Guns for Fun

My father fancied himself a hunter. And yes, he did hunting in his younger days. After I came along the hunting was limited to shooting weapons at odd things or using a fishing pole and worms. Nevertheless, my father did purchase guns over the years and proudly told me "these will all be yours someday."

When a parent tells you that, don't believe him or her. But that's another story.

As mentioned before, we did go out shooting. At one point my father had a semi-automatic .45 caliber machine gun that was fun to shoot. He also had a 30-06, a .22 long rifle, a .357 magnum, a 12 gauge shotgun, and various other guns all of which disappeared in his late years - either sold to pay some bill or stolen from him.

I have no idea if my father ever hunted ducks, but he was an avid supporter of Ducks Unlimited. To my knowledge, he was never a member of the NRA, but he supported their ideas. What I do recall about my father the gun owner was one summer in Montana. My father had purchased a large chunk of land outside of Bozeman, Montana. He thought he was going to be a rancher, and part of preparing that property for ranchin' was keeping the groundhog population down.

He spent countless hours driving around his hundreds of acres in his 1978 Ford "Crew Cab" with his .22 long rifle, stopping occasionally to blast a groundhog or two. Part of the blood fest was clearing the land of the rodent infestation, but most of it was just his pure "kill" instinct. And part of it was simply for fun, for as he put it best:

"If you shoot them in the head, they do a little dance for ya!"