That child could hurt someone some day! Good for you, taking the first steps to teaching her how to defend herself!
I'm having to make up for lost time with the boy, so we're starting with this. But, as soon as he's ready, I'm going to get him one of these.
have a friend that taught all her kids to shoot. as soon as their hands could grasp the handle of a revolver, they were taken to the range and taught to shoot. and weapons safety was always lesson one - even before they could pick up the weapon.
Since he's far, far too young to worry or care about the "tacticool" crap, I'm going to take advantage of his mindset and get his head screwed on right. Stage #1 - Safety Stage #2 - Accuracy from the bench. Stage #3 - Accuracy from prone. Stage #4 - Accuracy from kneeling Stage #5 - Accuracy from standing. Stage #6 - Speed. By the time he gets to Stage #5, he'll be old enough to handle the increased weight. And, if he stays with it, he'll be like his Old Man and be able to bust balloons at 1,000 yards. Then, after college, if he wants to join up (he wants to be a K-9 handler), he'll already have some advanced skills under his belt that'll help once he's certified.
http://i431.photobucket.com/albums/qq31/7th_Sephiroth/flippedresized.jpg heres a few of my pieces on display
Bumping this because I feel it's applicable... Got a friend, real liberal nanny state type, has openly said that the state should protect her from smokers, guns, etc. You know the type, "No good can come from them, dangerous, ban, ban, ban..." Here's the thing, I was in her truck today, (her husband is a bud and a cool dude) and lo and behold here are two realistic plastic toy click guns, a pistol and a rifle. No doubt the play toys of their five year old son. The irony struck me as both perplexing, and yet makes perfect sense. See, I was not raised with toy guns. Guns were serious business, even from a young age. I wasn't even allowed to have GI Joes, no movies or TV where guns were fired person to person. I could wallow in all the Transformers, Trek, Star Wars, etc, that I could ever want, but anything that glorified realistic guns? Not a chance. I do remember the watching the A-Team, but I was a getting older, and I'm pretty sure it was accompanied with a talk. I'm not saying that my old man didn't love violent movies, or was anti gun, but anything that would imprint in my young mind that guns were to be played with was forbidden. When I was ten I got my .22, that was my first "toy" gun, and I had free reign with it. I'm not alone in this sentiment, I remember a few years back, my brother in law would let his five year old play any video game in the restaurant but the one with the pistol. The guy is a pushover dad, but he put his foot down on that one, and for the same reasons I listed above. So that's what makes me shake my head at the anti gun parent and her toy guns. She's a real crusader, her kids will be raised hearing all of her politics, no doubt gun views included. My five year old just had a detailed lesson on what comes out the end of a gun, and the damage it can do. My five year old was asked if she'd like to see a hole in someone she loved, shown the consequences of a gun shot. Yet which five year old is more likely to pick up an unattended firearm and have the wrong mindset? Anyways, insert you views on toy guns here...
That's part of the problem these days (and has been for some time now). Parents let their kids play with toy guns or video game guns without teaching them the real world consequences of misusing a real gun. IMHO, they don't truly "get" that a real gun will kill somebody. Not that they truly think that real life is like a movie or video game, but that the reality of shooting someone (accidentally or otherwise) doesn't sink in until blood is spilled. I think it's part of the reason gang banger-types have such a casual attitude about gun violence. They don't see it as "real" until they have to face the consequences. As a kid, I had an arsenal of toy guns (I'd give anything if I still had the one that looked a helluva lot like an MP40 ) and BB guns. However, I was also taught that "real guns" weren't to be trifled with. Growing up on a farm, you regularly see what a gun really does to a living thing.
