Airgunning gone bad

Airguns are meant to be fun but they’re certainly not toys. I’ve enjoyed Airguns most of my life but there have been a couple of incidents that have gone bad.

The first one happened when I was about 11 years old. I was with a few neighbors in front of the house and one of them was playing with an “unloaded”co2 BB pistol. I believe the gun was intended for .177 pellets but it was able to shot bbs as well. The guy had used a few bbs in it and the gun was apparently empty. So he kept shooting the gun just expelling the co2 until he pointed at my face and I got hit by a bb at point blank in the cheek. My reflex was to turn away from the gun so the bb hit me parallel to the face. The bb traveled under my skin 1.5 inches until it stopped right at the end of the cheek bone. At the ER the doctor told us it was unsafe to take the bb out due to risk of damaging a face nerve. He told us that it eventually will rise right under the skin surface as the body rejects it. So it did. I haven’t taken it out yet. That was 40 years ago.

The second incident was as an adult I was shooting feral pigeons on the church property. My buddy is the Pastors son and we had a permit to be there to do a little pest control. All was going good until an old lady saw us and she called the cops. The crazy lady event closed the church gate on us so we couldn’t leave. When the cops showed up they asked us to show them the pellet guns. They we’re stoked on how cool these new adult airguns were. I think we had Gamos at the time. They told us not to pay attention to the old lady but to try to shoot the guns in a discrete way so she could see us.

So how many of you have a sour moment involving an airgun?
 
When I was in the 2nd grade I was learning to shoot my Daisy Red Rider with aluminum cans. I started to get comfortable and bored with cans and moved on to stalking some birds in our yard. I lined up on a bird sitting on the fence, pulled the tigger, the bird flew away and the BB went right through my neighbor, Mr. Deets kitchen window. I learned a valuable lesson about knowing what’s beyond my targets and it left such an impression on me that 42 years later, I still remember Mr. Deets name. Oh yeah, he was pissed and so was my dad! We’ll leave it at that. 

Stoti
 
In the process of doing a bottled HPA conversion of a Crosman 2240, I had the tank block and bottle fitted. My plan was to install a rifle-length barrel but it hadn't come in yet so for a bit it looked like this:



So I was outside on Sunday after getting it assembled to give it a test drive. Had been shooting it from the bench for a while and it was doing pretty nicely.

Decided to walk around the back yard and plink at stuff for a few minutes. Soon braced it against a tree to take a shot, not realizing I had just placed my hand on the bottle, and wrapped my index finger too high.

Mmmmmm...tainted meat.


 
A buddy and I, as kids, were playing with his Crosman pump BB gun in his back yard. We were shooting pop cans propped against a 6qt basket. One of the shots missed, ricocheted off the basket and went thru 2 panes of glass and bedded itself in the wall of the neighbor's place. We didnt even know it at the time but he certainly heard about it that night. He sold me that gun real cheap lol.
 
My first rifle getting back into shooting, Hatsan Model 95 .25. Neighbor saw me shooting and called the cops thinking it was a for real .22. One of the town's finest showed up and after explaining the rifle and that it was just an air rifle, he was actually pretty impressed so I asked him if he wanted to give it a go. He spent almost half an hour at my shooting table...lol.

Fast forward a week and I used that same rifle to pick a raccoon off his back deck trying to raid his bird feeders with about a 20 yard head shot. He apologized for a week earlier and the cop, said feel free to wander my yard all you want, I got too many squirrels raiding that same feeder, you can shoot those too...lol.
 
Not a bad but a story.

I would guess the year to be about 1970 or so, buddy and mine are walking down the sidewalk of a pretty busy street, we both carry an air rifle, me a crosman 766 him a Daisy 880. As we walk down the road a cop car pulls over to the side of the road lights on and stops us.

Cop: what are you kids doing 

Us: going down to the creek to shoot frogs.

Cop: ok be careful 

And that was it....off he drove. And we just kept walking.

Such a different time.
 
...so far I have shot the wrong sparrow once and hit the bird feeder...chipped the powder coating...glad I was using the sub 600 fps .17 cal CZ T200 and not the .25 Escape...LoL...

