rabbi-tom asked me to tell you guys a dirty story. Well I don't know one off the top of my head, so I'll settle for telling a story about something else of interest to him: Guns.

This is how my brother shot himself --without one.

I have mentioned in previous journals that my brother is one of the most accident-prone people alive. This was particularly true when he was younger. By the age of 6, he had tried to bite off his tongue, stabbed himself in the throat with a toy arrow, cracked his head open, had a fight with a rosebush and lost and scalded himself severely by falling into a hot coffee-pot whilst trying to retrieve some cookies Mom had hidden on top of the refrigerator. I swear to God, if my brother was born forty years later, my parents would be in jail for alleged child abuse because no hospital --today-- would ever believe that a kid could do so much to himself. And my parents never touched that kid. Never. He was just accident-prone.

Anyway, the attitude towards firearms --specifically hunting rifles and shotguns-- was much more relaxed in the 1960s and while my father kept his shotguns in a cabinet, that cabinet was not locked. The idea was, I suppose, that if a burglar did get into the house, Dad would have easy access to a gun so that he would be armed when he confronted them.

There were three problems with this reasoning: One, the gun-cabinet was in the library in the center of the second floor. Nowhere near my parents' bedroom and, therefore, not close to hand. Two, because he had kids --and my brother was so gifted at almost killing himself-- Dad kept the guns unloaded. Three, the only time Dad did catch a burglar on our property (in the garage) he went bolting after the guy empty-handed, without a gun, without a weapon of any kind, in his underwear. Fortunately for Dad, the burglar was a 14-year-old kid who was scared to death when he saw this big, bald dude in his boxers come flying at him. He ran off, leaving behind his bicycle. So we ended-up with the bike and the burglar didn't get anything.

Anyway, Webb knew he was never to touch the guns without Dad's permission. He did not, however, assume that he was also not to touch the shotgun shells stored in the cupboard below the cabinet. So, one day, he helped himself to about a half-dozen of them and took them back to his room.

Webb was about 12 at the time and had that love of explosions and fireworks so prevalent in the male adolescent. He wasn't interested in the shotgun shells as shells. He wanted the cordite propellent. The first thing he did was remove the pellets and their casings from the front of the shells, which exposed the cordite, then he began carefully scraping the cordite out into a paper cup. Exactly what he was going to do with it, I don't know. I think he may have trying to duplicate a trick you saw on a lot of westerns at that time. You know, where they lay out a trail of black powder and light it off. How well this might have worked, I don't know. Webb never got the chance to find out.

You see, he was using a metal dental instrument to scrape out the cordite and when he was just about finished removing said cordite from his third shell, he found that some of it was adhering to the back wall of the brass, in the center, by the firing-pin...

Webb set the back of the brass against his thigh, just behind his knee, and started digging away at it with his metal tool...

Then there was this pop...

I was in my bedroom at the time and recall hearing something that sounded like a single shot from a cap-pistol. This did not alarm me particularly, but the scream that followed about ten seconds later certainly did. You see, when Webb began scratching with his metal tool, he caused a spark, which touched-off the primer in the firing-pin and blew that pin out the the back of the brass into Webb's leg. This stung, certainly, but it wasn't until he saw the blood come coursing down his leg that Webb realized he had injured himself. That's when he started screaming.

Well, this brought everybody running of course. The bleeding was stopped and the wound examined. My father, being a dentist, had some medical training and determined that the injury was not severe. There were only two problems: One, the firing-pin was still in Webb's leg and had to be removed before it caused an infection. Two, although no gun was involved, it was still considered a gunshot wound and would have to be reported to the police if Webb was taken to a hospital.

Webb was in hysterics by this time. He was twelve, he'd been caught doing something stupid and now he was convinced that he was going to be arrested. To keep him calm --and to keep the whole thing "in house" as it were-- Dad took Webb down to his dental office in an attempt to xray Webb's leg and find the pin. Unfortunately, dental xray equipment isn't designed for this and Dad couldn't find the thing. Rather than excavate blindly, Dad dragged Webb, wailing, to the hospital, where the pin was finally removed.

The hospital --of course-- called the police as they were required by law to do. The cop showed up, questioned my brother thoroughly and jotted down notes, all wearing a completely deadpan expression. At the end of the questioning, that cop looked squarely at my brother and asked: "Son, are you ever going to do this again?"

Bawling, my brother replied that no. He was NEVER going do it again!

At which point. the cop snapped his notebook closed, tucked his pen away and said: "I don't think you are, either." After this, he wished my father good night and left.

Naturally, Webb was not arrested and although he went on to be a gun collector and a champion skeet shooter, he has never again shot himself. With a gun or without one.