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Ethics and Morality
How My BB Gun Taught Me Who I Am
My dad bought me the gun when I was ten, and it helped me find my conscience.
Posted April 23, 2018
I asked my dad for a BB gun because most of my friends had one. And because I wanted to feel powerful. It took a decade or two of getting knocked around by life, not to mention the best efforts of a couple of shrinks, to reach that pinnacle of self-knowledge. All I knew as a ten-year-old was that I really dug Lone Ranger movies, and my favorite article of clothing was my bright yellow Wyatt Earp vest.
Don’t remember where we bought the gun. But I do recall Dad’s tone of voice when he told me the rules—never fire it with people around, and never, ever let anyone else take a shot with my gun.
But when my friend Roger said, “Lemme see your BB gun,” I couldn’t deny him the pleasure, especially when he told me what he wanted to do with it.
Roger lived on a farm in New Mexico, next to some land Dad had bought near the San Juan River where we caught catfish, and where I learned how much damage a fish with spikes hidden in its gills could do to a kid’s hand. My father had shown me the right way to hold a catfish so it couldn’t shake its head back and forth, but I didn’t pay attention. After that, when his voice sounded a certain way—low, steady, serious—I listened. Most of the time.
Roger and I were walking through a freshly plowed field when he spotted his dad’s prize bull, surrounded by a small herd of mostly female bovines. The bull was easily half again bigger than his companions—a huge meaty hairy creature distinguished by two giant testicles bouncing gently on his hind end. These two ornaments were about the most precious possessions imaginable to Roger’s dad. Without them the barn would soon be empty. No more steers to ship to the slaughterhouse, no more cows to milk, and pretty soon the cupboards were empty and trips to the bank were more frequent.
We had no concept of the responsibilities of fatherhood. All Roger knew was that his dad paid more attention to his prize cow than his son.
Roger crouched down and walked quietly toward a line of bushes near the corral. He got down on one knee, steadied the gun on the fence, aimed carefully at the bull’s exaggerated manhood, and with that familiar POOF the tiny round pellet was launched. I could see the BB on its arched trajectory, heard the surprised grunt of the bull, and Roger’s satisfied chortle.
“Got ‘im,” he said with a grin. “First shot, too!”
Roger’s dad had survived the Bataan Death March in the Philippines during the war, and walked with a limp the rest of his life. He didn’t talk much, and I never heard him laugh. Not once. Somehow he’d spotted us hiding in the bushes, and he caught us by surprise. He didn’t do anything to me. But I watched in silence as father grabbed son by the arm, swung him around, and started kicking and whacking, over and over, yelling, cursing, banging with every available limb, for it seemed like forever but was probably a minute or two. Writhing and squirming, Roger tried to strike back, landed a blow here and there, but was no match for the older man’s disciplined knowledge of the art of physical combat. When it was over, we both took off for the nearby hills and hunted for lizards; I guess Roger’s dad looked after his bull.
I didn’t see Roger too much after that. I think he tried to avoid me. Embarrassed, maybe. I wondered if he thought all dads were like that—filled with rage at what life had done to them, enacting their accumulated wounds and insults on the people they love. My own dad mostly took out his anger on himself, exploding into strings of f-bombs and SOBs when he hit his thumb with a hammer or squeezed a piece of skin while fixing the brakes on his van.
I tried to avoid him when he was like that, but I never got used to it. He rarely turned his rage toward me. It was more like an unleashed, uncontrollable electric current aimed at some unseen enemy within.
There was that one time, though, when Roger and I climbed up onto the concrete walls that guided the river through a series of irrigation gates. The water was deep there, and when the gates were closed, calm. Dad had said, in that low voice, that I was never allowed to go anywhere near those massive concrete barriers. “That means NEVER,” he said.
But the lust for catfish was strong, and I knew we could manage the necessary leaps and hops and other gymnastic maneuvers that got us to the perfect fishing hole. Besides, it was kind of fun to disobey the boss man.
Somehow he saw us. Dad didn’t miss much. Later, as Roger and I walked across the alfalfa field toward the parking spot under the big cottonwood tree, my father walked purposefully toward us, and the moment he got within range, he hauled his arm back, swung it in my direction, and landed a major league adult male flat-handed slap on the kisser.
Words were not necessary. I knew he was right. I’d earned that one. Then I saw the look on Roger’s face, and he told me he could see my dad’s handprint in red, swollen skin on my cheek.
Roughly twenty years later, as we sat beside a campfire after fishing a Montana trout stream all day, Dad got quiet, looked at me until we made eye contact, and apologized for what he did that day in the alfalfa field. I thanked him and muttered something clumsy and inappropriate. But I respected that man for learning from his mistakes, and for the strength and courage to set things straight.
“Holy hell, Dad, I knew it was a dumb-ass maneuver.”
“Maybe so, but I was way out of line.” Looking back on it, that was the moment when we stopped brining father and son and became friends.
There were other educational things that happened with that BB gun. Like the time I was in a canoe in Colorado, paddling quietly toward a fishing hole, and a guy in his own canoe who’d spotted my weapon yelled at me to shoot at the ducks that were diving for their dinner and scaring away the fish.
I was used to doing what I was told to do by grown-ups, and never dreamed that I’d actually hit anything. So I grabbed, pumped, aimed, and fired, watched the BB fly, and heard the bird’s cry of pain on impact. The guy in the canoe grinned and shouted, “Nice shot, kid!”
I didn’t bother to pretend that I was pleased with myself. He gave me a puzzled look, shook his head, and paddled away.
And I’ve never forgotten the sunny summer afternoon when I joined a few of the neighborhood boys on one of their hunting parties into the nearby desert, in search of lizards to shoot. I thought it might be fun to kill a lizard. But I took no pleasure in the mangled reptilian corpse we left behind that day.
So when I dropped the BB gun accidentally in a wild Colorado stream, I watched my dad with admiration as he valiantly waded into the waist-high frigid rushing water to rescue the gun he thought his son prized. But when he failed, I didn’t ask for another one.
Now, I’m grateful that my dad got me that BB gun, because it taught me that I don’t like to kill things, and how easy it is to give in to the temptation.
Now the riverbank is a tangle of spiny Russian olive trees, and the irrigation dam is gone. When Dad died, my brother and I sold the land, and it helped me pay my bills for quite a while. I’d still like to nab one of those catfish. But I’d hold it just right, behind the gills, squeezing tight, as I opened the lid of my wicker basket and dropped that lovely and dangerous creature on the wet towels inside.
I wish everyone had a father like mine. It would be nice if stuff like the Bataan Death March didn’t happen too. Roger’s dad did the best he could with what he was given. So did Roger. Guess I did too.
