BB Guns

Stanley must have told Santa the Heap kids were exceptionally good the year we got our Daisy BB guns.  Marshall was 6 and I was 10 the Christmas morning we snuck to the living room armed with a flashlight to peek under the tree.  Ralphie would have been pea-green with envy when we discovered not one but two bb guns in the corner.  

There are always rules when it comes to being a gun owner.  By the way, BB guns are no different than a machine gun in the eyes of a mother.  Daddy sat down with Marshall and me and went over said rules.  Never point the gun at people.  Never run with the gun. Always point the gun at the ground when not aiming at a target, so on and so forth.  Mama injected her rules as well:

1.  NEVER shoot any kind of bird.  
2.  NEVER load your gun in the house.  Any BBs found in the carpet will ruin my vacuum cleaner.  
3.  NEVER shoot at any of my chickens, ducks, guineas, peacocks, turkeys (see Rule 1).
4.  If either one of you break any of these rules you BOTH will lose your gun privileges.

Ergo....

1.  We shot song birds but always had a proper burial service for them. "Now I lay me down to sleep" seemed to be the appropriate prayer.  
2.  We loaded our guns in the house and always dropped BBs on the floor hence the reason Mama had to replace the belt on the Hoover.  
3.  We only shot the peacocks when they were strutting.  We aimed for the "eyes" on their tail feathers.    
4.  Rules are meant to be broken, Mama.  Shooting cans gets boring. And yes, Mama caught us breaking each of her BB rules.  "Lefty" and "Rusty" would end up in Mama's closet until such time she felt we had learned our lesson.

We had to venture further away from the house (and Mama's eyes) to have fun with our guns.  That was until we came across a rattlesnake in the road.  Its a wonder we didn't throw our guns at the snake to distract it and hightail it to the house.  Instead we backed away slowly and then ran like heck to the house.  Out of breath and scared silly, we explained to Mama what was going on.  She asked us, "Why didn't you shoot the snake?"  Marshall replied, "We thought it might be one of your rules you forgot to tell us and we didn't want to get into trouble."  Well played, Brother, well played.