Readers from across the U.S. share what they remember about their introduction to firearms. To tell your story, please send us a note: hello@theatlantic.com.
A reader from the Rust Belt has a remarkable followup to these stories:
I’ve always grown up around guns and have very mixed feelings about them. My father is a lifelong hunter. Venison, pheasant, and duck were regular staples in our household and most of the meat we eat came from him. He’s passed down guns and hunting traditions to my two teenage nephews—avid video gamers who, other than hunting, would practically never go outside. He’s taught my French fiancee and me how to shoot a bullseye in our backyard. (My fiancee, a true Parisien, particularly enjoyed the experience.)
My father has also always kept a handgun in the house for protection. In our neighborhood, break-ins and robberies are quite common and nearly all of our neighbors keep guns in their homes for peace of mind. A good half of them concealed carry everywhere they go.
Dad also started concealed carrying in the early 2000s when he survived a mass shooting at a factory in our hometown.
Three of his fellow supervisors were shot by another employee while my dad was out smoking a cigarette. One died and two were critically injured, and the shooter killed himself. My dad knew the shooter personally and had taken him fishing before, but he always wondered if he was a target too, being the only one not shot from management. Finding his friend’s dead body left him feeling helpless, and I believe it led him to become a much more active member of the NRA.
Growing up I also frequently saw guns at parties and under beds and even had friends who carried them around—rarely legally. Two of my best friends were shot during high school. One, a 16-year-old male, was shot by a 20-year-old male over a petty argument during a party. The incident tore me up. Shortly afterward, another of my young friends, a 15-year-old girl, was accidentally shot in the chest by her boyfriend who received minimal charges. She survived, but I remember visiting her in the hospital with my Mom and being very afraid.
Today, I am a 27-year-old woman living in Manhattan and part of the top five percent of U.S. earners. My neighborhood is safe and I haven’t seen a gun in a decade, aside from the times when I go back home to the Rust Belt, where they’re everywhere.
My New York friends are much more anti-gun than I am. Even as a flaming Liberal, I'm in the middle on this issue. I believe in common-sense gun laws, but I find that most of the people who strongly oppose guns don’t live in places where people feel VERY unsafe and where a LOT of people around you carry a gun on them at all times—legally or not. They don’t live in neighborhoods where heroin addicts roam around like zombies breaking into your homes and cars. They don’t grow up in cities known for sex trafficking. I wonder if their opinions would be different if they did?
I see and support much of the anti-gun data out there, but I believe that the message is not being delivered by credible people who look and live like the ones who own guns. And that’s a big problem that leads us to stall out on even the most minimal of changes.
Update from a reader:
First off, by claiming that liberals don’t understand those who carry guns, and live in places where they have no contact with people who carry guns, your reader leaves a lot of us liberals out. I’m a staunch liberal, quite lefty, as well as a gun owner and hunter. I live in a rural part of New Hampshire. Owning a gun here is not a big deal, and it makes a lot of sense, as far as hunting goes.
But carrying a gun around everywhere to guarantee personal safety is frankly offensive to the community, and kind of stupid. Here in New Hampshire there is no need for a personal sidearm. In fact, having one makes everyone less safe, by increasing the risk of someone being shot. The data are clear; carrying a gun does not make you more safe; it makes you less safe.
As for your reader’s inaccuracies regarding gun-toting “open carry” advocates, there are a lot of gun-toters in New Hampshire, which does not fit her model that said gun-toters are driven by worries about personal safety. We’re a state where the rate of violent crime is minuscule. These New Hampsherites carrying sidearms are not doing so because they have to deal with violent crime. They do so because they’ve bought into the NRA mythology, that to “live free and die” means being some sort of pistol-packing militiaman, 2nd amendment cowboys, yada yada yada. The only dangers that gun-toters in the Granite State face are in their fevered, NRA-stoked imaginations.
