My kid packs heat: I taught my 10-year-old to shoot a gun. You should too.

• Author: Tuccille, J.D.
• Position: LIFESTYLE

THERE IS NO greater joy than seeing the wide-eyed look of wonder in a child's face the first time he's successfully shredded a target with a full magazine of hot lead death from a rifle.

My wife and I always intended to teach our son Anthony to shoot. It's a good skill for anybody to add to his personal quiver. If you can shoot, you have a means for putting food on the table in tough times. If you can shoot, you can defend yourself against dangerous animals (javelina and coyote wander our rural Arizona neighborhood, while mountain lion and bear frequent some of our favorite hiking trails) and malicious assailants (if he runs into a gang of tax collectors, is he supposed to beat them with his shoe?). Shooting encourages concentration and develops hand-eye coordination--and enables bonding with friends who have similar interests.

Those friends might include other kids his age in our boomstick-friendly region--but they could also include the nonagenarian rancher and former cop who took a shine to Anthony at a gun show. He'd flown his private plane to town to man his table, but was a bit downcast that his doctor was no longer willing to perform the medical assessment required for him to maintain a pilot's license.

"Maybe I'll just fly anyway," he said. "At my age, what are they going to do to me?"

We saw value in the self-confidence and personal responsibility Anthony would gain from learning to engage in the sport safely. We'd seen him grow and mature through five years (and counting) of Tae Kwon Do and were certain he'd benefit just as much from discovering how to properly handle guns.

But I had told him we'd wait until he wanted to learn, and for years he'd shown little interest.

THEN IN JUNE 2015 I had a fairly serious health scare. Suddenly, it seemed that I might have a limited window of opportunity to transmit my hard-acquired knowledge and skillset--such as it is--to my pre-adolescent kid. So I started pushing to get him ready for life. In between seemingly endless bouts of medical tests, I taught him to bore holes in wood with an eggbeater drill and to drive screws and nails. I shared with him my wisdom (or lack thereof) and insights into the world. I showed him how to do some basic repairs and passed along the secrets of making a campfire.

"I know what you're doing," Wendy, my wife, said to me one day when she had me cornered. "You think you're going to die."

"Maybe," I responded.

As it turned out, I was fine after a period of...