I got mine when I was in third grade. It was a Daisy that was designed to resemble a Winchester lever-action, single shot rifle. It would hold 50 bb’s, and was a rather powerful rifle given that it wasn’t a pump gun. I’m sorry I can’t relate to you the specific model specs or other technical information; it wasn’t terribly important to me at the time.
I recall many long summer days, either solo or with my friends, ranging around our back yards (and sneaking through the neighborhood) shooting things. Most often, we’d set up a bunch of little plastic army men and take long shots. (You can lose a LOT of army men this way.) We’d also make paper targets of various designs and try to cut out the design by shooting along the lines - - this never really worked that well. G.I. Joe took some hits as well, but as he was the full-sized Joe, he didn’t move as much as the little army men when we hit him so he wasn’t a favorite target. Regretfully, I also shot a few birds - - sparrows mostly - - but I always felt so guilty afterwards that I didn’t do it very often. As my dad was retired military and some of my friends’ dads were active military, we never had bb gun wars, although other kids at our elementary school did.
Once, a ricochet came back and caught in the skin of my eyelid. The skin didn’t break, but the velocity of the bb carried it and some skin in a way that they lodged between my eyeball and eye socket. I pulled on my eyelid and the bb came out - - no blood, no major damage to my eye, although I do need a more powerful lens for that eye now that I wear glasses. I waited about ten years before telling mom and dad about that little incident.
In today’s world, I would imagine that four or five boys roaming the neighborhood with bb guns would elicit several calls to 911, but while not commonplace, it was not that unusual when I was a kid in the early 70s.
Another Daisy ranger here. My friend and I also used to set up our vast assortment of army men in a sand pit, along with tonka trucks and stuff and have quite the epic battles. Those were the good ole days:) One day, many years later I pulled it out to relive that fun, and couldn’t figure out how we ever shot those tiny army men. I noticed that I could actually watch the BB as it lobbed through the air. I wound up giving it to my young cousin who, in proud tradition, ran up to his room and came down with a bucket of army men and raced in the backyard to “try it out”
When my brother and I were kids, we never were allowed to even imagine having a BB gun. Mom is a Pediatric RN so naturally were the safest and most boring (bored) kids in town. No BB guns, no slingshots, hell - my brother was 14 before she let him have a skateboard.
When I met my husband (age 27), he showed me a world I had only seen on tv (and in my dreams). A wonderful mythical land where kids get to shoot their BB guns, fire their slingshots, and so many other ‘You’ll put an eye out’ kinds of things. Unbelievable. He taught me to shoot his pump BB rifle. Holy cow, what fun! Look ma, I’m shootin’ stuff!
The next year for Christmas he bought me a Daisy Red Ryder reissue. I am the Annie Oakley of the air rifle world! I love my BB rifle. It has come in so handy, I can’t imagine living without it. Stray dogs, stray cats, possums - all annoying feral critters know to run when they hear the familiar ‘chik-chik’ of me shaking my rifle.
I never shoot anything with the intent to do actual harm. Mostly I use it to keep the local roaming dog pack out of my trash, off my little dog, away from my kids, etc.
And yes, I let my kids shoot it, too. Only when I supervise them, and then only at pop cans or paper targets, but they still get a kick out of it.
I also preferred the Daisy models, even though I also had a pump action BB gun. The Daisy guns always seemed to shoot straighter.
My friends and I used to have BB gun battles on a regular basis. No head shots. No pumping more than once if you had a pump action gun. (The rules were flouted on a regular basis. Amazingly, I still have both my eyes.)
I killed the occasional bird (barn swallows), and also felt really bad about it. My BB gun experiences probably kept me from becoming a hunter. I was just too soft-hearted for it.
Our practice targets were usually army men and bottles. Nothing like the joy of breaking glass from a distance.
I had a daisy bb gun when I was younger. Had occational wars with them, but everyone involved usually brought safety gogles. I used to shoot burnt out light bulbs, made a nice POP when you hit them.
I still have my Daisy 10-pump rifle, complete with a Bushnel scope. The thing’s prolly a good 15 years old. I mostly shot tin cans and caterpillar nests (very tough bastards to puncture). I never killed any animals with it, although I did shoot my sister with it.
[sub](Bad idea. Should not shoot family members. Especially big sisters.)[/sub]
I also knocked a hole in a neighbor’s window. Even after both of these little mistakes, I was allowed to keep the thing. Go figure.
Fond memories. I started with a Daisy lever action gun. Not the Red Ryder model, but one a little bigger and beefie IIRC. Fortunately my dad taught me to use it safely. Lots of happy days plinking with that gun. I graduated to .22s on my grandfather’s ranch in Montana, shooting prairie dogs in the wheat fields and pastures. <wistful sigh>
I still play cowboy, but with real guns now, in SASS competition. We shoot 19th century type rifles, shotguns and pistols, mostly Italian reproductions. desperados That’s me on the left, I compete under the alias Morgan Randall, and my compadre Canada Bill, an expatriate Canuck who fought for the confederates. You’ll have to excuse the Gargoyle shooting glasses. I like to be as period authentic as possible but won’t compromise where safety is concerned. We get a lot of lead splashback and fragments from the steel targets and you can put an eye out with them.