As we start to wind down this series, here are five great snapshots from readers raised in families with a strong hunting culture. For our first reader, guns were a necessity:
I only ever knew guns to be for hunting. Nobody in my family ever touched a gun except my father when he hunted. We ate tons of game when I was little because we were poor. I picked a lot of buckshot out of my food, but the gun was a tool to feed us—not a weapon of harm. Once we got rich enough to raise livestock to butcher, the gun was left to rust.
Another reader also got food through guns:
We lived in southwestern Colorado my first six years of life (1949-1955). My father had a double-barrel shotgun, and a single-barrel one, a .22 rifle, and a “deer rifle.” We ate more venison than beef and almost as much pheasant as chicken. He prided himself on using the .22 to shoot the head off a pheasant because he couldn’t abide biting down on buckshot. I never saw him do any target practice. Bullets cost too much, I think.
I never knew where he kept those guns; I never touched one that he didn’t offer. We only saw them when he cleaned them or packed them to go hunting. He let my older sister and me shoot one of them to feel the kick and power and hear the loudness.
After we moved to a town in Texas and my father took a job as a mechanic, he didn’t have to hunt meat; we could afford to buy it. Then I only saw the guns when he cleaned them.
When he passed away in 1981, a year after my mother had passed away, we took inventory of their estate, but we never found those guns. Perhaps he sold them or gave them away or simply kept them hidden somewhere so that no one would be able to find them and shoot someone accidentally.
She ends on a darker note:
This wasn’t your question, but I sometimes ask people if they know anyone who has been shot. I know two. My cousin got shot in the knee by accident at a gun show in Lubbock, Texas, and still walks with a limp. That was at least 30 years ago. The other was my best friend who shot herself in the chest when we were in 8th grade because her brother was arrested for burglary. She survived but dropped out of school. I don’t know who the gun belonged to.
Another reader has fonder memories:
Growing up in central Pennsylvania, with all of the extended maternal side of my family belonging to various hunting camps, and my grandfather, grandmother, father, uncles, and brothers all active hunters, guns were a normal part of life. I wasn’t left out of the fun; my dad taught me how to shoot a gun when I was probably seven or eight years old, always at targets, never at anything alive (I had no interest in killing animals myself).
I actually didn’t know what beef tasted like until I was a teenager, since we grew up eating venison everything: steaks, tenderloins, roasts, burgers, sausage, scrapple, bologna, jerky. Venison could be hunted cheaply, and it was infinitely better for us than other red meats, lower in fat and cholesterol, but still delicious. I prefer venison to beef to this day. It amuses me to see it priced as a luxury item on restaurant menus in the D.C. area, where I now live.
As my brothers grew up and lost interest in hunting, and my dad’s hunting trips became more and more rare, the gun cabinet has been moved to an upstairs guest bedroom, more for show than use. Many of my extended family still hunt; my 94-year-old grandfather still loves it and manages to safely shoot from tree stands and blinds.
This reader, Bobby Mathews, emphasizes how responsible most gun owners are:
When I was six or seven years old, my dad took me along on several hunting trips. I believe I had a small shotgun, a .20-gauge. Prior to going hunting, my father took us both to a safety course—a refresher for himself and a first-time experience for me. I learned how to handle the weapon, how to break the breech and load or eject shells, how to carry the unloaded shotgun over my shoulder with the barrel pointed down toward the ground.
I also learned how to use the safety—when to leave it on (almost always), and when to take it off (when you’re actually ready to take your shot). And I learned to never, ever point a gun at anything you don’t intend to shoot. I was taught that a gun is a tool and not a toy. That’s a pretty good deterrent, by the way. Who wants to work for goodness’ sake? Not a seven year old.
So I have a very positive association with guns and spending time with my father. Currently I own two guns: a .32-caliber revolver and a 12-gauge shotgun. I have no concealed carry license and don’t need one. The handgun is a weapon of last resort, and it stays locked and away from everyone else in the house.
The shotgun is a little more complicated. Even though I don’t hunt anymore, I do enjoy going to the shooting range. And when my sons are old enough, I will do what my own father did—take them to a safety course to demystify the weapons. And whether or note they like guns, they’ll understand their use and the seriousness of owning a weapon that can kill so easily.
