They shoot kitties, don't they?

VolMom bought her most favored son-in-law a BB gun for Christmas. She tried to make me promise not to tell my brother about this gift, but she'd already bought the thing. There would have been times growing up that VolMom could have made VolBro the happiest boy in the world if only she'd given him a BB gun. Or maybe he would have put his eye out. But my mom was so anti-gun than I'm pretty sure he never even asked for one.

Anyway, the gun was a gift to me too if I could say "Hey, my brother, mom bought my husband a BB gun for Christmas. Something she still wouldn't buy you."

This BB gun is some sort of "safe" version, though - hardly what a boy most desires. For one thing, the safety won't stay off unless you're actively pressing on it. For another, it's battery operated with a constant force of BB expulsion - that means you can't pump it up higher and higher and higher resulting in a more painful shooting experience. And it uses plastic pellets, not those little metal eye poppers.

But it still hurts to be hit by this BB gun. I know this because that's what the Vol-in-Law told me when I shot him.

It sounds like a domestic, I know, but it wasn't. It was a carefully controlled experiment. Kind of like science.

First I put on the ViL's down jacket and had him shoot me in the back. I couldn't really feel the impact, though I kinda felt the fabric move. That was a bit disappointing, given what we had in mind. Then the ViL put on the jacket. Similar experience. Then I tried to convince him to let me shoot him in the chest with only a shirt between him and the plastic pellet. He said no. He did let me shoot him in the butt. Over the pocket, he felt it, but it wasn't painful. Above the pocket he said it stung.

Good.

-0-

We want to use the BB gun to shoot cats. We don't really want to wound them, but we do want to scare the begeezus out of 'em. There are a couple of neighbourhood toms that come into our house, eat our expensive anti-allergy cat food, terrorise and wound our kitties costing us money on vet bills and piss on our stuff. Not acceptable. We've tried locking them out, we've tried squirt guns, yelling and arm-waving.

Now it's time to bring out the small guns.

So far, the Vol-in-Law has managed to wing one of the cats. The result is that the cat does make itself scarce - as in over the garden fence - when he sees us, where before he arrogantly retreated a mere few feet.

That's a start.