By Eric S. Caruncho, Staff Writer
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

THE BEATLES’ “I Should Have Known Better” was on the jukebox, so it must have been my tenth birthday when my father gave me a BB rifle.

It was a Daisy pump-action rifle, the kind that you still see in the shooting galleries of small-time traveling fairs, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever possessed. The barrel was gunmetal blue. The plastic stock was grained to look like real wood. It had a magazine that screwed into the muzzle that you loaded the BBs into, and a slide that you pumped to cock the gun, like a real shotgun.

Today, of course, the political correctness police would have freaked at the thought of handing a ten-year-old such a potentially dangerous weapon (not to mention the tacit approval of packing a piece that it implied.) The Daisy wasn’t as powerful as a real air rifle, but it could easily take out an eye if you weren’t careful (and nearly did, but we’re getting ahead of the story.)

In those days, however, it was taken as a matter of course that girls played with dolls and boys with guns.

I had in fact worked up to the Daisy, starting with water pistols, then graduating to cap pistols and toy guns that fired suction tip arrows, then to my first Daisy rifle — the kind that made a loud bang but was otherwise totally harmless, firing no projectiles whatsoever.

The new Daisy was a quantum leap in firepower, however. At close range, it could easily shoot a hole in a tin can. This was definitely not a toy.
I soon grew bored with shooting at paper targets, and moved on to plastic toy soldiers, tin cans and bottles which shattered on impact. Eventually I tried hunting the sparrows that nested in our trees, with little luck. Then the neighbor’s chickens. I massacred dozens of innocent lizards, shooting them down from the ceiling. At dusk I even attempted to shoot down the bats flitting overhead in the fading light.

After a few months of this I got tired of the Daisy and moved on to other pursuits. It languished in my toy chest, or so I thought.

One day, coming home from play, I noticed a commotion at our house. My older cousin, an MD, was tending to our housemaid. She had her blouse open while my cousin picked something out of a bleeding would on her back with tweezers.

Eventually, the commotion died down and I was able to piece together the story. My younger brother, it seems, had gone postal with the Daisy.

His first target was the neighbor’s long-suffering chickens. But apparently, his boredom threshold was way lower than mine, because his next victim was a patient in our mother’s dental clinic waiting to have a tooth pulled. My brother gave him something to take his mind off his toothache. Then he set his sights on the maid. When the irate patient and maid went after him, he prudently dropped the Daisy and took off.

Luckily, no charges were filed. I don’t remember what my brother got when he turned ten, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a Daisy.