...wounded a squirrel with the AP16... 

...as a kid we were careless aboot the backstop in the basement with our Daisy 99 and ruined mom's wedding dress with a science project that was stored in glass jars and stacked on top of it...

...my father was a real pack rat...

...I hit the bird feeder once back then too, and got in a lot of trouble over it...broke the glass with my Winchester break barrel springer in .17...

...once I took a shot at my brother with a wrist rocket and broke a cellar door window when he ducked...does that count...???...

...I try not to do stupid poop with guns...
 
Had a few incidents..

When younger my friend shot me I n the calf, I dug the pellet out with a penknife, less painful than the hiding I would have received from my dad.

I had a job as a bakers boy delivering bread, I was shot in the back of the head by some lads, it broke the skin but didn’t penetrate. despite giving them all a good bashing, I never discovered who did it. 

shot myself in the knee with a pistol that someone gave me, I found out why as it had a defective trigger sear. Didn’t break the skin but left a nice bruise.

shot myself in the neck, actually it was a rebound off a wooden pole, stuck in just below skin, pulled it out with tweezers.

I got shot twice while attending a fire on a gypsy site, pellet didn’t get trough my tunic but left a couple of bruises.



Bb






 
I got shot once by a bb gun, and my friend did it on purpose. I also shot a bird once as a kid and felt horrible about it, hid the murder, and then confessed it all to my Dad; I was 6. My Dad then proceeded to turn on history channel about the bombing of Japan with Nukes, and he said, “Just think if you had to make the call on dropping that bomb and killing a bunch of people to end the war and save a bunch of lives, you would feel way more guilty.” Funny little memory. It worked though, I felt better. I thought to myself, hey, I didn’t kill a human being. I never shot an animal until I started pest hunting. Funny memories like that.
 
When I was a kid there was another kid on my bowling team that shot a CO2 cartridge and somehow got shrapnel in his eye that caused serious problems. I don’t remember it much though as I wasn’t there when it happened. 

I got shot in the back of the head by a friend with a cheap co2 pistol that hurt but bounced off luckily. 

I was plinking around one day (I don’t do plinking nowadays as I like to keep my shooting stressful and on paper or game) and hit a real hard tree. The round bounced off and hit me in my eye lid. Scared me more then anything. 
 
I had a red rider when I was a kid, and apparently not the brightest bulb on the tree, I don't remember exactly what happened but I cocked the gun (lever still open) and preceded to get the bb's to load it and at that time I understood the true meaning of pain, somehow I bumped the trigger and the cocking lever came flying back at about 3,000 miles per hour, right across my poor little fingers, that was the first and only lesson I needed on gun safety for that gun. ;~( lol 
 
I've got one that won me the king of stupid crown, shot myself in the finger with a .22cal. 25.39gr. JSB at 975fps. I was using my finger to gauge the air pressure out of the muzzle on my SK19, I thought I had all the pellets removed from the magazine, wrong again pellet breath. It shot clean through, made quite a mess of my finger, had to learn how to shoot with my index finger for awhile, didn't improve my accuracy. I didn't go to the ER because I was ashamed at being so stupid also didn't want to explain to the police how stupid I was. I've since ground a small semicircle in the mag housing so that I may poke out rounds from the mag. I now double check to make sure the mag is empty.
 
My dad bought me my first BB gun when I was 8. I set up a cardboard target on a picnic table right in front of a sliding glass door and.....you guessed it.

At one point my dad said I put enough cone shaped BB holes in windows around the house that the insurance company wouldn't pay for anymore replacement glass.

I don't know why he never took my BB gun away.
 
I only had one issue. Early in my airgun exploits, I owned a Falcon FN12 in .22. I shoot a lot out of my house using a door or window frame as a rest. As we all know, it is very easy to look through a scope a see a shot that looks clear, but is not. I did shoot the door frame on my brand new house. Fortunately it was kind of parallel to the frame and was easily repaired with some wood filler-but not until after my wife noticed it.