An item of curiosity...

As a kid, did you grow up around guns?

@NanoRaptor Not sure what the right answer is for me:

I grew up in the countryside in the UK where a lot of farmers had shotguns and people shot pheasants (imagine a bird that is slightly less of a challenging target than a piece of paper), but I want really around them, I just heard shotguns in the distance some mornings.

My school had a range and a cadet force. They had good .22 rifles for the sporting competitions and the cadets had number 8 target rifles (less accurate) and L98s, which are the cadet version of the SA80 converted to be only semi automatic. We couldn’t fire most of the L98s in the range because they could shoot through the wall (and the other side of the wall was the changing room), we had to take a bus to a base to shoot them. We had a couple with conversion kits to fire the .22 ammunition, which also made them fully automatic again. We also had a field day trip where we shot some pistols, .385 carbines, and did some clay pigeon shooting with a shotgun.

I wasn’t bad at them. My team came third nationally the last time I participated, but it got boring after a while: aim, press button, make small hole on far-away thing. Not a huge amount of variation.

Oh, and I had one C64 game with a light gun, where I won a bet at a party that I could overflow the score counter shooting with my left hand while drinking with my right (it took a while, but kind people refilled my glass a couple of times). But the skill there was knowing that the appearance of the targets was very predictable and consistent, rather than aiming accuracy.

@david_chisnall @NanoRaptor that's "yes", waaay more exposure than even my own rural UK childhood