My mother learned to shoot rifles in her youth, in Girl Scouts; according to family lore, my grandma was distressed at Mom's tomboyish qualities and was very pleased when she announced that she "loved the smell of powder"— only to discover that what pleased her daughter was not a cosmetic, but the smell of gunpowder. In her twenties, she was a nationally ranked markswoman (an amazing woman, she was also a licensed pilot and a historically significant educator, founding the nation's first continuing education program for women at the University of Minnesota in the 1950s).
My father was apparently also a good marksman, although I am uncertain about where he learned to shoot; as the child of Russian Jewish immigrants in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I don't think he had much of a chance for target practice.
I remember BB guns and riflery classes at summer camp, and our house had a couple of rifles and a shotgun parked in a closet. There was a revolver holstered in my father's bureau drawer. Occasionally my brother and I would look at it, but we never took it out. There were far more interesting things in our house, including an assortment of African spears, a batch of Khyber knives, a collection of Eskimo carvings in walrus ivory from when my parents lived in Alaska in the 1950s, as well as a whale oosik, which my brother and I used as a baseball bat for indoor whiffleball. Even in the liberal academic enclave where we grew up, our household was weirder by several quanta of eccentricity.
