My brother, who is two years older than I am, couldn't wait to turn 18 so he could buy a gun. The result was a gun fail.
When I was growing up, my family was a liberal, union-loving, gun-hating bastion of Kennedy Democrats. I did have one uncle who was a hunter, but he was considered a bit batty and pretty much ignored. Somehow, though, my brother became fascinated with guns. Not for hunting, as we had a standing offer from Uncle Batty to take us boys if we ever so desired, but just for having and for shooting.
Once he turned 18, Paul (name changed for privacy) rushed over to K-Mart and plunked down money for a .22 caliber rifle. If you know anything about guns, you know that a .22 is a decent starter gun for target shooting and for hunting small game. It won't bring down an elephant but is perfectly adequate for squirrels and rabbits.
Of course, that's not what Paul bought it for. His goal was to shoot. At stuff. To punch holes in things like tin cans and homemade paper targets. Naturally, he decided to set up a shooting range in our shared bedroom.
A little background is in order. At the time, we lived with my parents in their house a mile north of the Detroit city border. It was a typical close-in suburban home, built in the 1940s as a 2 bedroom house on a 40 foot wide lot, with neighboring homes on all sides. At some point, the attic was converted into a 3rd bedroom and that was where the 4 boys in the family grew up.
So Paul set up his shooting range, which consisted of a cardboard box stuffed full of newspapers and affixed with a hand-drawn target, then proceeded to exercise his 2nd Amendment rights. He even offered to let me take a shot but I demurred. I didn't know it at the time, but I'd get all the target practice I would ever need when I joined the Army a year later.
After shooting three or four rounds, Paul called it a night. He was on a limited budget and the rifle purchase had left little capital for ammunition. As an older brother, of course, he took his role as educator of younger brothers very seriously, so he carefully explained the pros and cons of different types of .22 ammo. I recall there are .22 long and .22 short bullets and that center-fire cartridges are considered to be better than rim-fire for some reason.
While waiting at the school bus stop the next day, I was chatting with my next door neighbor. His house had been built by the same builder as ours and had the same floor plan. Likewise, the attic had been converted, but in his case, to 3 rooms instead of just one big room. His bedroom was closest to our house. When we were younger, we had run string across the gap and used tin cans as primitive telephones.
That morning at the bus stop, he told me that while he'd been reading in bed the evening before, his window had shattered and something had whizzed by a few inches from his head. I put two and two together and quickly concluded that one of Paul's bullets had drilled through his target box, through the wall of our house, and through my friend's bedroom window.
"Geez," I said, "I wonder what caused that?"
"Dunno," he replied. "But it was kind of scary."
The bus arrived and we climbed aboard. I made a mental note to tell Paul to either build a better target or not shoot indoors anymore, and I did just that when I saw him later that day. As for his prized rifle, a year or two later it was confiscated by the police when he used it to shoot a guy in a bar over some stolen mail, a shooting which landed him in the state penitentiary at Jackson for a year. But that's a story for another day.
