handed me his dad’s pistol, the first time I had ever touched one, and I was so repulsed by it I haven’t touched any type of gun or rifle in the 59 years since.

Oh Americans.

Grew up in the country but in the mid-Atlantic. Have never seen a real gun outside of a museum. We did play cowboys and Indians with toy guns, though.

I have my mom’s childhood gun.

My great-grandfather gave her his .22 rifle on her 16th birthday and she gave it to me.

My father was a city boy from Baltimore and had seen a lot of action in the South Pacific as a young marine in WWII. He hated guns, hated hunting, hated war movies and hated any form a violence. But he loved my mother’s father, an amazing old Texan born in 1876, “The same year ol’ Custer got his ass shot off up there in Wyoming!” he used to tell us. He had been a cowboy and had been on a couple of the last big cattle drives out of Texas as a teenager, a small-time cotton farmer, a combination music teacher and roving drummer (traveling salesman) for Monkey Wards band instruments for for schools, a fiery jack-boot preacher when he and his partner once got their hands on a big tent, then took the collection money to sit in on poker games in another county… He was a survivor. The guy was everything a guy from depression-era, inner city Baltimore dreamt of as a kid. He ended up a fairly successful home builder in Sacramento in the 1940’s and 50’s and retired with my grandmother to a small horse ranch in the Sierras foothills near where Coloma lives now.

My old man loved this old guy and our family spent a lot of our weekends up there on the ranch. As soon as we boys were old enough to hold a rifle steady enough to hit our mark, grandpa gave us one of his old rifles and my father reluctantly acquiesced. So, a lot of those weekends were spent riding and shooting at cans and bottles up at grandpa’s place. When my big brother turned 13, he got an old 30–30 from grandpa and was taken on gramp’s hunting trips up in the Siskyous for deer and bear.

My gun was an old, beat up Winchester that loaded from the buttstock and fired ten .22 longs that grandpa had picked up in the 1930’s. When we moved to suburban Florida, it got mothballed. When I was pairing down my belongings for a long stay in Europe, I found it and gave it to my big sister’s husband. One of my nephews has it now and I understand it’s worth a pretty penny.

Wow. There are some old ones mentioned here. Have you done the research to see how old they are. Mine is 50 years old. My dad’s is about 90 years old. And they all work!
How many products made today will still function in 50 years or 20 or even in 10 years?

My .22 was made in 1923. It’s in beautiful shape and works as well as a brand new rifle.

That is just it @LuckyGuy a well made firearm cared for will last forever, what else can claim that?

What the fuck.

sorry the link didn’t work.

@dappled_leaves @ragingloli That is why I wanted to ask the question here. For many (most?) of us it was a normal part of growing up. We got a few gifts along the way to teenager hood. We got a wind-up watch (Timex) at age 6 or 7, a good knife at age 8 – 10, a BB or pellet gun age 9 – 11 and a real rifle at age 11 – 13, IFF (if and only if) we didn’t misbehave or do anything stupid with the BB gun. I still have my watch, knife, and rifle. The BB gun broke in a few years. I’m guessing many people still have one or more of those childhood gifts.

Note! We actually brought our guns on the school bus and into school on days when we had class! Read that sentence again!!! It seems incredible. We had to keep the guns in a case and we were not allowed to carry ammunition. The instructor, Mr Fabrizio, would give each of us our box of 50 bullets to be used in the basement rifle range. No soccer for me!

@LuckyGuy—I, for one, am thankful guns were NOT a normal part of MY growing up.

My Ex learned to shoot a rifle as part of a Raners program in England growing up.

Hee-hee, there’s a photo somewhere, probably buried in an aunt’s loft, of me & my 2 brothers taken in our garden on xmas morning, we were all around 7/8/9yr old.
In it we’re gleefully posing with our toy rifles, pistols & cowboy hats & boy am I fucking loving myself. Funny thing is though, i’m shouldering arms but my rifle is the wrong way round with the butt facing upward…also those rifles were white :D

Speaking of BB guns, though…

When I was ten years old – in fact, at my 10th birthday party, my Dad gave me a Daisy BB pistol. I had never even imagined such a brilliant thing existed.

Since it was a birthday party with a bunch of 10-year-old boys (and my 11-year-old friend from across the street, and his 12-year-old brother, Steve, things being run the way they were back then), well, we had to turn it into a shooting party. So Dad did the necessary: he cleared a “range” in the basement, set up a target taped onto a cardboard box stuffed with newspaper, and set up a shooting line which we were absolutely not to cross.

