Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 November 1884 — How to Handle a Gun. [ARTICLE]

How to Handle a Gun.

The first thing you do when you go out gunning with another boy, is to guard yourself against accident. The best way to do this Ts to shoot the other boy before he has time to loud his gun. Then take both guns to the nearest creek and throw them in. Throw the powder and shot in after them. If you have any matches about your clothes, throw them in also. Then start at once and go home as fast as ever you can. And if you are under 18 years, the chances are, even with these precautions, that you will get both legs and a section of your back filled to the brim with bird shot before you reach home. “How?” Goodness only knows how, my son, I don’t. I have often wondered how it did happen, but I never could ascertain. lam not here to advance ingenious theories, but merely to state cold facts, and I know it to be a solemn truth that a boy, with a single-barrel gun twice as long as himself, can manage to shoot himself in more places at once than a man can do with a sevenshooter revolver. “And am I going to buy you a gun?” Yes, I am; some time in the long vacation when time hangs heavily on my hands, and I think I would enjoy entertaining you by picking shot out of your legs with a nut .pick. “But you will be very careful with it?” So is a woman very careful with an umbrella, my son, and yet science is unable to account for the startling increase of one-eyed men every summer. —Burlington Hawkeye.