Guns and me

Or the true story of how I shot the hole in the piano

When I was growing up In Denver, I was too young to join the Boy Scouts.  They had an organization for boys in Denver that was called the Highlander Boys. They wore uniforms and met once a week and drilled and marched and learned about the military.  As part of the training they had use of the rifle range in the basement of the building that we met in.  I learned to shoot a 22-gauge rifle and we would shoot at paper targets.  I learned to hit the target fairly well. The NRA had a program that would give medals for certain proficiency.  I received the pro-marksman, marksman, marksman first class, and sharpshooter medals.  I used to wear these medals on my Boy Scout merit badge sash.

 

Because I wanted to join the ward scout troop, I quit the Highlanders.  I was still interested in shooting, so I asked for a 22-gauge rifle for Christmas.  We got the gun the Christmas before we moved to Lander.

When we got to Lander we went rabbit hunting with Norbert Ribble, an employee at the weather bureau.  We would go out to Lyons Valley and hunt cottontail rabbits.  We did not have a car and so we had to depend on Norbert for transportation.

My father bought a 30-06 hunting rifle when we were in Denver and bought a new stock for it, which he finished himself. He hunted antelope in Wyoming.  After he moved to Lander he would hunt deer, antelope, and elk.

Each year I would buy a fishing license.  In those days one could buy a combined license that would allow fishing, hunting for deer or elk and bear.  I got an elk license one year, but I never killed an elk.  We went hunting above Louis Lake and all I shot was a snowshoe rabbit.

My father wanted to go pheasant hunting one year.  We did not have a shotgun.  Dad's friend Joe Yack had a shotgun.  We arranged to borrow the shotgun from Joe and he brought it to the house the day before we were to go pheasant hunting.

I was sitting on the couch or a chair on the north side of our front room. I took the shotgun in my hands to look at it and to make sure that the gun was not loaded.  This particular gun was a pump action gun.  In order to get a shell in the chamber, one had to pull the pump lever toward the trigger end of the gun and the chamber would open, eject the shell and place a new shell into the chamber.   I checked and there was no shell in the chamber.  As I moved the pump lever back into the locked position, the shotgun discharged firing the shot into the front of the piano.  The safety was on and I did not touch the trigger. 

The piano was on the south wall of the living room up against the wall separating the living room from my parent’s bedroom.   Martell had just walked in front of the piano just before the shotgun discharged.  My mother and my brother Glendon were in the bedroom behind the piano making the bed.

The buckshot from the gun blew a nice round ragged hole in the piano and went through the sounding board of the piano and out the back and through the wall of the bedroom and shot dropped on the floor in front of mother and Glendon.

 

Needless to say, I was upset and did not want to have anything to do with the gun after that experience.  My mother said that we should not reveal this to my father, but wait until a later time.

We went pheasant hunting the next day out behind the State Training School.  There were a lot of pheasants in the fields where they had farmed and left some grain stubble.  Dad was in front and Martell, Glendon and I hung back.  Dad pumped the shotgun and the gun discharged in the same way that it had for me.  Martell said, “That is just what happened to Laurence!”  Fortunately Dad did not hear that and I motioned to Martell to be quiet.

We finally did tell Dad, but he could not be too critical, because the same thing happened to him.  Until we got the piano tuned, the strings that were hit by the shot were out of tune when the keys were hit.  Dad took the gun back to Joe and we never had a shotgun in the house that I remember.

I do not remember what ever happened to the 22-gauge rifle. 

Fortunately, in this instance, no one was hurt or injured except the piano, but they could have been.

As I went through the next years, I saw a number of not so fortunate incidents.  When I was an intern at the Dee hospital, a young man and his sister were frightened when their parents were away and got a rifle from the gun cabinet and it discharged while the young 16 year old boy was holding the gun hitting his sister in the back and leaving her paralyzed. 

I was in the Dee emergency room when they brought in a man who had been deer hunting riding a Tote Goat[1].  A hunter mistook him for a deer and shot him off the machine.  He was hit in the leg and had his femur shattered.  He was fortunate not to have bled to death.

At that time there were more hunters in the field in Utah[2] than there were American infantry soldiers at Omaha beach in Normandy during the D-day invasion[3].  Hunting is a dangerous thing to do even though the hunters are not trying to kill each other.

We did not have a gun in the house after our marriage and after my medical training I never did go hunting. 

I took care of a patient in my practice, who lost his eye sight in one eye by someone shooting at him with a BB gun.  I received a great deal of criticism, when as stake president, I spoke in stake conference about hunting and killing animals after President Kimball gave his conference address on “Don’t kill the little birds”.

There is a great deal of debate at the present time about guns.  We can read about a people in the Book of Mormon who buried their weapons of war.

Perhaps we ought to rely more on the Lord for our defense that the arm of the flesh.

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[1] The Tote Gote is an off-road motorcycle that was produced from 1958 to 1970. It was developed by Ralph Bonham, who is credited with inventing the off-road motorcycle. Bonham created the Tote Gote to relieve the exhaustion of walking through the Utah mountains while hunting. First called the "Mechanical Goat", it was renamed to refer to its ability to "tote" (carry) deer out of the woods while climbing inclines with the skill of a mountain goat.

[2] More than 52,000 hunters expected afield for Utah's most popular hunt (DOWR Utah website).

[3] 43,250 infantry (Wikipedia).