We had an old Daisy of my dad’s, a pump action one, and a bb pistol. Of the three, the pump action was the best. It’s funny that this thread came up, because this weekend I had the urge to find one of them and line up some cans…I used to have really good aim, and I wonder if I still do.
I got my Daisy lever-action when I was 10 and shot the living daylights out of it. Graduated to a Crossman pellet gun when I was 12. My younger brother got his guns at the same times I did. I guess my parents understood the MAD phenomenon since we hardly ever took aim at one another. Had I had mine for a year before he did, I’d have probably had the crap beat out of me by my mother right after she took the gun away from me.
Back in the 1960s, my folks wouldn’t let me have a BB gun but my friends did have em. I was especially good friends with one kid who had an air pistol. Actually, I was mostly friends with this dorky kid BECAUSE he had an air pistol. It could fire BBs or these little cylindrical lead slugs, which packed a lot more punch. It ran off of a little CO2 cylinder so you didn’t have to pump it or anything. Oh man did I want an air pistol like that.
Later on I went to a summer camp that had an actual .22 rifle range and it turned out that I am a crack shot. I got the NRA top marksmanship rating in virtually no time. The camp’s range operator could not believe I could put all 5 shots through the bullseye, he made me do it over and over to prove it.
Now I’m an adult and a pacifist and I have no use for the NRA or weapons of any kind. But I still have occasional fantasies of being on the Olympic rifle team. Or maybe the Biathlon.
I never had a Daisey BB gun, but I used a friend’s any number of times. My first gun was a Crossman 760 pump-gun. Wicked fun! Trouble was, to get to power, you had to really strain at those last few pumps.
I grew up in the 70’s too. I LOVED my Daisy BB Gun. My mother would take my best friend and me to the dump where we had all sorts of stuff to shoot at. (Our local dump wasn’t the organized waste disposal sites that exist today.) Every so often we would go out of town a mile or two and go shooting below “the bridge”.
My favorite thing to shoot was cicadas. When we moved into my parents house in 73, there hundreds of them, the noise was incredably annoying. After several summers of doing nothing all day but shooting them, (id kill 50 or so a day), they became extinct in that yard. To this day, 20 years or so later, they arent any at my parents place. Unfortuneately I don’t still have my Daisy, or the crossman 760 that I got later, but I have an old winchester looking one that my grandfather kept out at his place for the grandkids. I used to sit on his back porch with it whenever I went to visit him, and shoot bees.(I had this thing about killing bugs, apparently). I’m gonna take that one out tonight and teach my son how to shoot it.
I had a Daisy BB-gun, too… I loved it!! I still love it, even though I have no idea where it ended up…
I was a GREAT shot with it! Once, I killed a robin that was sitting in a tree in our neighbor’s yard (maybe 75 yards away… or less, that was a LONG time ago!). When I saw the bird fall, I ran around the barn into the neighbor’s yard to see it, only to be greeted with the sight of the neighbor picking up the dead bird and giving me a withering (and well-deserved) look… I felt like crap!
Both my Dad and my younger brother are avid hunters, and I decided to try it one year when I was in high school… I got a license to hunt doves, and younger brother and I headed out into the corn-fields of SE Pennsylvania to hunt.
We got into position at opposite ends of a field, maybe 100-150 yards apart.
A bird flew between us, and my brother shot at it. He missed, but a few seconds later I heard his bird-shot patter down into the corn-field around me! “You asshole!”, I thought, and raised my gun and fired at him! He fired back… we burned up all of our ammo in a few minutes of firing, grooving on the sound of the bird-shot raining down around us… we didn’t tell our Dad that we used about $20 of ammo shooting at each other across a corn field…
But, what was my point here? I’m not sure… But I’m sure it was well-made:D
I also had a Crossman 760 (high-fives Tranquilis). It’s still at my parents’ house.
It shot pellets and BBs. The pellets were more accurate, but had to be loaded individually. There was a reservoir that held a good number of BBs, which were loaded into the chamber from there.
I got it when I was 9?, 8?, somewhere around there, for Christmas. I would shoot it in our Cincinnati basement with my dad. We hung a red blanket with targets attached to it at one end, and fire from the other. The blanket absorbed the BBs/pellets so they didn’t ricochet. There were a lot of dented quarters around the house thanks to my marksmanship.
When we moved to Georgia, I carried it around the woods and fired at targets. Mostly beer/pop cans and that sort of thing. I shot a lizard once, but I felt bad about it and didn’t do that anymore. You know those little green worms that spin a thread from which they rappel out of trees? I managed to shoot through one of those a few years ago. It took three shots, but the first two were pretty close. I was impressed that I had maintained my BB gun marksmanship.
My younger brother and I each had a Daisy lever action model. We also never shot at each other, but sometimes I shot kinda close to him. Mostly it was cans, army men, trees, whatever stood still long enough to get targeted. One favorite was the neighbor’s junk pile. He seemed to throw away a lot of glass bottles, which we happily shattered into little chunks. We usually had a cat or 2 around, so we didn’t have mice or chipmunks to shoot at. And birds were strictly out of bounds, by order of Mom. We also had packs of pre-teen boys roaming my neighborhood then, armed for bear!
My brother discovered that if you put a small finishing nail in the end of the barrel of an empty gun, and fired it, the nail would go maybe 8-10 feet and stick in something soft, say a cardboard box. We both experimented with this, until the nails slid down the barrel and jammed the mechanism. No more functional BB guns…
