My "new" addiction

When I was about five or six, my dad bought me a Daisy BB gun. I don't remember the model (not a Red Ryder), but it was a small rifle with a cocking handle that cocked like a lever action, but the cocking arm was contoured into the pistol grip of the rifle. BB's were fed into a side port towards the front of the barrel. Thinking back, it probably launched BB's at around 250 feet per second. It had fixed sights and was quiet. I remember spending hours in the back yard of our house in base housing at Richards Gebaur Air Force Base, shooting a target my mother made by packing brown grocery bags into a large grocery bag and drawing circles on it. I would shoot for hours, standing about 10-15 feet away. I can remember that the only way that I could cock it was to hook the stock on my thigh and then pull the cocking handle. Great memories....

When I was 13, my parents bought me a Crosman 2100 pneumatic (pump) rifle for Christmas. The following summer was the '84 Olympics, and I remember watching a story about 10-meter air rifle that lit a fire under me. I measured out 33 feet in my back yard, and I would spend hours shooting at a target attached to hay bales. A year or two later, girls, cars, and school took priority over everything...

In 2003, I saw an ad for Chinese air rifles, and I bought this crappy looking underlever spring-piston air rifle that I really didn't do much with. I would shoot a few pellets out of it from time to time, but that was it. In 2008, I bought a nice looking Crosman air rifle that came with a scope, but I could never get it zeroed in so that it would hold it shots. Out of frustration, the threw the Crosman rifle in a closet and forgot about it.

About a year ago, I saw an ad for something called a Nitro Piston, and I had some extra cash, so I bought a gas piston air rifle, only this time I did a lot of on-line research. The new rifle was great! I also learned why that Crosman rifle from 2008 wasn't working. From that point, I became addicted to air guns. I have a nice collection of them, now. I have spring piston guns, gas piston guns, CO2 guns, multi-pump guns, and single-stroke pneumatic guns. Men and their toys....