You’ll shoot your eye out

Written by Joe Pisani
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 23:00

My nephew recently celebrated his 12th birthday, and now the teen years are looming on the horizon like a swirling hurricane of hormones — those tumultuous teen years that strike fear into the hearts of mothers everywhere.

His coming-of-age reminded me of the primitive cultures that celebrate the “vision quest,” when a boy turns into a young man and goes through a rite of passage alone in the wilderness.

Nowadays, kids are so preoccupied with video games like Grand Theft Auto that they don’t have much time to go off searching for manhood, let alone get off the couch.

I never had a teenage son, so last year I thought I’d help him along the path and bought him the ultimate birthday gift — a Red Ryder BB gun with lever action, a smooth bore steel barrel and the Red Ryder’s image burned into the wood stock.

When he held up the box, every boy at the party said “oooh” and “ahhhh” in unison, precisely at the same moment all the mothers let out a collective gasp that echoed from the hinterlands of Trumbull, across Long Island Sound to Amityville, N.Y., and out into the vast desolation of the Atlantic Ocean.

Needless to say, my sister took pre-emptive action and hid the gun even before my nephew blew out the candles. To this day, no one knows where it is, not even my brother-in-law.

Before I manage to provoke PETA, I want to confess that I own several BB guns, pellet guns and a semiautomatic Marlin 22 — made in America — but I’ve never killed anything except an occasional squirrel with my SUV, and that was by accident.

My father gave me my first BB gun at 11 and my first 22-caliber, a bolt-action Remington, when I was 16. The irony is that my sisters shot BB guns when they were growing up in Pine Rock Park, although they’d probably deny it today because they’d be forced to move out of their neighborhoods and have to undergo cultural rehabilitation by taking closely supervised classes with Martha Stewart.

My daughters did the same thing, along with fishing, camping and canoeing, which is a lot more fun than playing Guitar Hero in front of a high-definition video screen.

I’ve pleaded with my sister to take that gun out of hiding and let the kid have some fun. But her fear, I suspect, is that he might turn out like his grandfather, who in retirement sat on the porch with an antique BB gun in his lap while he kept watch over his bird feeders and waited for poachers to approach. When a squirrel made its way into a feeder, he would raise the rifle, focus the squirrel’s rear-end between the crosshairs and squeeze the trigger.

The gun was so old the BB barely made it out of the barrel, but the sound was enough to scare away the squirrels and give my father the thrill of boyhood adventure. You won’t get thrills like that playing Wii.

Joe Pisani has been a writer and editor for 30 years. Questions or comments, e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .