by JDLush » Fri Apr 29, 2005 9:30 am
When I was 15 I bugged my parents for a BB gun. Ok, I started bugging them when I was 13 and they relented when I turned 15.
It was a Crossman 760 pump. I spent $20 of my hard-earned (at 2.45/hr) cash on a 4x15 scope for it. Had the shoulder strap, the whole magilla. 2 milk containers full of BBs and a package of .177 pellets.
This was 1981 or so and the gun came with 5 or 6 paper targets with pictures of the Ayatollah Khomeini on it. If you don't know who he is, well, then I guess I'm too old to tell ya.
I started out with the targets and it was pretty cool. We lived at an apartment complex but there was a big wooded area behind the buildings that ran along an aqueduct. At some point I found a soda can on the ground and brought that with me, realizing after the first shot that knocking a can down was WAY cooler than hitting some lame-ass paper target. Jimmy, a buddy of mine, got a similar gun (he had a Daisy) not long afterward and the two of us would make an almost daily trek back to the woods to shoot the crap out of soda cans.
Then we discovered bottles. Bottles make a lot more noise when you hit them. They crack, shatter, explode. Once in a while you'd hit the perfect shot on the edge and the BB would penetrate, then spin in circles around the bottle without knocking it over. That was the gold medal shot of the day, believe me. It was pretty cool watching the BB fly through the scope (especially since they curved so damn much).
One day, after exhausting our supply of bottles, we were on our way back to play some baseball/football/whatever and saw a bunch of toads jumping around in a big mini-pond created by the tire tracks of some construction equipment. It was maybe 30 feet long, 6 feet across and 5 inches deep. The damn thing was full of these baby toads, tho. Had to be 50 of them jumping and swimming and flopping their green asses around. They couldn't have been much more than 3 inches long, maybe 4 for the more mature ones.
The more mature ones were the first to go.
Besides being easier targets to hit, they usually stayed out of the water, and anyone that has ever shot a toad that was swimming in a tire-track pond knows the swimmers are the hardest to shoot. We shot them all at least once, usually through the back. 9 times out of 10 the BB would stick, leaving a shiny brass memento of our visit. It was a beautiful thing, or so we thought.
The only bad thing about killing all the toads in your personal tire-track pond at once is that they don't have a good chance to reproduce and make more baby toads for you to shoot. Maybe it's some kind of performance anxiety caused by stray pieces of brass zooming overheard, I don't know. But we quickly ran out of toads. We were pretty bummed about it, but didn't talk about much else for the next couple of days. We went back there after it rained and there were a couple more, but they didn't last long.
Then the birds came. Well, they had been coming to the same tree outside his bedroom window forever, I guess. Of course, we never really noticed them until we ran out of toads to shoot. In the evolutionary scale of items to shoot with a BB gun, birds come right after toads. Unless you have a hamster.
Unfortunately for the birds, Jimmy didn't own a hamster.
The only bad thing about shooting a couple of dozen birds from a 1st floor apartment window on a rainy day (for us, at least) is the end result. Yeah, a couple of dozen dead birds laying on the ground tends to attract attention. We realized that just a bit too late, unfortunately. The good part about it was the guy that noticed knew we were generally pretty good kids. He also happened to have an empty cardboard box, and believe me, that made the clean up process a lot more pleasant than it could have been.
Ok, no more bird shooting for us, but to this day I am still amazed at how incredibly stupid those things were. Over and over again it was the same thing: Pump, pump, pump. Pause. Pop. Unlucky bird hits the ground. Temporarily lucky birds fly away. Wait 2 minutes. Birds fly back. Repeat as necessary.
About a week later we were walking in the woods, looking for stuff to hit. It was getting into winter now and there was maybe a couple inches of snow on the ground, but it wasn't terribly cold. Pop, and a can goes flying. Pop, and a BB ricochets off a branch and whizzes by your head. Pop, and you watch your curving BB miss everything completely. Repeat as necessary.
Until Jimmy saw the squirrel.
The smart squirrels were already in hibernation, or hiding, or wherever they go in early December. This must have been one of the dumb ones.
For those who are curious, a single BB does not kill a squirrel. Not even if you pump your Crossman 760 over a dozen times (the instructions say 10 is the max, but after a while you need to compensate for the worn out bladder). In fact, a half dozen direct hits over a span of 20 minutes won't even kill one. Occasionally you'll have to do a little tree climbing, or load 3 extra BBs down the barrel and spray some shots into knotholes to flush the sucker out, but eventually you'll have another clear shot.
It was either hit number 9 or 10 that finally did the squirrel in. He was about 20 feet up when Jimmy knocked him down, and he didn't make much noise when he hit the ground in front of us. You could hear the blood melting through the snow, however, and that is a pretty eerie sound, believe me.
We both stood over him for probably 5 minutes, never saying a word. Finally, Jimmy asked if I wanted to play some Intellivision Baseball and we went back to his place. I don't think I ever shot my Crossman again, and as far as I know, his Daisy rusted up pretty good as well.
So, I've never fired a pistol or rifle, but I bet I could still pop a toad from 40 feet, as long as you have a Crossman 760 and a 4x15 scope. And a milk container full of BBs.