My first .22

If my first .22 had been anything like the rest of my shooting experience, I would now be a tropical fish enthusiast.

If memory serves me, it was a Savage. It was semi-auto. It had a birch stock and the pressed checkering looked like it had been done at home at a kitchen table with a wobbly leg by someone with a severe learning disability and palsy.

My first memory of it was all the years it sat in my Grandfathers closet. I used to ask him about it. He said he had bought it when he first moved into his house to shoot pigeons out of the back bathroom window. However, he had given up. There were just too many. If that was accurate, I figure the purchase date was around 1949, and it had been purchased at the local hardware store in College Hill.

I inherited it along with a handful of other firearms when he died in 1976. I had no interest in shooting. I went off to college with all the guns left at my folks house.

It was not until well after college that I fell in with a bad crew, all much older than me. One was a fireman, an ex-marine armorer that owned a gun store on the side. The other was manic-depressive veteran of The Bulge. The worst of the bunch was the retired gun editor of Gun Dog Magazine.

After a couple years of steady indoctrination into the vast right wing conspiracy, I was invited to go shooting. We all went out to the range, with a staggering array of armament. I went out to the folks and retrieved the Savage, and bought two whole boxes of Winchester Super-X, and a set of muffs.

I was still so fresh and new, I had no clue how pathetic I must have looked, standing there at the firing line. I remember my friends taking good care of me and explaining everything in detail and watching carefully. For the first time, I felt like one of the guys and not just a tag-along.

By the end of the first box, I could sense there was something not quite right. At 50 yards, I could see that. . . well, I was making the dirt fly, but hitting my target was kind of a random thing. A few rounds jammed. Jerry told me to save them and try them again later. I was halfway through the second box when I could not get the rifle to fire. There were no dents in the cartridges. Jerry correctly identified the problem as a broken firing pin. That was it for the day.

I was wracked for days with feelings of inadequacy, and the shame of breaking my Grandfather’s rifle. Bob tried to soften the blow, explaining the Savages were cheap guns, and they often had these problems. That made it worse. How could my Grandfather’s legacy be cheap? He had been an engineer. This could not be! Alas, I was to find out that in one area, Gramps was just a farm boy at heart. His taste in guns left a lot to be desired. It must have been all those years spent reading the Sears Catalog in the out-house.

My first .22 became my first experience with gunsmithing. Jerry gave me the number for Numrich. I called. Got the part shipped, and then went about replacing the firing pin. It was not all that hard to do. Jerry checked my work the next time he was over and pronounced it good enough.

The next trip out, I had two more boxes of Super-X. I don’t think I had gotten more than 10 rounds through it before the firing pin broke again. I was distraught. Bob and Jerry kindly explained that it was just a poor design and suggested I start looking for a new one. Within a month or so, Bob started taking me to the Gun and Nut shows held at the Gardens and I soon had a new Ruger 10-22.

I disassembled the Savage and the parts scattered. I ran into a couple the other day, rummaging at my ‘smithing bench. I keep the stock with a length of plumbing pipe taped to it to demonstrate proper shooting position and carrying methods when I am indoctrinating children into The Conspiracy.

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