Shooting

I am no hunter or ever belonged to an armed organized crime group but a few times I have shot real guns on a shooting range.
It was fun but I could stop thinking that this little noisy inventions were originally design to kill people among many other living beings. I have an immense respect for these bullet spitting jewels but I doubt I will ever become a fan of this sport.

On the other hand, when I was a kid growing up in Spain, my family owned a compressed air rifle and every summer for many years I spent countless hours shooting all kind of imaginable targets. From standard paper practice targets to almost anything I could reach in my backyard. I used to kill snails, rats, lizards and even bees with those little lead pellets. I loved to punch holes though all sorts of fruits and pop cans. I shot and killed a few little innocent birds and a few ugly sewer rats. I shot and killed dozens of my mom’s plants and flowers. Now I feel so bad about it, how could I be such a cruel kid.

My friend Iker had one of these rifles as well and he and a bunch of my friends used to come over my place and compete for accuracy. After half an hour of contest we couldn’t resist shooting at anything that moved or breathed. Well, except for ourselves thank God.

I remember this one summer afternoon, me and Iker were shooting around when I spotted an enormous snail crawling around the far end of my backyard. We shot it a few times from far away but we missed every time so I decided that the little bugger was not going to escape by any means. Before it could hide from our heavy fire behind some plants, I rushed closer to it and I went onto playing some Dirty Harry by putting the end of my rifle barrel 1 inch from the snail carcass. Then I said the famous Cleant Eastwood line: “make my day!” and shot it point blank with my friend standing two feet

away from the poor helpless victim.
When I shot the poor little bastard, the crawling animal seemed to disappear before our eyes. The snail had disintegrated, vanished into thin air and we just could not believe it. Iker and I stood there perplex for a few instants wondering how the snail could have disappeared like that. I was expecting to make a hole on the carcass and see all the guts pouring out slowly from it but never that perfect disappearing act. What the hell had happened?

Then, I looked closer into my friend’s face and noticed he had little chunks of bugger like material all over it. Then I begun to laugh hysterically at him. The snail had exploded in a million chunks!. My friend picked a sample of this sticky shit and examined. He was so disgusted that he almost puked his guts right then and there.
I was still laughing when Iker pointed at me and began to laugh as well. Shit! my face was full of snail chunks too! argg!. I went running to the bathroom and looked myself in the mirror. My face looked like a battlefield full of chunks of snail everywhere, even inside my eyes!. I was so disgusted that since then I have never shot a living being ever again.