I do want to add that, although I’m a gun owner, I don’t support the NRA’s view that the First Amendment means everyone should be allowed to own a gun, and I find the idea of open carry to be ludicrous and offensive on its face. I got a gun at a young age because my father wanted to take me hunting with him. When we weren’t hunting? The guns were locked in a cabinet.
One more reader, Ted Stanfield, talks about growing up on a ranch in southeastern Wyoming and ends with an impassioned point about our cultural divide over guns:
My earliest memories involving guns are of walking with my dad hunting rabbits, ducks, and deer when I was around five or six. From the time I was old enough to keep up, he took me with him. The memories of cool fall days, fallen leaves, the smell of gun smoke, the laughter of friends will stay with me always.
My father died when I was eight, but other men—neighbors and uncles and family friends—continued my introduction to guns and hunting. Great people, great memories.
P.S. The inability or unwillingness of those raised in urban America to understand how deeply guns are embedded in rural culture is very difficult to combat. In rural America, guns accompany us nearly everywhere: to the pasture, to the field, to the water holes, to town. They are as much a part of our daily lives as your cell-phone.
We cannot imagine a world in which that is somehow denied us. We have lots of political differences in rural America—economics, abortion, inequality, injustice, environmental degradation, conservation—and how to deal with those issues keep us arguing over who to support in local and state elections; but threats of increased gun regulation will make us all single-issue voters. The void between rural and urban is much deeper than conservative vs. liberal or Democrat vs. Republican.
Update from another reader, Steve Merlan, who taught me a new word today, plinking—the casual shooting of targets like tin cans and glass bottles, based on the onomatopoeia of “plink” when the bullet hits a metal surface. I’ve done a good amount of .22 plinking myself, mostly when visiting family in Door County, Wisconsin, so it’s good to have a name for it now. Here’s Steve:
When I was a child in New Mexico and Colorado, most people hunted. We had a couple of hunting rifles—one for my father, one for myself or my brother, whichever was out—a .22 for plinking, and a shotgun that we traded pretty soon for something else, since we weren’t much interested in wing shooting. A deer was more our idea of meat, and we made a good deal of venison sausage, besides eating roast venison haunch and the like.
One Colorado town we lived in had a target practice program in the basement of the Elks lodge. You showed up and got a .22 with a heavy target barrel and scope sights and brought your ammo. It was a kind of social occasion for us junior high and high schoolers.
No one had ever heard of a gun rampage and none of us thought of any danger. But we were drilled in careful handling of firearms. (God help you if you brought a loaded gun into the house.) We looked down on people who bought military surplus; it was a second-best choice for the poor. A good hunting rifle with fine workmanship in the stock was a point of pride.
I just learned the movie Natural Born Killerswas inspired by two teenagers on a murder spree in 1950s Nebraska. This reader remembers it all too well:
My earliest memory of guns was in the late 1950s, when Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Fugate, were terrorizing Nebraska. In my memory, Fugate’s parents, two of the early victims, lived within walking distance of my grade school.
At the time, my father drove a late ‘40s car, and all children walked to and from school (about a mile, in our case). One day, my dad arrived to pick up my sister and me in the middle of the afternoon, which was highly unusual. As I crawled up the running board and onto the bench front seat, I saw a pistol in a holster strapped to his right thigh.
My father had grown up on a farm in rural Oklahoma and was comfortable with guns, but he had by that point finished a Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska and was about to join the faculty. We never spoke of that day, and Starkweather was quickly caught.
Guns were a big part of my life growing up in rural Florida. I had a small, lightweight rifle my step-father gave me to shoot with out back. My mom (born and raised in suburban New Jersey) learned to shoot and used a pistol to shoot critters who came in our back yard.
