One afternoon my friend Buddy and I were out shooting with our Daisys. We had been wandering around the shallow hillside firing at set up tin can targets as there was little else to shoot. I say little else, for some crazy reason we decided to use each other as targets. I think may have bet him that he couldn’t hit me at 50 paces or something stupid like that. It seemed a good idea at the time, so we agreed to trade shots at each other. I must have drawn the short straw because I paced out 50 steps and turned to face him, standing knee deep in the long brown grass. “Shoot for the legs not the head” was the deal. Not being entirely stupid I had the sense at least to cover my eyes and asked Bill to shoot. ..! I heard the distant but familiar plunt’ sound of the spring powered compressor forcing the BB through the barrel and…

Fucking Hell!!. I felt a very sharp burning pain in my right thigh. That sucker really hurt! I don’t think it broke the skin by much, but it raised one hell of a welt. Buddy, seeing my reaction, quickly talked himself out of the previously agreed reversal of shooter and target and I don’t think I gave him much argument about it. Getting shot, even with a BB gun, was not fun. It would be completely inappropriate to say here that I now realised how that poor little bird must have felt. That was, of course, a completely different thing… But the thought did go through my mind. …poor little bird… sigh!

So.. I was familiar with guns. When I was a bit older, 11 or 12 I think, I got my first shot gun. It was a 20 gauge single shot break action gun, ideal for pheasants and grouse. It was just about the right size for a young kid going hunting with his dad for the first time. My dad and I hunted together lots of times, sometimes getting up before dawn to sit in a freezing duck blind waiting for the honkers to fly in and settle on a lake. I never managed to shoot a goose, but I bagged a few ducks and pheasants as a pre-teen. My experience and confidence with firearms was growing all the time.

As I said my Father was a consummate hunter and often went out for deer or elk mid-week with his good friends and fellow hunter/alcoholics. My dad had lots of guns which he kept in various parts of the house. They were never locked away and I had always been allowed to carefully handle them. Of course, I always followed the rules and always remembered that “A Gun Is Always Loaded”.

One afternoon I came home from school with my friend Bill, who lived in a newly build house nearby. No one was home at the time, and we went down to the basement game room to play ping pong. Lying on the couch in the game room were three large hunting rifles with telescopic scopes mounted on them. My father must have dropped then off earlier when he returned from one of these trips.

One of them I recognised was my dad’s favourite big game rifle, a bolt action 300 H&H Savage. The over-large cartridge carried a big powder charge and a heavy soft nosed bullet. It was the proper rifle to use for the really big game like Moose or Bear. It was the business!

As I was allowed to touch dad’s weapons, and I thought Bill would be interested, I picked up the H&H, being careful at all times to keep the muzzle pointed toward the floor at the back of the room. Holding it in both hands away from my body, I proudly pointed out the quality of the scope and how nicely finished the stock and tooling were. I opened the bolt and checked inside to see if it was loaded. I could see the empty clip under the fully open bolt and was satisfied that the rifle was indeed empty. Keeping the empty weapon spewing its imaginary bullets down range the whole time, I closed the bolt, and as one does, in order to relieve the tension on the hammer spring, I put the butt of the stock loosely to my shoulder and squeezed the trigger.

!!!

I expect you have worked it out already, there was an enormous explosion, and the room filled with pungent cordite smoke and concrete dust. Apart from the tremendous thump it gave my shoulder from the recoil, this empty gun had just blown a deep hole in the concrete floor of the game room about 15 feet in front of us,. The bullet tore through the shag carpet and about two inches into the concrete before ricocheting off and imbedding itself, along with a good half pound of concrete rubble, into the designer acoustic tiles on the ceiling.

I couldn’t understand how a weapon, which I was positive I had just carefully checked, could explode? Go off? What had happened? I was shaken, we both were, but I didn’t feel overly guilty. While I couldn’t understand how it had happened, I had simply proven the essential truth, that a gun is always loaded even when it is unloaded. I had done the right thing. I hadn’t been foolish in any way. I had done everything by the book as my father had painstakingly taught me. No one got hurt!!

The real upset came when my father, coming in late that night and no doubt quite drunk, pulled me out of bed and set about me with some good hard slaps, backhands and verbal assaults. I was really upset! He didn’t normally strike me! … In my mind I was blameless. I had done everything I had been taught, and because of his excellent training, no real damage or injury had occurred.

He later explained that he had neglected to tell me that the ejector on that rifle had a nasty habit of leaving a shell deep in the chamber and out of sight. The solution, which he had not previously revealed, was to put your little finger deep into the chamber to feel whether there was still a cartridge in it or not. Now he tells me!

To this day, unlike the tragedy of the poor little bird, I feel completely vindicated about the event. The damage to the floor and ceiling was minor and it was all fixed a few days later for not a lot of money. A half a pound of cement fixed the concrete floor, and the shag carpet was so shaggy that a couple of stitches were all that was required to close and mask the hole. It was necessary to replace about six or eight ceiling tiles because the blast had created a fair spread when it exploded out of the concrete floor, with its accompanying shrapnel, but it was all done fairly cheaply and with little fuss.

One day, many, many years later, not long before he died, the subject came up in conversation during one of my last visits. Dad started to lightly chastise me as he remembered the incident. “Ya!” he began ..“What in the Hell .. You shot a God Damn hole in the game room floo…” I stopped him there. I had never really gotten over my annoyance at being, from my perspective, unjustly blamed for the incident. I told him the story again from my point of view pointing out that, first of all, he had left the weapon loaded with a live shell and because of the lack of proper information from him, I had no way to predict or prevent what had happened that day and that fortunately, due to his sound teaching, and my diligent adherence to his safety procedures, no real damage was done, and absolutely no injury had occurred. My dad finally conceded, somewhat reluctantly I sensed, that I had been right all along.

The important thing was that together we proved what he had been teaching me and anyone else who would listen, for many years…

A Gun is Always Loaded, Even When it is Not Loaded.

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