My mind works in mysterious ways. One minute it's dwelling on my military past; the next it's somewhere else. Right now it's somewhere else.
Anyone who's followed my Facebook posts knows I'm for gun control. Some people figure I'm afraid of guns. Not really. But there have been a couple instances in my past that altered my view.
It seems to me that for most of my childhood and teenage years I owned at least one gun. I started off with a pellet gun my dad bought me. It was fun and good for plinking tin cans. I think it was a .22 caliber.
Next I had a single shot .22 rifle. I guess I got it from my dad but I really don't remember. I loved that gun. Mostly I used it for target shooting - tin cans, bottles, things like that. But there was an incident that eventually scared the shit out of me.
I must have been 14 or 15. My mom and dad had split and we lived on Wall Street, Coventry, in a Victorian house. My mom rented out rooms to help make ends meet. Fourteen or fifteen is not a good time to own a gun; the testosterone is going nuts in a teenage boy. In my mind I was the "man" of the house, the protector.
One night, early winter I think because there was some snow on the ground, as I was going upstairs to get something from my room, as I passed the front door (there was a small foyer and the stairs went up from there) I saw a pair of eyes peering in at me. I freaked! Thinking we were being cased for a robbery or worse I ran upstairs, grabbed my rifle, stuffed a cartridge in the chamber and rushed back downstairs. I threw open the door and saw in the moonlight a figure hot footing it up the road. I threw the rifle to my shoulder and tried to aim. I pulled the trigger. Thankfully I missed. I fumbled for another cartridge but before I could reload I saw the guy run down into the apple orchard.
A long time later I heard from someone that the guy I tried to shoot was the brother of one of our roomers, Roy Michaud. The guy had come down from Quebec asked at Mike's Pizza where his brother lived and was simply trying to see if he had the right house. He told everyone that some crazy guy tried to shoot him. I was the crazy guy.
Lucky for me that the cops in Coventry at that time were pretty easy going and never followed up on it. Lucky for me I didn't take time to really aim.
The next run in with a rifle came later, probably 1968. I'd bought a semi-automatic .22 Savage Arms rifle. I think it was supposed to be for my brother Hotch but I used it most of the time, again for target shooting (although I did go squirrel hunting once with my friend Danny).
At that time we had an exchange student from England staying with us. For some reason he went into my bedroom and started dry firing the rifle. I think my brother's friend Barry was in the room with him. They must have dry fired the rifle a dozen times. Barry then came back into the living room and shut the door behind him. All of a sudden there was the crack of a shot being fired and a bullet ripped through the bedroom door missing Barry's head by a couple of inches.
That was the first time the rifle "hid" a round. At first I thought maybe the English kid had found my cartridges but he hadn't. It wasn't the last time the rifle did that, hid a round. I had it happen a couple times when we were target shooting. It was bizarre, you had to count the rounds and make sure they all were fired or you might end up with one stuck somewhere only to be found who knows when.
I took the gun to the Savage Arms factory in Westfield, MA and they kept it for a couple weeks but never found the problem. I think we scrapped the gun, the gun that tried to kill someone.
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