My step-father was a skilled gunsmith who did repairs in our family-owned gun shop while my mom worked the counter. Between the ages of three and six, I went to work with them during the day. Unfortunately, a gun shop even then was a target for thieves. The shop was broken into several times. My parents got guard dogs and the dogs were poisoned and the shop still broken into. Eventually they gave up.
Unfortunately, my step-father continued his love affair with guns.
He worked as a sheriff (before he was thrown off the force—and you can imagine how bad he was to get thrown off a sheriff force in rural Florida in the 1960s). He decided to use his guns to keep his family in line.
If the kids didn’t line up to be beaten for some transgression and ran off (if one of us did something, his philosophy was to beat us all), he shot after us. More than once we went hightailing it away with shots hitting the road behind us. Luckily he was usually drunk and a bad shot.
So my experience with guns was intimate and informs my judgement today. Guns are weapons that can escalate to fatality very, very fast. I am not comfortable around them, and am glad I live (and will continue to live) in a state that regulates them strongly.
It’s not often we can cross-reference a personal anecdote from a reader with Google News archives reaching back 40 years. John Poirier’s first experience with guns—the theme of our new reader thread—was noted in the newspaper of his hometown of Lewiston, Maine, following his interview with the Boston Globe. Here’s John’s story in his own words:
I was 23 years old, a newly minted pharmacist living in the South End of Boston, which was beginning the process of gentrification in 1976. I was an idealistic young white gay man, who having witnessed the racially charged effects of forced busing, believed that it was better to integrate the neighborhoods instead of the schools. So I had just moved into a refurbished old brick building on Pembroke Street.
One dreary winter afternoon 40 years ago this January, I returned to my apartment to find the door jimmied open by a crowbar. Not thinking that the burglar might still be inside, I entered and went to the phone to call 911. Within a few seconds of picking up the receiver an armed black man appeared behind me and demanded all my money.
I had never seen a real gun before in my life, and the Saturday night special he was pointing at me looked too small to be real. I threw a five dollar bill at him and while he was distracted I ran out of my second-floor apartment and down the stairs. The burglar shot me in the back, leaving a .38 bullet between my second and third vertebrae of my spine, paralyzing me from the chest down for the rest of my life.
I was in the ICU of Boston City Hospital a couple of days after the bullet had been surgically removed when two reporters from the Boston Globe came to interview me. Still on a high dose of morphine, I spoke openly about the incident, without thinking of the consequences of what I said. A day later the Boston Globe published a long interview with me on page three, including quotes about being gay. Since most of my family did not know this, I was outed to the world by the newspaper. Ten years later, J. Anthony Lukas would write about this burglary and hate-crime in his Pulitzer-winning book Common Ground.
It is now almost 40 years to the day since that fateful encounter with a gun, and I am profoundly disappointed that gun violence has greatly increased since then [CG note: Research indicates the rates of non-fatal firearm crime and firearm homicides have in fact fallen since 1993], and that no progress in mitigating this epidemic seems possible. While most media focus on the lives lost to gun violence in America, little attention is paid to the thousands of survivors.
I am now 63, retired in Davis, California, alone as usual, and in much neuropathic pain, among other complications of having lived this long as a paraplegic.
Summer camp carries with it a particular kind of nostalgia. In memories, conditions were perfect: You were away from your parents, away from school, away from your regular ol’ friends—and hey, there was a whole new batch to bond with.
Much of that bonding takes place over shared activities, a brilliant effort by camp directors and counselors-in-training everywhere to further hone a developing person’s dependence on schedules. For some of us, “activities” meant sessions on the loom or crowded around a table making God’s eyes from rainbow yarn (it was the ‘90s and no one had thought to tell us about cultural appropriation yet).
For others, like these readers, it meant guns:
My first experience with guns was at an all-boys summer camp in 1984. I was 11 years old. It was the first time I was away from home.
We shot .22s, single-bolt action. I remember being very careful handling and carrying the rifle. Even at that age, I knew this was the real deal and not the toy guns I played Army with my friends at home.
We shot in the prone position, on our bellies. We aimed at paper bulls-eye targets about 25 yards away. The counselor taught us how to load, aim, and “fire at will.”
