.22 Caliber Bullet Story

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The .22 Rifle: The BIGGEST Caliber

by Ron Lupton

As a little boy, I was around rifles and pistols all the time, and my Dad, O. R. 'Jake' Lupton taught me all about the uses and the dangers involved. We shot snakes in the Dismal Swamp. All the time. They were ALL bad, of course, in those days! You could'a asked ANY swamp homemaker or his wife about that! Since I never saw any larger weapons around our house, I knew that .22 was the most lethal thing in existence!

I remember waking up one night from a horrible dream in which I had apparently shot Dad in the back of the mouth with the .22, and he was pointing to the entirely bloodless wound (like a big Swiss cheese hole) and telling me "Don't look at what you've done NOW! Just go get the band-aids!" I remember that dream to this day. It was terrible and traumatizing, and possibly brought on by the training. It was ingrained in me from TENDER times that that 22 caliber tool could Kill A Grown Man. Dead, dead, DEAD.

Dad wasn't a real hunter, but had done his share of it as a backwater swamp boy growing up in Burtonshell, N.C., near Columbia. On a very real, too often true subsistence existence, everybody hunted from time to time. Anybody lucky enough to bag real game would share it with the neighbors up and down the road. Deer, bear, wild hog... it didn't matter. Protein from the store was expensive, when it was available, and generally chickens and their fruit had to suffice on a farm. You didn't eat your own stock any more often than you HAD to.

So, long after there was a need, and out of habit I suppose, Dad taught me to shoot, kill, and EAT... birds! Any size, any variety. We had roast robin on more than one occasion during our hikes in the woods in the early 'fifties. He told me how as a kid he'd trap birds, or shotgun the flocks he'd entice to the farmyard with seed, and how Grandma Spencer would cook them up in a big pot for part of dinner. I didn't find out about cleaning game, though, until the day he let me have a try at a cottontail from the car window with my Uncle Felton's old Harrington-Richardson Sportsman pistol. Right through the eye! Dad was amazed I'd actually hit the thing, and when he cleaned it later, in our Portsmouth back yard, I was amazed. NASTY! STINKY! Green guts, and slime and... Nope. I knew I'd never became a hunter after that. My mom, Jessie, was disgusted, having long sense become very citified.

Dad had to eat that entire bunny by himself, while everybody hovered around him, or glanced at him from the kitchen door. They all shook their heads and 'tsk-tsk'-ed, telling him how dirty it must be, full of microbes, and warning him about 'rabbit fever' and 'hydrophobia'. In typical style, he grinned and kept chewing, and told us how nowadays you just couldn't GET the 'GOOD kind of hydrophobia' he'd eaten so often growing up!

Still, Dad's taste was not his best quality, anyhow. He had to chew EVERYTHING he was going to eventually swallow. Even pills and medicine capsules that would turn anyone else's mouth inside out! He'd make a face, all right, but just keep chewing and hopping around and squinting and grimacing until it was over. Gave us all headaches, just watching him. We kids would even come up missing the Cracker Jacks prizes sometimes when Dad got his huge hands near the box we were working on. Indiscriminate chewing and swallowing! He was a madman with it! Chewing gum had become an American novelty and all the rage when he was a youngster in the Nineteen Teens... and if you couldn't afford the real thing (what dirt poor farm kid COULD?) you tried balls of pine sap resin, just the way Dad suggested I do, at about age seven. I can still taste the poisonous outrage of it in my mouth to this day while Dad shrugged and kept chewing. But I digress...

Dad took a .22 bullet apart one night and showed me the tiny lead point which did the actual killing. "Dangerous." he muttered. Then he poured the powder out of the shell casing into an old spoon and put a match to it. When it flared up, he looked at me and said, "That's the power it uses to kill ya, boy. So you think i what's left is safe NOW?"

I handled the empty shell casing and said that, yes, it looked safe enough now. Then he placed the shell [casing] on a stove coil and turned on the heat. As we hid in the hallway, peeking around the corner, the cap inside went off with a bang, and scared me. "Never, never, NEVER," he said. "A bullet is NEVER safe, and whatever you point a gun at you should be ready to kill. Because it will." And it will!

This safety lesson, bless his heart, from the same fellow who told the ADULT me about the .22 rifle HE'D had growing up! The one he and his brothers and cousins had collectively shared. The rifle with the tiny hole which pierced through the barrel about halfway up. The hole which grabbed a shaving of lead from every bullet which passed through, for years, until it had built up a veritable dam inside that rifle barrel. He'd grin and say, "Funniest thing we ever seen! You could finally put in a bullet, pull the trigger, and kinda watch it come squirtin' out an inch or two long and flippin' over and over until it hit th' target! Gun 'ud kinda... I dunno... WHEEZE, like, when ya shot it, and sling out them bullets. Looked like we was squeezin' out nails!" Yep. This from my safety mentor who had apparently never heard about guns blowing up in folks' faces!

I asked him why he'd never bothered to tell me about this 'extrusion rifle' before. He stared silently at me for awhile, with his jaw drooping. "Ain't YOU th' kid filmed the war movie in high school with real dynamite? An' 'ud build your own rockets with match heads and crap? Try t' set fire to th' neighborhood with 'em? Boy, there wasn't a thing in this WORLD I could'a taught YOU about stuff like that."

Hmmph! I was somehow... offended by this lack of trust! Also, by the time he DID finally tell me about it, see, I had two little boys, too, and I knew they'd be watching, if I ever wanted to try to...

But I digress again. Growing up in Tidewater I longed for the Wild West of Arizona, and Utah and New Mexico. Too cool for school! We ALL wanted to be Roy Rogers and Cisco. Real guns and real bullets and dangerous, heroic fellows! But now I AM out here in the real Wild West. In Colorado. Going on fifty years later. And thinking back, and knowing what I know now, I realize all those guys, Tom Mix and Rocky Lane and Tim Holt, didn't have a thing on me, after all! Because when I fell asleep at night in my house in Portsmouth, downstairs somewhere was the Biggest Gun in the World, and in the next room was the Biggest Man in the World...

...and me? I knew 'em both. Personally!

Ron Lupton grew up in southside Virgina, lives in Colorado, and has contributed
several pieces in the THE POOR TOWN NEWS.

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