a .22 long rifle semi-automatic rifle
I was thirteen. technically I may have been fourteen, but let's say I was thirteen. crimeney, we were in Albuquerque so I may have been fifteen, but in so many ways, I was thirteen. sad. and I was a city kid. which meant I was gun-stupid. had I been a rural kid, I might have grown up around guns, shot guns since I was nine, received my own gun when I was twelve. I probably wouldn't have cared about guns except if you threatened to take mine away from me.... peace! you didn't. but if I'd been a rural kid, familiar and comfortable with guns, my eyes would have been green, I would have had a bass voice, and hell I might have had a cape that let me fly when I needed to. in other words, who knows what set of circumstances might have collected on me if I had been a rural kid and grown up in this country. but I didn't and I wasn't. I had spent most of ten years in Brasil, been dumped on one aunt in this country, then dumped on a different aunt, one who happened to have time and love to spare, and made me understand "home" for a few days. then my parents collected me and my sister and my brothers and took us to Clovis, New Mexico, then moved us to Albuquerque. I wanted a gun, and when I had one, I wanted another. I think I got the rifle first. I think I had owned and cared for and shot the rifle for nearly a year before I campaigned for and won and got my revolver, a .32 six gun that looked like and was a lady's gun, but I could afford it at a pawn shop. but that's another story. let's get back to my being technically fifteen but thirteen in so many ways, and gun-stupid like most city kids in this country. but not gun-ignorant. oh no! I had read and read and read about guns. yes, almost every adventure story I read had a gun in it, but I mean I had read about guns. I knew about flintlocks and muzzle-loaders and single-shot rifles. I may have known about cap-and-ball revolvers. that is, I had read about them, and memorized selective facts from my reading. I was still gun-stupid. and what I wanted, as you may have guessed, was a carbine, but I had worked and worked and saved and saved, and what I could afford wasn't much. oh god, I must've wanted that gun! everything about it was a compromise! you see, in some ways, I'm a real reactionary. I never have liked fuzzy math, I never have liked fuzzy logic, but about guns, damn! I'm not quite ready to go back to flintlocks, but I see no need for civilians to have Tommy guns. You probably don't know what a Tommy gun is, but it's a fully automatic short-barreled rifle with a circular magazine. it was wonderful for comic books and the FBI, but became a throw-away when people invented modern automatic rifles. I didn't want an automatic rifle, and I don't think they were available to civilians on the white market anyway. I didn't want a bolt-action either, so I convinced myself that the compromise was a semi-automatic. that means you load the rifle, pop the first shell into the chamber, then shoot one bullet at a time, but without having to re-chamber a shell, until the magazine is empty. it would do. (remember: I really wanted a carbine but couldn't afford one.) I wanted a real gun, a .30-06 or a .30-30, but I couldn't afford one. and I knew a boy's beginner gun was usually a .22. Okay, but if I was going to have a semi-automatic, it needed to be a .22 long rifle - the gun needed the extra power to kick back the action and chamber a new shell. so there you were. I bought what I could afford, and I took care of it meticulously. I shot it and shot it and shot it through high school and college, but then I got involved with spacecraft and didn't have time for guns for a while. and I didn't need them either. but damn, I've never lost my appreciation for them. as much as that .22 long rifle semi-automatic rifle wasn't what I wanted, I treasure my memories of it. can still feel how it felt in my hands, against my shoulder. It was a kid's gun, but a good one. especially for someone trying to survive thirteen and maybe even get a little older.
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