Steve, the 12-year-old, took his turn, handed the pistol to my Dad (per instructions) and then broke the rule to run up and look at his target. Dad calmly cocked the pistol… and shot Steve in the ass. Steve screamed and dashed across the street to get his father in on the fun.

When Mr. L. came back across to see us a few minutes later, he didn’t look happy, but Steve did. When Mr. L. and my Dad had discussed what happened and everyone confirmed that Steve broke the iron rule not to cross the line without permission and that my Dad had deliberately shot Steve in the ass, his expression changed. He shook my Dad’s hand, thanked him, and told Steve he got off easy.

I’ve never forgotten that lesson, but it’s one that I would not repeat these days.

Steve was a strange dude. We once went into another friend’s house – with an invitation – and he rummaged in the refrigerator (which was not part of the invitation), and pulled out a wrapped quarter-pound stick of butter. He unwrapped it… and ate it like a candy bar. I’ve never forgotten that, either – though I wish that I could.) I wonder whatever became of Steve.

This is just disturbing. I grew up in the fuckin’ ghetto and guns were everywhere, but never ever, even when people were shot in and around my schools, did my parents ever think to get me a gun. And I was no good girl—out late, hanging around with nefarious people, doing drugs and drinking.

I find it weird that places where kids might need to protect themselves from others with guns are less likely to have had a gun than people who lived in the country and probably only feared animals. Yikes.

I’m a female and not really a fan of guns, however, living in the rural hills they can be quite necessary out here, to a degree.I have called my neighbor over several times to shoot rattlesnakes if they are too big to lop their heads off with a shovel.
Mostly rifles and shotguns for shooting coyotes or rattlesnakes, if need be, but not vicariously. I do not own a gun and have zero desire to do so but, almost everyone I know has guns up here on their rural properties and I also know several people with their CC permits.

Not my thing but as long as you are responsible, not my biz if you want to keep firearms.

I’ve still got mine. It is my hand pointing at the enemy with two fingers extended and the lower two covered by my thumb. I used it when playing cowboys and indians or Britishers and Jerries. I’ve still got it but no longer use it.

Probably the Larami Limited Edition Super Soaker 100 in Orange and Green. Circa 1990. It’s a classic.

Sadly, I don’t still have it. Particularly on hot summer days.

I’m assuming the country kids who had guns had them for hunting not defense. Am I right? As I said, guns were not part of my rural culture at all.

Yes, hunting is common. My mother grew up in the mountains, and it was not unusual for my grandfather to take an afternoon off to hunt for dinner.

I grew up in the suburbs, but on the first day of deer season about ⅓ to ½ of the boys would be out of school.

I go to northern Michigan every November, and we wear orange and put orange collars on the dogs because it’s deer season.

On the radio up there, people call in their deer to the radio station, and they’ll spend fifteen minutes reading lists – “Bill Nelson was out two days, and he got a six point buck up by Silver Falls…”

For all the guns we had in school (legally!) no one ever had a problem!
Nobody was ever shot. No windows were broken nor property damaged! We knew the rules and obeyed them. Simple! We didn’t want to have our birthday guns taken away – which our parents surely would do. If a kid did not follow the rules, his parents would not get him a gun.
I’m guessing @CWOTUS‘s friend Steve never got one from his parents.
@tinyfaery Our parents did not give us guns for protection. We got them as a sign of maturity and rite of passage and a sign of mutual trust.
It was not unheard of to have a group of teenagers go to the dump with a few hundred rounds (purchased by an adult of course) to shoot rats. Everyone behaved. There were never drugs or alcohol and we never stayed out late. We had our guns, so it was imperative we followed our parents rules to the letter. They trusted us to follow the rules so we did.
It was the “good kids” who had guns.

@janbb Yeah, definitely for target practice or hunting. Shooting people was the farthest thing from my mind. Pointing even an empty gun at someone in fun would get it taken away permanently and you punished severely. Even the old timers would never talk about lethal defense. It was always rock salt or a light load of bird shot at the worst. People didn’t look forward to killing other people like they seem to today. One shot, one kill. Triple tap. This shit you hear today is just a bunch of idiot noobs who live some kind of macho TV fantasy and have never seen what one of these weapons can do to flesh in real life, or watched an animal’s eyes empty and go matte as it’s life drains away.

I was in a suburban household that desperately wished it was country. There was no particularly good reason for the home I grew up in to have the arsenal it did. My stepfather and his whole family lived in a world of irrational fear.

My stepfather was also a Y2K believer. We saved up old milk jugs full of water for almost a year. They were all full of algae and gross.