“Remember,” one of them said. “Exhale, then squeeze the trigger. Don’t jerk it.”
I was an OK shot. I got better with practice. I used to mail my targets home to my folks along with letters about camp. I never forgot the first time the rifle kicked back after I pulled (squeezed) the trigger. The loud pop. The smell of gunpowder. The clink of the shell casings. And the feeling that I just grew up a bit.
I went back to that camp every summer and shot those rifles until I was 17. I haven’t picked up a rifle since.
But, because of that positive experience, I’m not as quick to support gun bans as some of my more liberal friends. Target practice, marksmanship, gun safety. Under proper supervision, these are good skills—and can be fun. The NRA used to stand for that before it went nuts.
Another reader found his shooting stride even earlier:
My earliest memory was eight years old. As a kid, I was privileged to spend some glorious two-week summer stints at Camp St. Michael near Hancock, Wisconsin. The Salvatorian Brothers taught me how to swim, ride a horse, shoot an arrow with a bow, and safe, accurate, firearm handling.
.22 caliber range rifles were used, and we campers drilled and practiced the manual of arms shooting prone, seated, and standing. If you put your shot in the center of the bullseye you earned “double canteen” (soda pop and an ice cream bar) that evening. I earned a couple of NRA qualifications—pro-marksman and marksman.
I committed to memory the five cardinal rules: ALWAYS keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction; keep the gun unloaded until ready to use; keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot; treat every firearm as if was loaded; and be aware of your target and what’s beyond.
Here’s one more, though this reader got his first taste of guns thanks to his brother’s camp stay:
My first experience was shooting a little .22 caliber rifle at my brother’s Scout jamboree during his summer camp family day. We lived in a rural area, and some of our neighbors hunted, though we did not. My parents were Army veterans and emphasized that guns were weapons which were intended for use in killing. No beating around the bush about “self defense” or sport.
My next experience with guns was Army basic training.
Shooting is enjoyable. I definitely see the attraction in it. I’d rather not have guns around my house, though, knowing the statistics about accidental shooting of family members.
Similar to what I’ve heard from my extended family in the Midwest, a good number of readers wrote about positive first experiences with guns, which led to a lifelong respect and passion for firearms. Our first reader:
When I was about age seven and living in semi-rural Illinois outside of Chicago, I remember my Aunt Marge inviting me to go outdoors with her and watch her fire a .22 rifle at a target hung from the apple tree. She was wearing a suede jacket, which seemed unusual to me, since she was a businesswoman and an accountant for a string of movie theaters.
I remember her giving me safety instructions, including where to stand and how to remain alert around a shooter to avoid mishaps. It was very cold and windy. And I remember, most of all, the sweet smell of gunsmoke—which I enjoyed.
Then, we went inside, and I watched her carefully unload the gun and put it away in a long, cardboard box—with the ammunition put up high in a safe place separate from the gun. She gave me repeated warnings about “not playing” with any firearms.
So my earliest memory of guns is that Aunt Marge really knew how to use them. They were dangerous but useful, and you needed to respect them and be very grown-up before you could be trusted to use one for target practice. I like guns, and I have a healthy respect for them because of early exposure to good training about their purpose and use.
Another reader:
I was four years old when I announced that I wanted a BB gun.
“What would you do with a BB gun?” Pappy asked. “They’re no good for anything but making noise. A real man uses a real gun.”
Ten minutes later, we were in the backyard near the barn. I listened attentively as he explained how to aim the .22 rifle he had in his hand. “And the most important rule of all,” he said, “is to NEVER, EVER point a gun at a person. Not even if it’s unloaded. Not even by accident. Guns are not toys.”
Lecture over, he set a pop can on top of a fence post, carefully measured off ten paces, then had me lie on my belly, rest the barrel of the gun on a crate, look down the sight, and squeeze the trigger. “Squeeze it, don’t pull it,” he said.
The gun cracked. The pop can flew off the fence post.
