The BB gun had a distinctly cheesy appearance that made it unimpressive as a firearm. I found that it was actually more complex to load and use than a real gun. I suppose this is because bullets come with their own method of propulsion, whereas the BB gun owner must use another source of energy to propel the tiny projectile. With this gun, the would-be marksman "pumps" the stock of the barrel to build the air pressure that does the job. Young dudes aspiring to bigger firearms might think it's kind of cool, but in truth, it makes you look less like The Terminator and more like someone inflating a bicycle tire.

In the hollers of Virginia where I grew up, young boys received BB guns almost as soon as they grew hands large enough to hold them. This kept them busy and honed their skills until they were old enough to go deer hunting with the bigger boys. Even older boys held on to their BB guns, for those times outside of hunting season when they were just sitting on a porch and wanted to give a dog or cat a little jolt without really blowing its leg off.

The coolest boys had "air rifles," which drew their power from a canister of compressed air instead of a manual pump. Air rifles threw out pellets with such force that they could really hurt you, as opposed to BBs, which everyone said had no range at all and just stung if fired from any distance. It was a big thing to tell stories of when and where you'd been hit with BBs, customarily those fired by older brothers. I have never been hit by a BB, but I of course lied vigorously and said I 'd been, and that it only stung.

Once or twice, owing to the subtle influence of my environment, I quietly intimated that it would be neato to get a BB gun for Christmas. I didn't want one very much, but I was impressed by the power of the boys who passed time by popping soda cans off a fence. I knew, deep down, that my parents found the whole concept appalling. They had read The Greening of America and moved out to the country to be at one with the land, to raise their kids in the woods. Now all their rural neighbors, those gentle forest folk whose ways their son was learning, demonstrated their deep attachment to nature by shooting at it at every opportunity. My parents were no more likely to yield to my request than they were to give me a stick of dynamite and a box of kitchen matches.

But now, through no effort on my part, I have come to possess a genuine BB gun. I've noticed that life occasionally offers us the chance to return to the dramas of one's childhood and fix the little wrongs that may have accrued back there. For example, I really wanted Operation (the wacky doctor's game) when I was a kid, but never got it. When I was in twelfth grade, we held a Christmas toy drive and someone donated Operation to the cause. I secretly borrowed it for a night and played Operation nonstop until I'd extracted enough funny bones for a lifetime. Then I returned it, having mended forever that little hole in my childhood. Another example is that when I was a kid, my family tended to go to the emergency room with alarming frequency. I have vivid memories of people I cared about being hurt, and feeling my complete powerlessness and inability to comfort them. So now I carry people to safety on the ambulance. Some things take a little longer to get out of one's system.

A few test-firings of the BB gun confirmed my suspicions: this is not the kind of weapon that lends one a sense of dangerous invulnerability. With tremendous aim or rotten luck, I could probably put someone's eye out: a nasty injury, but the outer limits of my potency. It was far from the sense of limitless, seductive power conveyed by real firearms.

Still, the BB gun disturbs me. Even from the corner it suggests the ruthless enthusiasm of youth, a childish desire for destruction that we never fully outgrow. I dislike it because I want to play with it, as I always did, despite everything I have been taught and learned on my own in the intervening years.