Well you walk into the arcade or game stores these days, and instead of using a 'controller' to shoot people, they have real pistols, and even assault rifles there for the kids to use. For a 8 year old, how exactly is allowing them to kill a bunch of people on a screen, but not allowing, or teaching them proper gun safety, with REAL guns....going to keep them from accidentally taking some relatives gun, and shooting their friend because they thought it was just like the video games? My parents hated first person shooters. In fact, until I was 12/13, they were banned in our house, and trying to sneak up to the computer room after midnight to play some Wolf3D resulted in a loss of computer privileges for a week. But, I had my first .22 when I was 10, and after a summer of my dad going with me to shoot gophers or other small varmit, the summer I was 11, I went by myself. I knew proper gun safety, I had proper trigger discipline, I knew when to shoot at something, and when not too, I knew how to cross a fence safety, and I knew how to safely hunt with a friend. And I also knew how to clean my .22....and how to store it. Like anything else, locking your kids up in a box and thinking it will keep them from the dangers of the 'world' is stupid. My little cousins are only to eager to learn about my guns, and even at age 5, like Flow's daughter, they perfectly understand the dangers involved in using a firearm. Kids grow up, they move out.....and you can only hope that what you taught them the first 18 years of their life will help them succeed in the 'big world'....without fucking something up.
I didn't have the toy guns....well, not officially...except for those me and my cousins made in the woodshop when dad wasn't home. But, your last sentence could not be any truer. I was with dad a LOT of times when he had to shoot a cows, horses, coyotes, gophers, crows, foxes, ravens, and numerous other assorted animals. Anyone who grows up on a farm/ranch has no choice but to be around guns. We can only hope that their parents teach them about firearms, because I have yet to see a 10 year old that didn't have an overwhelming sense of curiosity when it came to guns. Which usually means they go and take dad's .22 out back when he isn't home.
I was allowed to have toy guns, but was never allowed to point them at anyone. Not even water guns. I had to use a squirt bottle.
The first non-cowboy toy gun I had was a little rifle that looked like an M1 Garand. It used caps, but also had a little fake bullet molded to a bolt-looking piece of plastic so, when you closed it it looked like you were chambering a round. That MP40-looking one was awesome. You "cocked" it by pulling a spring-loaded lever ("charging handle" ) back and, when you pulled the trigger, it released it and it made a "rat-tat-tat" sound by rubbing along something inside the body of the toy. It was great...until something inside the mechanism didn't work any more. We had lots of "made" toy guns, too. With pipe and other stuff laying around, there was no shortage of material for building play guns, swords and even cannons.
This is a great thread. I think I shot the .22 with my dad for the first time when I was 5. By the time I was 7, he'd given it to me, but he kept it with his guns. If I was ever caught looking at it funny, I had it coming. When turned 10, he let me start to disassemble his guns and reassemble them. I loved figuring them out. One thing about a gun is that it is totally logical. The parts are beautiful, the way they work together is beautiful, and when one is well designed, it is beautiful. I enjoy shooting, but I enjoy looking at a well made gun more than anything else. I was never allowed to point a gun at anyone, but I did often get involved in war movies by playing along growing up. I don't know how many times I watched Sergeant York with toy guns. All through these things, my dad was there, making sure I followed good safety rules. It has to become second nature. Flow, you're a good pa.
I had a toy rifle that looked like an M-14. It shot plastic bullets via a spring. Had a magazine and everything! It was teh awesome. I had a toy bazooka that could spring-launch rubber "rockets". Bunch'a cap pistols. And a big thing with about five different spring-launched projectiles and a "rifle" that shot plastic bullets the same way as the M-14. Also had a detachable cap pistol that fit up inside it somehow. Toy guns were cool back then (late 60s).
I would have killed to have a cap pistol when I was younger. Most of the guns I had were made out of a wood, or old pipe that we had. We had quite the armory too.
I remember that a friend of mine had a toy machine gun of some sort (I seem to recall that it looked sort of like an M60) that worked on the same priniciple as my MP40-looking toy. I really wanted one just like it.
The neighbors had a toy based on the Browning .30 cal machine gun that I loved to play with. We would have wars where no one got shot, but everyone shot everyone else. One of my favorites was a toy of a M1903. It had a bolt you cycled and had a little bullet in there.
Oh yes. I too had the replica M1903 that had the little gray plastic bullet inside the chamber. There's no telling how many hundreds of thousands of pretend Soviet and Nazi soldiers I killed with that thing.
Because I'm a guy, I never actually said "pyew! pyew!" I made a respectable imitation of the actual sound in the movie, unrepresentable in letters, but kinda like a raspy "pyooch! pyooch!"
Oh. You were a kid back then. What sounds manly now probably sounded girly back then. We even 'trained' ourselves to each have a distinct sound so we would know who killed who.