It was a triumphant introduction to guns. I don’t remember anything else about that day. The fact is, that one little window in time is one of just a handful of memories I have of Pappy. I love him still with the fierce love of a small child because a year later he was dead of a brain tumor, far too young.
Was he crazy to teach a four year old about guns? Maybe.
But years later, as my father and I taught my (considerably older than four-year-old) daughters how to shoot safely, my mind went back to that day long ago when my grandfather made a real human connection with a four year old over a gun.
I’m struck by the theme of comfort in these emails—not in the sense that they’re learning to protect themselves, but the simple relief of feeling safe spending time with the adults they look up to. Here’s another reader, from San Diego:
My first encounter with firearms involved a few cousins, uncles, my father, and I all driving out to rural deserts in east San Diego county. I was eight years old. We pulled off the road when we found a good place to set up targets. We had old fruit, water jugs, paper targets, and other odds and ends we would all shoot.
I don’t remember much of the day, but I remember my dad’s firm stance behind me when I shot his .22 rifle for the first time, lest the kick of the gun knock me off my feet.
I remember the strangely comforting smell of gun powder, oil, and dry heat all through the afternoon. It was a good day. We stopped for Mexican food afterward, on our way home, and I knew I’d found a hobby that I’d always enjoy. I still do.
We’ve heard from many of you about your first experience with guns, so thanks to everyone who’s emailed so far. The details of this reader’s account jumped out among the dozens in our inbox:
When I was maybe four years old, my father brought my older brother and me along with him to the shooting range. He and a friend brought a variety of shotguns and pistols, as well as a supply of cotton balls to stuff into our ears.
Now, this range was an outdoor range, and it was just a bit windy. In the course of watching the others shoot, one of the cotton balls fell out of my ear and went blowing down the shooting range. I—of course—chased it.
Picture it, if you will: five or six people shooting downrange and a four-year-old running out in the middle of the range. Looking back at this, I do wonder what my father was thinking. (Unfortunately I never thought to ask him about the experience, and now he has Alzheimer’s, so I doubt he'd recall it.)
Fortunately all I got was a spanking and a yelling at, rather than a bullet. And at some point I got to shoot a 12-gauge shotgun, which knocked me down. (How many four-year-olds know to pull the shotgun tight to their shoulder?) I don’t remember whether I got to shoot before or after I nearly got myself shot.
Forty years later, I can still remember the cotton ball rolling along the ground, me stooped over running after it, being short enough to run beneath the bullets.
Having grown up in Indiana, and with family in rural Illinois (where the itinerary for a family reunion in 2014 included a trick shooting show and a two-hour block of time for “introduction to firearms”), I know more than a few people for whom owning guns is a significant part of their lives. When I’ve asked an ex’s father or a second cousin why they hunt or maintain a collection of firearms, they’ve typically said something about growing up with them in the house, or that they were the focal accessory in bonding time with a mentor.
That’s also the gist of several comments in this discussion thread I found. This passage in particular shows a striking dichotomy of early exposure to guns:
I have an extremely negative memory for my first experience with a gun. My older cousin (who was about 16 or 18 at the time) tried to shoot me. I was about five years old.
My four-year-old cousin saw him aim the gun at where I was swinging. She jumped off of her swing and pulled me back. I was really mad at her until I heard the crack of the rifle. I froze while realizing what happened. The bullet missed me but went through the window of our trailer. He walked away, angry. I still have no idea why he tried to shoot me. I can’t ask him because his younger brother killed him about seven years ago.
Luckily a short while after this incident, my father gave me a positive memory with a firearm. He taught me how to shoot. It was a great bonding experience. He taught me how to aim and care for a gun, mentioning that the most important things were to treat guns and people with respect and to properly clean guns. We spend most of the afternoon shooting the target in the yard. I think it was a mock-up of a deer.
“Guns brought my father and I closer together,” the commenter says in a later post. “It was something he knew well that he was able to teach me. I will pass on the same values to my little one.”
