My son is 9 and we have only recently started shooting, I needed him to be ready, to ask to go. I dont want to force the old mans hobbies on my son, but if he wants to try then by all means lets do it.

I few months back at my fathers we started him out on a 77/22 rifle, a 12 pack of soda was a great way to start the boy out, easy targets that really are fun to shoot.

He took to it well, took time to aim and shot very well we thought. Well a couple sessions have come and gone since then and he has been doing well. He doesn't want to shoot all day, 30 or 40 rounds and he is content, but he still wanted more.

He has been asking about shooting a handgun, I have been cautious to a fault here but I felt it would be best to go slow. So this morning I tell I was going to go shooting today and asked if he wanted to go along. Well after a false start to the outing we headed out to my favorite shooting area with a array of guns to shoot. He started off with my old single shot 22 and was breaking clay pigeons at 25 yards more often than not once he sorted out the sights. But he wanted to try a handgun...

Well a little coaching and he was ready to make the Single Six shoot.

We had dry fired the gun a dozen times and when we were ready a single round was loaded and a clay pigeon was selected at about 7 yards.

Well first shot and he broke the center out of the pigeon! We were both pretty tickled, he shot all in all about 50 rounds through the Single Six and was very safe about the whole process, and he hit more than he missed but we made sure the targets were friendly. We forget how much is going on when we are shooting, seeing it through the eyes of a raw beginner reminds us of this. Small hands and a single action can be a lot to take in but he did very well I thought.

He even wanted to try my 30/30, luckily I had some extremely mild loads of Red Dot and a cast bullet just in case and he shot about 20 of those as well.

Yup he is growing up every day and getting to be a lot of fun, I'm pretty proud of him. He wants to go on a big game hunt this fall and I have a perfect doe mule deer hunt for him to tag along with. Like I said I want his involvement to be his idea, not my idea where it is forced on him. Before you know it he is going to be dragging me out to take him shooting and fishing, and I am looking forwards to every second...