Should a Coach own a Gun?

By David

I own three guns. I have an old Diana .22. I have a much more powerful ex-army .303 and a pretty basic single barrel shot gun.

The most used and reliable is my .22. My Mum bought it for me in the late 1950s from the Ohakune Dairy Company. I notched the stock to record each animal I killed. I can’t remember the total number of cuts but I do remember passing 1000 sometime around my seventeenth birthday. The primary victims were the region’s wild goats. My domestic chore was to shoot two goats each weekend to feed our dogs.

Strangely my crowning memory of this rifle did not involve killing things. We had just finished Sunday lunch. My mother always cooked a leg of lamb on Sunday and served it with mint sauce, roast potatoes and best of all green peas from our garden. After lunch my father wandered off with his fly rod to spend the afternoon fishing for trout in the Hangaroa River. He seldom caught anything but enjoyed the solitude. An hour or so later I set out to find and shoot two unfortunate goats. As I wandered along, I felt the call of nature and started to pee over a cliff down into the Hangaroa River. Below me I heard a scream, “What the hell are you doing?” I believe the question was rhetorical. You are not going to believe this, but in 25 miles of river bank I chose to pee in exactly the spot occupied by my father. It took me weeks to convince him my aim had not been deliberate.

The .303 is not as well used but did assist in the killing of 30 or 40 deer and about the same number of wild pigs. There could have been many more pigs but knifing them to death was considered a preferable method. It did less damage to the meat and better bled the animal. Occasionally I shot goats with the .303. My Dad did not approve of the .303’s excessive fire power being used on these small animals. I think the more expensive bullets were his main concern.

For years my father would not allow me to use the .303’s magazine. He believed that by having to hand feed each bullet into the gun I would waste less ammunition. Looking back on it, he was probably right. For a short time, after I was allowed a magazine, it was like world war three out there. I did once score a moral victory over my father’s frugal views on ammunition. I shot a goat and walked over to the carcass to find two dead goats lying side by side. My bullet had passed through the neck of one goat and into the chest of another. I still remember shooting my first deer with that gun. A mate of mine, Kahui Duncan, and I fired at about the same time. The deer dropped but we only found one bullet hole. Kahui swears it was his; I know it was mine.

The shot gun is virtually unused. I found sitting for hours, waiting to shoot a duck, pheasant or turkey, boring beyond belief. Besides the hopelessly unsophisticated skill involved in pointing a gun like this in the general direction of a fleeing duck and blasting it out of the sky never appealed to me. The fact the current US Vice President finds it an attractive sport explains a lot about his behavior in Iraq.

When the use of guns has been so much a part of ones early life the thought of using them for anything illicit is abhorrent. A reliable friend of mine told me a story of a swim coach in the Caribbean who got on the wrong side of the island’s drug underworld. Two enforcers turned up at afternoon practice and sat tapping their palms with loaded hand guns. Guns at practice, every mothers dream. I bet no one skipped lengths that day. It is interesting to compare gun statistics between New Zealand and the United States. Internationally New Zealand has a high level of gun ownership. Twenty percent of Kiwi households own a gun; a figure that is beaten out of sight by the forty-one percent of armed US households. There are 0.22 homicide gun deaths per 100,000 people in New Zealand, compared to 6.24 shooting deaths in the United States; 2500% more, not a good figure.

Any of my Florida swim team reading this, need not be concerned. The coach’s arsenal is safely locked away in his mother’s home, 8000 miles away in New Zealand. Happily, there doesn’t seem to be any use for guns in Delray Beach, Florida.