Anyway, I e-mailed him back and explained that, a) The squirrels we shoot with BB’s are starving the birds at our feeders, and that they (the squirrels) are increasingly becoming a problem as their population explodes; and, b) We don’t injure the squirrels by shooting them with BB’s; it’s more just a strong nudge for them to get the hell out of our yard. I don’t know what he thought of my response. So far he hasn’t written back. Maybe he’s still numb with shock. If so, I hope he recovers soon.
Dolf seemed especially affected by the “Wild West” notion of somebody plugging away at backyard wildlife with a gun. I admit, sometimes when I lean out of the upstairs window and take a crack at a sneaking seed-stealer down below, I feel as if I should be wearing a huge muumuu and cracked rubber flip-flops and sticking my gun out of the plastic window of a double-wide someplace in the Great American Desert. Only if that were the case, I’d be intending to eat whatever it was I shot. And of course, BB’s don’t kill anything.
There is something to be said for the old cliche “as the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” I grew up in an environment in which guns were tacitly accepted. My dad, for instance, kept his old service revolver in the closet in his bedroom. Maybe once a year he’d take it out, disassemble it, and thoroughly clean it, then carefully put it away again. I never remembered him shooting it, but other relatives told me he had been a first class marksman since he was a little kid.
My dad’s younger brother had a rifle rack in his living room, bristling with rifles, shotguns, and the like. He never shot any of them either (which was probably a good thing, since he wore Coke-bottle glasses), but he was very proud of his collection and insisted on showing it off to any and all visitors.
My great-uncle, on the other hand, came from a generation with vivid memories of Pancho Villa and Billy the Kid. He had an old Smith & Wesson .38 which he never left home without. One thing he enjoyed was setting up targets in my grandmother (his sister)’s backyard...cans, bottles, anything disposable...and spending the morning or afternoon “pluggin’ ‘em.” He gave me my first lessons in target shooting when I was about six. It was a lot of fun, I must admit. I should add that despite his Wild West attitude, he was very conscious of gun safety. He explained from the beginning that I should never point a gun at anyone (because the gun might be loaded), that loaded guns should never be left lying around, that if you had to lay a loaded gun down even just for a moment, you automatically locked the safety in place. I was especially fond of another piece of advice he gave me: “Never shoot anybody just for the hell of it. And if you do have to shoot somebody, for Chrissakes do it right. You don’t want ‘em recoverin’, ‘cause then they’ll talk.” Of course he winked when he told me that.
By the time I was a teenager, the Summer of Love and the Vietnam war had polarized people’s views of firearms. Gun control had become a huge issue. You were either one of Us, or one of Them. I found myself awash in moral ambiguity: on the one hand, I hated aggression, competition, and violence, and participated regularly in anti-war activities; on the other hand, I still enjoyed target practice and, ahem, blowing things up on occasion with explosives. A bit schizo, to say the least. Eventually I got to the point where the pacifist in me won out, although throughout the ‘60s and early ‘70s it was always fun to razz diehard sanctimonious hipsters by cataloguing things I’d shot at and/or blown up.
Today, I don’t own a “real” gun. I lived in Los Angeles too long. There, if you have a gun, you have to be prepared to use it, and if you do use it, you have to be ready and willing to shoot to kill. I may joke around about anarchistic amusements like blowing up abandoned buildings in the desert, but I do not have any desire whatsoever to kill another human being. (Well, there have been times when I did, but I’ve learned to count to 989,980 until the impulse passes.)
Of course we’ve had some amusing moments with the Crossman. From a distance it looks exactly like a long-barreled pistol. We started “Operation Feeder Watch” on New Year’s Day. Around noon Eric was leaning out of the window, aiming at various spots in the yard and adjusting the BB gun. He was still feeling a bit hungover, so every few minutes he’d take a sip of beer. At one point, some middle-aged ladies were strolling by in jogging suits in the arboretum just over the fence from us, and they happened to look up and see this unshaven, wild-haired maniac in the window above, waving what looked like a pistol in one hand and clutching a bottle in the other. They shrieked and took off like -- excuse the pun -- bats out of hell. For a very uneasy hour, we waited for the Black Maria to come roaring down our driveway with full lights and siren, for the ominous crunch of jackboots on the snow, the imperious rap on the door. We had all our alibis lined up like ducks in a row, but as it turned out, we didn’t need them. No cops appeared. Suffice to say, after that we have been punctilious about not sticking the gun out of the window where it can be seen. This is, after all, Setauket. The last time somebody shot a gun in Setauket, it was probably a “Brown Bess” musket. Which is, no doubt, why the squirrels have become such a problem.
It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
