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Did you grow up with firearms or get interested later in life?

  • Since I was a kid.

    Votes: 391 86.7%
  • Later in adulthood.

    Votes: 60 13.3%

  • Total voters
    451
Messages
885
Reactions
2,478
I was born and raised on a small horse outfit outside of Moscow, ID. My biological dad was a writer for Field & Stream, owned a chain of gun shops in the region, and was a Marine sniper. Stepdad was a rancher, then a cop, then FBI, then Chief of Police.

I got my first .22 at age 10 and was let loose in the Idaho woods alone with my trusty firearm. By age 13, I was riding horseback 50 miles a day in the mountains with a .22 Ruger Single-Six on my hip, alone, and would camp out in the woods occasionally.

I don't remember ever not knowing about guns or having one handy.

Seems a lot of folks these days grew up without firearms and got into them later in life.

I admit to sometimes not understanding their perspectives or issues with firearms and being a bit insensitive about certain subjects with folks like that.

Just wondering who else here had a proper upbringing like me.
 
I was a semi suburban/rural kid. We'd sneak through the back streets of our neighborhood on our dirt bikes (all paranoid the cops would bust us... LOL) to the railroad tracks, then follow the tracks for miles to Powel Butte and go riding up there.... we'd run around with BB/pellet guns, and even 22's.

We never did any malicious stuff with the guns.... ever.
 
I sure did, in fact there's a funny story behind it. When I was in 3rd or 4th grade I went to the pumpkin patch with my school. Someone there to a photo of me holding up a pumpkin, in the front of my pants, "appendix carry" you can see the butt of a revolver cap gun. I guess I was packing heat at an early age...
 
Your childhood sounds like a Bob Lee Swagger novel. I'm a little jealous.

Didn't start with guns until I was 12 or so, an older cousin got me into hunting and such.
 
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grew up on 70 acres of timber in the Cascades ....I don't even remember learning to shoot , thank you Dad for bring me up as an American patriot
 
I, too, have been shooting longer than I can remember. Dad was career Air Force. And training recruits in hand to hand and small arms was at one point part of his job, and was always an interest. One of the guns I learned on was Dad's SW .38 Combat Masterpiece, the sidearm of Air Force pilots in those days. (Dad was in starting in WW II.) Back then, the emphasis for pilots included the potential need to hunt with the gun if plane was downed in a remote area. He and my mother were hunting snow shoe rabbits in Alaska with handguns right after the war. l got my first gun, a .22 rifle, when I was 12. It would have been earlier, but we had spent the three prior years in NY and Tokyo. Only some places we lived were conducive to family recreational shooting. And alas, none to the sort of childhood hunting experience you got.
 
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First memory was before I even started school. Dad took me to an old quarry we shot at. Had an old kitchen chair I would sit on backwards to rest the gun on. I enjoyed the .22 so much he let me try his .22 Jet S&W. Then another had a 1911. That started a life time love of the 1911. Can't keep track of how many toy guns I had that were modeled after the 1911. They were always the toy gun I would gravitate too. So sad so many kids are now made to totally fear anything to do with guns.
 
I grew up learning :
How to shoot...
How to safely handle a firearm...
To respect all life...
That being able to "Keep and bear arms" is both a Right and a responsibility...

Having hunted for much of my life and serving four combat tours while in the Army has only re-enforced those early life lessons taught to me , by my dad and granddad.

I received my first gun , my granddad's Remington 870 Wingmaster , at an early age around 8 maybe..?
It served as life lesson , hunting and shooting tool and always a source of pride and fond memories.
I still own and use this shotgun and hope to pass it on to someone someday...All while imparting the same lessons , I have learned.
Andy
 
Great topic...Grew up in a small town of 3,000 and as a boy we'd walk our .22 rifle's down to the river to shoot. We'd even walk through the High School property on week-ends. The only time I was stopped is when a cop asked if my breach was open, I showed him it was and he said "Have fun"
In high school many of us would have guns in the racks of our trucks just waiting for the final bell so we could go hunting...My how times have changed.
 
I was a semi suburban/rural kid. We'd sneak through the back streets of our neighborhood on our dirt bikes (all paranoid the cops would bust us... LOL) to the railroad tracks, then follow the tracks for miles to Powel Butte and go riding up there.... we'd run around with BB/pellet guns, and even 22's.

We never did any malicious stuff with the guns.... ever.


I always had grand envisions of taking my dirt bike to Powell Butte via spring water corridor. You had bigger brass than me! I would ride around the neighborhood a time or two but nothing as far as what you did.
 
Great topic...Grew up in a small town of 3,000 and as a boy we'd walk our .22 rifle's down to the river to shoot. We'd even walk through the High School property on week-ends. The only time I was stopped is when a cop asked if my breach was open, I showed him it was and he said "Have fun"
In high school many of us would have guns in the racks of our trucks just waiting for the final bell so we could go hunting...My how times have changed.
how did we ever survive ?. There was 500 folks in Butte Falls . We would walk to town and collect enough beer cans in the ditch to trade in for a box of 22 at the gas station and go shoot them all on the way back home....the entire time Remington Speedmaster 22 in hand , even in the gas station while collecting ammo. Set me up real good for scrounging ammo for a shtf situation lol
 
I was born and raised on the family ranch in the "country". Got my first .22 rifle when I was 6 years old. Spent a good chunk of my youth on horseback, roaming the countryside hunting pheasant and quail. Still live on the same ranch, still roam the hills on horseback when I'm not busy with the ranch chores. In my family, firearms were (and still are) just one of the tools you use to do a job.
 
I started on bb guns. A couple of my aunts had property growing up so my brother and I would get to roam the area shooting cans and bugs. When I turned 12 I got a 10/22 for Christmas; the rest is history.
 
I was a semi suburban/rural kid. We'd sneak through the back streets of our neighborhood on our dirt bikes (all paranoid the cops would bust us... LOL) to the railroad tracks, then follow the tracks for miles to Powel Butte and go riding up there...
We used to ride up there and get the dairy farmer to chase us while trying to roost him with mud. Good old days. 20 yrs later I bought a house that backed up to the (what is now the park)
 
I spent most of my childhood in a very remote area. In adolescence, we moved closer to "civilization", but it was still quite rural. Yes, firearms were certainly part of that experience. All six children in my family were taught how to safely use firearms. All of us are still responsible gun owners and some continue to regularly hunt. I will teach my own children the same.
 
We never did any malicious stuff with the guns.... ever.
I think when parents choose to teach and allow their kid to shoot they automatically do a lot of other things that change the kid fundamentally. For starters, they take the kid more seriously. You simply do take a creature more seriously when it can kill you than if it can't. Second, you introduce a whole lot of teaching of ethics, morals, and responsibility for your actions and for making the right choices that you might be more casual about otherwise.
 
I didn't start shooting until I was six, so you might say I had a late start by comparison with most of you over there. I didn't do too badly though - the first thing I ever shot was my dad's [illegal] Colt .45 M1911. I shot it into the waves on the shore from the beach, and I do believe I put some holes in them right there and then.

Since then I've never been far away from guns, and I'm a lot better for it, IMO. I really can't imagine life without them.
 
My grandfather lived on a couple hundred acres near Cottage Grove OR. I never had a father or much of one so my grandfather raised me. We hunted with his hounds and I got to go with a friend of his who was a trapper for the county. Anyway, I had free run of the ranch and my own .22 single shot at age 7 and killed my first buck at age 9. I feel bad now about all the birds I killed, but didn't know better.
 

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