Bulls Eye

Recently I got my first gun, a 315 rifle, no it isn’t for those predators. Its absolutely deadly weapon, I fired it on a wall and it left a 10 inch deep hole, it can be effective up to a 1000 meters. Actually Dad was more keen but since he already has three licenses he could not get another one so I got the license. Yeah in India you have to first get a license to keep a gun. The kind of environment we live in I think one should have something for safety. In our family every one can handle a gun, including the females. With a gun I can go to any place at any time without fear, I have carried a pistol to the University for some time, we got entangled with some bad elements. Either you give in to them, or you stand up. The bad guys too fear for their lives, perhaps more than ordinary people. So when we made it loud and clear that we would not hesitate to kill if any harm came to us they backed off, and we never had any problem since then, if that day we had surrendered it would have been life long bullying.

Fortunately we never had to use a gun, the only place we did was at shooting ranges. Dad won the District Championship a few times, though he never took it seriously as a sport. Once he was dragged to State Championship and without any practice he managed to bag the silver medal in Pistol shooting.

I was involved in shoot out at the District Championship once in a Shot Gun event, it went on and on other events where delayed, finally I lost the first place to the guy from the army. At the School, once the NCC boys where having shooting, with .22 rifles, I wasn’t old enough to be in NCC. I went and pestered the NCC teacher to let me shoot. The event was supervised by two guys from the army. So the teacher asked me to borrow a uniform and use the name Vij, some one who was absent. I was there, 5 shots, each one of them bulls eye, the guys from the Army wanted me to go to Delhi for Republic Day Competition and the teacher was ‘arre yeh kya kiya marwoge mujhe’ (wht did u do u will get me killed) since I wasn’t from the NCC. The high point was when in NCC I used the Light Machine Gun, that was some fun.

But keeping Guns means a lot of responsibility and any one who is short tempered, the kind of people who just loose it, should not keep one. Never ever play the fool with a gun, the saying is, empty guns fire, so pointing a gun towards any one even if we are 100% sure that its empty is a strict no no. While firing a gun lot of things have to be made sure off, especially when it’s a long range weapon like a rifle. I would never fire until I am sure about the final destination of the bullet, it should either head for the sky or the ground or be hitting something which I can see. The angles are very important. Stray bullets have resulted in many accidents. And always keep out from the reach of the children. As a 7-8 year old I almost shot my sister. I picked up the Air Gun, thinking it was empty, aimed towards my sister from a few meters, ‘aaj mai tumhe khatam kar dunga’ and pulled the trigger and it actually fired, thankfully since it was too heavy for me I missed her, it could have been a real disaster, even though an Air Gun but from that close it could have been lethal.