So my creative writing teacher gave me this riddle…i am not sure what the answer is…can you help me?
Adults are holding children, waiting their turn. The children are handed (one at a time, usually) to a man, who holds them while a woman shoots them. If the child is crying, the man tries to stop the crying before the child is shot. Why is this happening?
Pictures with Santa.
They’re getting vaccinations?
ETA: Joey P’s answer makes far more sense. 
They’re getting flu shots or something.
That took me about two seconds; I’d guess it’s correct.
Edit: I like Joey’s answer too.
They are getting pictures with Santa.
The woman is a nurse?
i think joey is probably right…well that was helpful…i hate these things…i got a whole 2 sided paper with them.
The Duggars finally snapped.
Weird. I knew this one before I had even read half of it. Could it be because I’m a parent? Or did I just get lucky this time?
-FrL-
That’s a riddle?
I thought it was pretty obvious, too…and I first thought photographer. Who uses the word “shoot” for a vaccine? Shooting up, maybe, but not for giving a kid a vaccine. Santa makes sense–that’s probably why it’s specified as being a man, and not just a person.
I didn’t understand the riddle, or rather why it was a riddle. Given the setting, it didn’t occur to me at first that it could be interpreted as something other than a vaccine shot. :smack:
I interpreted it is using a word that might not be used commonly for something, but would make sense in some sort of way.
But then I don’t use “shoot” for taking pictures either.
Shoot is a derived from the word shot but with different meaning so it would be a play on words associated with a riddle. I thought of the vaccine thing right away but the part where it says the children are usually handed one at a time implies that 2 or more could be handed over. Santa usually gets 1 child but sometimes gets 2. It makes more sense than getting shots because either 1 person is giving shots or more than 1 person is giving shots.
I remember standing in line when I was a kid to get vaccinated and I still have the scar after 45 years.
I remember we used to play with riddles like theses when we were kids on car trips. Everyone had to figure out the riddle by asking yes or no questions:
A man with 53 bicycles is shot dead, why?
Two men are found dead in a cabin in the middle of the woods, how’d they die?
A man turns on his car radio and immediately pulls over to the side of the road to commit suicide, why?
(I never realized how morbid these all were.)
Also that someone is trying to make them stop crying. Doctors don’t give a crap whether babies are crying during shots or not, only if they hold still long enough to get the job done. Different story for pics.
You’re not doing homework here, are you? 
Nowadays these are called lateral thinking puzzles. Googling should turn up a bunch.
It gets worse. After she shoots them, she blows them up and hangs them.
Some of them are cool, like the cabin one…but ones like the radio are kind of a stretch. It’s not like anyone could actually solve them, and they’re so out there that the twist is a bit dumb…