Guns have always attracted me, in my early childhood I gathered alot of toy guns, the ones that only use to make funny noises and the ones known as “water guns” and the ones used to play video games etc. Then as I grew little older I first time saw a man carrying an small air rifle and a board that had several sorts of targets attached to it like balloons, match sticks, buttons, dummy soldiers of 3 inches and needles etc. I came to know that for certain amount of money he’ll let me shoot some pallets at the targets, so I paid him the desired amount. It was my first ever experience of using any gun that actually shoot some projectile, I didn’t had any clue of how it is used. So the man gave me first lesson that was just “align the front sight with rear sight on target and shoot” so I did as told. It was a great experience.
I was 6 or 7 years old then, afterwards I had shot airguns like that several times. As I was young and never found air guns in toy shops or with any other person or child so I thought that may be they are very expensive or so that’s why people done have one. As I entered my teenage I saw an older boy with an airsoft rifle, I was very much attracted to it. I didn’t found it on toy shops initially and believed that perhaps its also very expensive or so. However I suddenly saw it in the shop and inquired its price, too my surprise it wasn’t that expensive so I instantly bought it. I enjoyed shooting it but as I was a child and it was a cheap toy, it broke into two pieces after a week or two. I bought new ones as they broke, they included both airsoft rifle and airsoft pistols.
Finally when I was 13 or 14 I saw an air rifle at an arms dealers shop from display window. On the moment I saw that I started to push my parent to get me one of those, initially they resisted but eventually they gave up and bought me my first ever airgun rifle. It was a local made break barrel, was much bigger then those used by the men to shoot at balloons etc. It was much powerful to handle for a 14 years old boy. As I was in teens and had no sense of proper usage or maintenance the gun suffered alot. Eventually after falling down several times its front sight got disintegrated and wooden frame also broke from one side, making it quite difficult to cock. I went to dealer to inquire the cost to repair it and he was talking about more then 50 % of its sale price. After that I put it into store, got busy with my studies and never looked back on it.
However, now after watching the Olympic airgun competition I once again felt the desire for an air gun. However as I am in last years for education carrier, I decided to wait till my degree completion and started to window shop the air guns available on internet. I was surprised to see the prices of well known international airgun brands i.e. Gamo, Crossman, Diana, Hatsan (average priced between 100 to 300 USD) etc. These were 20 to 40 times the initial price I paid for my local made airgun 10 years back. Then there were precision airgun like feinwerkbau (average priced between 2000 to 4000 USD) used in Olympic competition costing 300 to 500 times.
While window shopping I came across very informative stuff related to air guns that I decided to share through this blog. I’ll hopefully blog about it in my future posts.
airgunstudent 