I was a kid with a rifle. Very bad idea.
Puberty and firepower are a recipe for tragedy. I got lucky, thank goodness.
When I was 12, my dad bought me a rifle from a pawnshop. It was a .22-caliber Mossberg bolt-action rifle. It was his way of reaching out to a sullen and withdrawn kid on the verge of adolescence. He believed that it would give us an interest in common. He also thought that being able to shoot, like knowing how to box, were skills any well-rounded man should master. In the age of the military draft, it might also put me at the head of my class in basic training.
The two of us would go out and hunt “varmints,” which where I grew up mostly consisted of the rats that infested a vacant lot. He also set up a kind of primitive shooting range in our basement that consisted of an old mattress and some inch-thick pine boards.
I loved my rifle despite the fact that as a weapon, it was nothing special. My father would buy me a small box of .22caliber short cartridges that fired a slug about the size of a pea. But I loved it for the power it gave me at a time of my life when powerlessness was a sad fact of my life. Parents had power. Teachers had power. And bigger kids, especially the bullies, had power.
Hitting the bull’s-eye or killing a rat with my rifle also provided a diversion from Latin and algebra — both of which I was flunking — but more than that it enabled me in some small way to exert power. I was oblivious to the fact that even a small slug was a lethal projectile.
One day when I was home alone, I took out my rifle and, without a moment of reflection on what the consequences might be, fired it out the window of our house in the general direction of the house across the street. Whether it was just dumb luck or divine providence, the bullet embedded itself in the bough of a big sycamore tree. A few inches higher, and it would have gone through the window of my neighbor’s master bedroom.
Over the years, I’ve had moments when I thought about this lapse in judgment that could have killed or wounded a neighbor. The memory revisits me whenever a teenage boy goes on a mur- derous rampage, and I wonder whether the same impulse that prompted me to fire that shot so many years ago is the same one motivating the school shooters, who might not even give any thought to the consequences of their acts, or be so consumed by alienation or revenge that the consequences don’t matter.
Another thought haunts me: If I had an AR-15 rather than a secondhand single-shot rifle, would I have been able to stop at one trigger pull? Unlike my simple, primitive rifle, an AR-15 is a charismatic weapon that would appeal to the immature but swaggering teenage boy. It is a weapon that just screams testosterone. In the teenage imagination, it makes you into a special operations shooter or a Navy SEAL. These are appealing but potentially fatal thoughts in the mind of a kid.
I’m glad that I didn’t know about AR-15s. I don’t think we should let teenage boys anywhere near them. Puberty and firepower are a dangerous combination.