Ralphie checking out his brand new Red Ryder BB gun on Christmas morning

Back in the sixth grade, I had my sights set on a BB gun for Christmas. It didn’t necessarily have to be the Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action, Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle so famously coveted by Ralphie in A Christmas Story; make and model were of no consequence. Besides, that popular holiday film hadn’t even gone into production yet. I just needed something to keep up with my good friend, Dan Rogers, who was already duly armed with a pump-action Daisy. Dan and I spent many of our waking hours (and more than a few of what were supposed to be sleeping hours) exploring the vast (it seemed back then) ravine behind his house, and there were definitely things lurking in the forbidden recesses of that ravine that needed shooting—like old beer cans and…older beer cans. So any time we weren’t building campfires, fighting each other with makeshift quarterstaffs on fallen logs, or detonating firecrackers, we could be found picking cans off any level horizontal surface with BBs MORE