I don't know about those Red Ryder BB guns, but my old single shot, hand pump style pellet gun used to work great for shooting flies inside the house. It worked much better than a fly swatter. Fly swatters have two drawbacks. One is that flies quickly learn to avoid them. In many cases, it's hard to sneak up on a fly with a swatter in your hand. Get anywhere close and it'll fly out of range. The pellet gun, however, didn't seem to scare the flies. I usually could put the gun's muzzle within an inch or two of the fly without scaring the fly away. At that range its hard to miss!
The other big advantage of the pellet gun over a fly swatter was that there was less mess to clean up afterwards. Swat a fly on the wall with a fly swatter, and you'd have a wet blob of gooey fly guts to clean off the wall. The pellet gun, however, would instantly dismember the fly into separate wings, legs, and some relatively solid body parts that would drift through the air and land on the floor, where they could be picked up easily with a vacuum cleaner, leaving no gooey mess. Sure, you say, but what about all those bullet holes in the walls? Aren't they worse than squashed fly guts! The trick is that YOU DON'T PUT ANY PELLET IN THE PELLET GUN. That way you don't shoot holes in anything. When you pump it up and pull the trigger, all that comes out the muzzle is a puff of compressed air. If the muzzle is only an inch or two from the fly, the air blast is sufficient to disintegrate the fly without damaging anything else. Normally, it's not a good idea to fire the gun directly towards the wall, since that would splatter fly guts on the wall almost as bad as a fly swatter. Instead, I'd usually position the gun at an angle nearly parallel to the wall, such that fly parts would fly through the air and drift to the floor instead of splattering on the wall. The same technique also worked well for mosquitoes and small spiders. With small, fragile bugs, the technique often worked best with the gun pumped to only moderate pressure (like maybe 4 pump strokes using a pellet gun designed for a maximum of 6 to 8 strokes). That way the air blast would be sufficient to instantly kill the bug without turning it into a gooey mess that would be harder to clean up. Tougher bugs, such as wasps, were hard to kill with an air blast, even with the gun pumped to its maximum pressure. I killed a few indoor wasps this way, but I don't recommend it, since sometimes the air blast was just enough to put them into a bad mood. For safety, I'd always double check that the gun contained no pellet before using it for indoor bug blasting. First I'd open the action to see visually that it was empty. Then I'd close the action, pump the gun to minimal firing pressure (one or two strokes on that pellet gun), and fire it in a safe direction to be sure there was nothing in it. (At that low pressure, even if a pellet had been left in the gun accidentally, it would have been blown out the barrel at a low enough velocity to cause negligible damage or safety risk when fired in a safe direction.) Finally, when actually firing an air blast at a bug, I'd fire in a safe direction that would not have endangered anyone even if a pellet had been left in the gun. That old pellet gun, which I had had since I was a kid, eventually wore out, but it sure was a useful bug blaster while it lasted. As they say on TV, don't try this at home, kids (at least not while anyone is watching). ;-) Rod -----Original Message----- >From: Andy Gluesenkamp <[email protected]> >Sent: Feb 10, 2011 11:35 AM >To: Bill Bentley <[email protected]>, Fritz Holt <[email protected]>, >"[email protected]" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" ><[email protected]> >Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, Mandy Holt ><[email protected]>, Jenny Holt <[email protected]> >Subject: Re: [Texascavers] Bear Grylls related > >Someone needs to. > >You'll shoot your eye out. > >Fritz Holt <[email protected]> wrote: > >>WATCH OUT! My daughters and I own Red Ryder BB guns. We shoot holes in cans, >>not >>birds or other creatures. >>I am a Bee Gee fan. They make good music. >> >>Fritz --------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
