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December 20, 2016

Daisy, Daisy, Give Your BBs Do! / I'm Half Crazy. All for the Love of You.

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I got a Daisy on my 7th Christmas and gave the exact same one to my son on his 7th and he gave it back to me about 15 years ago and it's sitting in one of my gun cabinets right now waiting for my grand daughter to turn 7.
It still functions perfectly after probably 10,000 BB's shot through it. It's the old skool version, circa 1962, where you twist the end of the barrel revealing the hole on the side. If you try to pour the BB's in they go all over the place. So the best way to load it is to fill your mouth with the BB's then put your mouth on the hole and blow em in there. I was a skinny brat at 7 and lacked the arm strength to cock the thing so my dad showed me how to skrunch my toes up in my shoe, put the end of the barrel on the end of the shoe and use my hand to leverage the lever down to cock it. What my dad DIDN'T tell me, and I learned the hard way was, that you can't fire the Daisy with the lever in the down position like a 'sheen gun. I did and almost broke all the fingers in my right hand as the lever came back up HARD. Yeah, I cried like a gurl baby. Comment Posted by ghostsniper

Posted by gerardvanderleun at December 20, 2016 3:10 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.

Your Say

I did that too. Still have the scar on my index finger. Blood shot all over the place. Never did it again!

Posted by: Stargazer at December 20, 2016 3:19 PM

That boy is proudly holding the exact BB gun I got as a kid about his age. I could not resist the temptation to shoot a window pane at my grand dads place on a house no one lived in. Finaly got that off my conscience!!! Only took around 63 years!

Posted by: Terry at December 20, 2016 3:23 PM

The problem with loading BBs by mouth is that spit-moistened BBs tend to corrode the inner workings of the gun over time -- perhaps less so if you make sure to shoot or remove all the BBs before storing it.

Posted by: Schill MacGuffin at December 20, 2016 3:59 PM

OH!!

My eyes just watered up at the memory of getting smacked in the fingers. Yup, a one-time only learning experience. OWWWW!!!

Posted by: Dave at December 20, 2016 4:03 PM

Don't remember how I did it, but I got a fold of skin on my right hand under that damn lever and ended up with a world-record blood-blister and ho-lee-fuk did it hurt! I was afraid if I told my dad he wouldn't let me use the air rifle for a while, so I told him I hit my hand with a hammer while trying to build a birdhouse or some bullshit. He thought woodworking was the ultimate thing a boy could learn, so that worked like a charm. Until he asked to see the birdhouse.

Posted by: Ray Van Dune at December 20, 2016 5:42 PM

The BB's tend to bridge-up in the magazine of the Daisy so every few shots you end up *dry firing* and thus a good shaking would be necessary.

Back then, in the early 60's, living in a semi rural existence on the outskirts of Gettysburg, and with 4 brothers and sisters younger than me, I sought my solace with Daisy in hand in the deep forest.

When the noise of the litter became too fierce I'd grab the Daisy and my old aluminum canteen full of red kool-aid and head out thru the sticks, and stay out there all day long.

It didn't take long to grow into the Daisy and I was cocking it like a champ, and getting 10 shots a minute out of it. No 2 shots ever traced the same way so accuracy was never an option but the thrill of the hunt was the goal in and of itself.

I only shot 1 living thing with the Daisy, a wild bird, and I lived to regret it. As soon as I seen it fall from the limb I knew something changed in me. I ran to it and stood there and stared at it, and I was not the same. I was still a little kid and it bothered me. A lot.

So in the course of one of these woods excursions I'd go through a couple hundred BB's and lot's of shaking to keep the blood flowing through it. Any moisture that was imparted during the loading was evaporated in no time. Some 54 years later it still works like the day it was born but I wouldn't doubt the bore has been hammered to a larger diameter making it even less accurate than when new.

I keep joking to my wife that I'm going to hang it over the fireplace right under my Granpappy's old 1917 Winchester model 12 12ga shotgun and my did's 1952 Winchester model 71 .348. She still doesn't laugh at that joke.

