Just like everybody, I receive a number of emails that contain either humorous or political comments, cartoons, photos etc. One I received the other day had a picture of a cap gun which had the portion holding the caps open so you could see them. The caption also indicated that the sender could still smell them. As I looked at the photo, I could too. When I was a small lad, I had great fun with my friends in sociable shoot outs. As I think back, it never once made me want a real gun so I could shoot someone. We even played “Cowboys and Indians” which I am certain is not politically correct these days. Heck, even having a cap gun is not politically correct!
I am not even certain that they make cap guns or caps anymore. I imagine somebody does and perhaps if I searched the Internet, I might find one or both.
Actually, I would have to find both since like love and marriage you can’t have one without the other. OK, I am not certain about love and marriage in our modern world, but right now I am more interested in caps and cap guns. The guns didn’t make that much noise, but if you could get a string of small explosions going it was great fun. One time I talked my parents into buying me a Roy Rogers cap gun for my birthday. The unique thing about that pistol was that it had special caps. It was a small round group of six caps. The problem was that you got only six shots before you had to open it and put in a new six cap resupply.
Six caps put you at a disadvantage when you were in a battle to keep the countryside safe from the bad guys. Therefore, I put Roy aside and went back to my multi-shot guy. Besides I saw plenty of Westerns not only with Roy, but Gene Autry, the Durango Kid, Tex Ritter, Sunset Carson, Don “Red” Barry and many more. In every case when their guns were going nobody whether a good guy or a bad guy ever ran out of bullets after six shots. Thus, I saw no good reason why I should either. As I recall a roll of caps had fifty shots, but it has been a very long time since I had my cap guns out so it is possible it was a different number. Regardless, it was tremendous fun.
Now, I am aware that today you should never, never ever give a child a cap gun – assuming that you can find one. However, it is perfectly acceptable to buy them a video game which is usually rife with shooting of a great more magnitude in color with bodies all over the place. In fact, the goal seems to be to slaughter as many of the enemy as you can. Sometimes, the young player may have to start over as he did not advance all the way so he/she has to go back and start blasting away again. I am most likely wrong since I am from an earlier generation and do not understand that holding a gun with caps is much more apt to cause a person to go bad than to indiscriminately shoot the enemy in video games.
Despite that, I would still love to go back and choose up teams of white and black hats and shoot caps at each other. Despite the handicap, I would even be willing to use my Roy Rogers six shooter!
Barry Evans writes about Life in The Villages for Villages-News.com
