Story by Tom Claycomb III

I still remember my first gun.  It was Christmas morning and I was six years old. I woke up about 4:30 a.m. and slipped into the living room before anyone else was awake. In my family we laid each of the stockings for us four kids in the corner of the couch and Santa Claus placed your big gift by your stocking.

The Christmas tree lights were sparkling and dancing off the barrel of my new Crosman BB gun. To cock it you had to push the barrel in. It had a hole up by the barrel that would hold something like 16-18 BB’s.

Wide eyed I crept back to my bedroom and slipped back into bed. Finally at 6:00 I could wait no longer and had to go wake up everyone to inform them Santa Claus had hit town. Of course my two sleepy-headed sisters yelled at Mom to shut me up for us to sleep a few hours longer, but I’d have none of that. Despite some serious life threats I persevered and was soon holding my new rifle beaming like little “Ralphie.”

Like any sport, as you grow older and get better at something you progress. Dad soon bought a .177 Benjamin pump up pellet gun and when I was nine my Christmas present was a .22 cal. Benjamin pellet gun. I shot hundreds of snakes with it on our farm, cottontails on up to jackrabbits, armadillos and possums. I hunted everything with my Benjamin.

Dad and Mom bought us shotguns on our 10^th birthday and .22 rimfires for our 12^th birthday. So by the time I was 12 I’d moved into the real gun category and was off and running — leaving airguns in the dust. I bought one pump up BB gun years later to shoot pigeons for a couple of weeks in town but basically didn’t touch an airgun for nearly 50 years.

I became an outdoor writer years ago and am constantly scrambling to find interesting topics to write about. It takes a lot of fodder to publish over six articles per week. Well, I started hearing rumblings about how cool the new break barrel pellet guns were but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why a grown man would digress and start back into shooting airguns.

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