Posted by: ghostsniper at December 20, 2016 6:37 PM

Mine had a wood stock and grip with a graphic of Red with a lasso. I have no idea what happened to it after I joined the Coast Guard. But the mockingbirds paid a heavy price around my house.

Posted by: Glenn at December 20, 2016 7:02 PM

At least you didn't shoot your eye out.

Posted by: Jewel at December 20, 2016 7:25 PM

I bought mine in 1962. I worked at my dad's new meat market and was paid $2 bucks a week. It cost $9 bucks, a true fortune back then. I paid him $1 buck a week for most of the whole summer and couldn't have it till I paid it off. It was a prize possession for many years.

In my neighborhood a boy graduated to a 22 rifle, then shotguns and finally pistols. Ah, a grand tradition. Neither of my boys ever got past their new Daisy, more interested in video games ( Though I didn't have my first son till I was 40).

Posted by: tonynoboloney at December 20, 2016 10:25 PM

Yeah. And Daisy is still good after all these years for keeping the neighbor's dog off the lawn. (and his pussy kid too) The dog has better manners, doncha know.

Posted by: Vermont Woodchuck at December 21, 2016 8:45 AM

I'll never forget the look on my cousin's face when my mother told him to stop shooting his bbgun at the side of the barn and her friend walked by not knowing he was shooting at the barn and he shot her in the hip. My mother stomped over to my cousin, her nephew, and plucked it out of his hand, turned it around and took it by the barrel and coldly wrapped it around an adjacent tree. I'm not sure if my cousin was more terrified of the act or the murderous look on my mother's face, but his career in shooting people came to an abrupt end.

His parents, upon finding out the reason for the demise of his Daisy, refused to buy him a new one. Today, that would never happen. Today, a parent would have sued my mother.

Posted by: Amazed at December 21, 2016 10:42 AM

I have a picture of me in 1973 on Christmas day shooting my Daisy BB gun in my back yard in Ohio. I'm wearing a NY JETS jacket, some cheap and ugly snow boots and I had some serious hair back then at eight years old. Much of the hair is gone as is that BB gun. It finally gave up the ghost, barely dribbling BBs out the barrel. I spent hours and hours in our family Kansas garden shooting grasshoppers, moths and any other bug that presented themselves as a target. I got good enough to shoot a grasshopper off of on-the-vine vegetables, at least most of the time. Mom cooked a nice large eggplant once, which was a beautiful vegetable... except for one small blemish. She cut it open at dinner and inside was a little brass BB. Sometimes the hostage has to die!

Posted by: Snakepit Kansas at December 21, 2016 5:01 PM

I remember biting down on tiny BB's in the roasted pheasants my mother prepared for Sunday dinner that my dad harvested with his Winchester model 12 shotgun in the depleted corn fields around Gettysburg in the fall. I think I cracked a molar.

Posted by: ghostsniper at December 21, 2016 6:11 PM

At any proper game dinner, there is a side plate to collect those #6 shot that escaped the cleaner's knife during the prep.

We lose those niceties as we lost touch with the field and stream and became more immersed in prepackaged, frozen, sterile food that is stalked across the linoleum sward and shelved gullies.

Posted by: Vermont Woodchuck at December 22, 2016 3:10 PM

I learned a different lesson, you know, the first one, the one that says "all guns are always loaded", courtesy of a Crosman M1 Carbine BB gun. I wanted to feel how hard the blast of air was, so I unloaded the gun (or so I thought), cocked it, put my palm over the muzzle, and pulled the trigger. As everyone reading this knows, there was a BB still in the gun that exited with enough velocity to leave a nice bruise in the middle of my palm. It hurt like hell, but didn't break the skin. Never told my parents, and they never saw the bruise, but I never forgot it, either.

Posted by: waltj at December 23, 2016 7:03 PM

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