Yeah. I still have my Ruger 10/22. But it got damaged in a storm , so I have to tear it down.

It was my first ‘my’ gun. I was 14 .Although I was taught to shoot much earlier.

I had a steady string of air rifles but my fondest memory was my pumpmaster760. I don’t have it anymore. Mom was and still is quite liberal and anti-gun. Dad was pretty right wing but not a gun nut so I did not officially graduate to a .22 like I should have. Only thing that I resent about my childhood upbringing. I got to shoot friends .22 rifles/shotguns etc.. and in the rural south there was always an extra for me to use. It’s not like I missed out we pretty much shot the hell out of them from dawn till dusk on non school days. The one I had lent to me most was a ruger 10/22 and as an adult I have one and still enjoy plinking with it. At age 15 we moved from the boonies to the suburbs so that basically ended my shooting days until I picked it right back up as an adult basically as soon as I was old enough to move out.
@LuckyGuy We had a shooting team in middle school as well.

@dappled_leaves @ragingloli Don’t judge all Americans! This shit is as foreign here in suburban California as it is in Europe/Unamerica.

I still have a pop-gun I got in my Christmas stocking when I was about 7. I thought it was gone forever, and then I found it in a box of old stuff. So that was cool :)

This is the first time I have ever seen a suggestion that we might all have had guns as a matter of course, and what’s more, had them in childhood. I hardly even know what to make of the question. Rural American culture? I didn’t know kids routinely had guns anywhere.

@Jeruba Most American households don’t have guns but it’s common. And hunting is common.

I don’t hunt, but I spend time outdoors in Michigan and follow the Michigan Dept of Natural Resources (DNR) news (I’m on a few of their email lists).

For 2015, the DNR estimates 600,000 people went deer hunting and the harvest (that’s the term) was about 335,000 deer.

Crossbow hunters alone took 65,000 deer. The state sold 1,000,000 hunting licenses.

There are a lot of hunters out there.

No, but I remember having cap guns. They were nifty!

Roughly half of US households have at least one firearm.

and roughly half will vote for trump

Only a small percentage are really participating. Most I know are either not voting or voting third party. Perhaps 15–20% will vote for Trump. 25–30% Hillary.

Don’t be so sure. Most people (gun owners included) know Drumpf is a narcissistic lunatic. His views on guns are insignificant, despite what the NRA wants everyone to believe.

Households are one thing, and I know there are guns in a lot of them. But routinely put into the hands of children? From what I’ve read and heard, I know it happens, but I am still floored by an assumption that kids all have them, posed in much the same way that one might ask, “Do you still have your favorite stuffed animal?” or ”...your favorite noisemaking toy?” (No, but I sure remember it. I think my mother couldn’t wait to make it disappear.) And not everybody even has one of those.

The thought of my parents giving me a real gun as a child or of me giving my children a real gun when they were 12 years old appals me.

It is like asking “do you still have your first childhood sex toy”

About 20 something years ago a friends 2 sons were given 22 rifles by their grandpa. They were about 11 and 13 at the time. they shot a Canadian Goose at a local pond near their house and my friend at the time, made those boys eat that Goose for DAYS!
Roast goose, goose meat sandwiches, goose soup, on and on. They hated the taste and were repulsed by the whole experience.

Cured them of their random shooting of wild life moment. I thought that was the perfect lesson. You WILL eat every last scrap of this bird. haha

@flutherother It sounds incredible doesn’t it? But it is still true for some areas of the country – usually rural areas where everyone know everyone else and crime rates are zero to none.
@Jeruba I intentionally asked the question that way to see how people would respond. The ones that live in the areas where it is normal will most likely still have them. The folks in areas where the practice is not common.will be surprised. Can you imagine taking your gun to school?
The reason I took my own gun to school was I was too small and weak to hold the guns the school provided! They taught us safety, trust, and respect. Anyone who did not follow the rules was out – forever. They had to play football and soccer. :-)

A while ago the state lowered the age for a junior hunting license from 16 to 14. Surprisingly the accident rates went way down. Why? Because more parents went out with their kids.
Recently they tried an experiment and lowered the age to 12! The accident rates dropped even further. It seem that having a couple of young kids with a group of guys makes everyone behave safer – (and probably less alcohol is consumed as well.)

One of the guys who deer hunts with a bow on my property (he’s about 65) goes with his grand daughter, now 14. She loves it! She started hunting with him when she was 12. They have a ground blind set up next to my orchard.
I don’t participate but I will gladly help them do the lifting when they get one.