The Man Scout: A family legend, a fortuitous ricochet and a hard lesson in appreciating risks we create

By Chris Cole
Special to NKyTribune

I’ll never forget my first gun. It was beautiful and powerful, and I can still remember how it felt in my hands, the orange plastic grip cool to the touch.

It was Christmas Day of 1985, and I was as happy as any 9-year-old boy could ever be. All the other presents lay in a pile on our living room floor; I was singularly focused on my Nintendo Zapper and ready to play some Duck Hunt.

Looking back, it’s amazing we Cole boys got anything at all for Christmas growing up. We spent much of the year on the naughty list, and to this day I don’t know how our parents still love us.

Case in point: about a year before we got our new Nintendo system, my older brother Billy got a BB gun. I can’t tell you much about the gun itself, other than the fact that it looked like something out of Rambo and was the coolest thing we’d ever seen.

It also wasn’t easy for a kid my age to figure out how to operate. You see, Billy would never let me or my little brother Brent play with it, so one day on the rare occasion when he’d gone outside and left it in his closet, Brent and I took advantage of the opportunity.

We played around with the weapon for a little while and then decided why not try and actually shoot it? So, we searched Billy’s room and finally found a lone lost BB. I’m sure it was indistinguishable from the millions of other tiny steel balls produced each year. But for some reason, in my memory we found a Civil War BB, rusted and green tinged from centuries of oxidation and neglect.

Brent kept an eye out for Billy as I quickly dropped the BB down the only hole I could find in the gun – the barrel. Sure that we’d properly loaded the weapon, I aimed it at a poster hanging on Billy’s wall and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

I pulled it again and still nothing. At that point, I did what any Weren’t No Boy Scout would do – I shook the gun violently and banged the stock against the ground a few times. Surely that’s all it needed to become properly loaded.

Still no success. Brent, who would have been about four years old at the time, grabbed the gun and took a turn trying to figure it out, but to no avail. We quickly grew bored with it and returned the gun to its proper place in Billy’s closet, promising to never tell him we’d played with it.

And that would have probably made for a boring story that you’d have never heard without this next part.

A few hours later, I was laying on my bed wrestling with my G.I. Joe figures when Billy got home. I heard him climb the stairs and go into his room, not giving it much thought.

A few moments later, he appeared in the doorway holding the BB gun and, pretending to be either a cop or a robber, instructed me to freeze. I was in the middle of a big match, so when I didn’t pay Billy much attention, he proceeded to kick open the bathroom door and give Brent the same command.

The next five seconds are an integral part of my family’s history. Every year at Thanksgiving or Christmas – sometimes both – we retell the story and each year it gets a little fuzzier and a little more dramatic.

But the facts as I recall them are these: Brent, who was using the bathroom, yelled for Billy to close the door; Billy aimed the air rifle at Brent and pulled the trigger; that old Civil War BB decided to free itself and hurled across the bathroom, ricocheting off the wall behind Brent and lodging into Brent’s left temple.

I looked up from my wrestling match just as a horrified Billy was dropping the gun to the bathroom floor. At the first sight of blood, Brent started screaming and Billy ran down the stairs and out of the house, a fugitive from justice.

I guess this is as good a time as any to point out the idiocy of what I did that day and thank God that Billy only had a BB gun, had terrible aim and that the BB didn’t blind or kill Brent anyway. Tragedies like that happen all the time, and we are lucky to be able to look back on that day and laugh.

Brent turned out to be OK – the BB didn’t go very deep and didn’t hit anything important (easy for me to say – it wasn’t my temple). Billy ran away for a week, sure that my dad would skip the criminal justice system and take matters into his own hands.

And I learned to stick with Nintendo guns. In fact, I didn’t pick up an actual gun – BB or otherwise – until last winter, 35 years after the infamous “Billy Shot Brent with a BB Gun” incident, when my wife’s uncle took us to a shooting range.

A good Scout understands and respects the risks he creates in this world, whether it’s blade handling, fire safety or abandoning a loaded weapon.

Until next week, stay safe and Do a Good Turn Daily!

Chris Cole is Director of Enterprise Communications at Sanitation District No. 1 and a deacon at Plum Creek Christian Church in Butler. He lives in Highland Heights with his wife, Megan. The Man Scout chronicles Cole’s journey to acquiring some of the skills of the head, the heart and the hand he failed to learn as a child of the 1980s growing up in Newport. His field guide: a 1952 Boy Scouts Handbook he found on eBay.