One of my very favorite things is a guy who picks up a real gun on the road in the summer when he's 13 or 14 years old. Out of ignorance and fearlessness, he pulls the trigger and no one dies or gets hurt. He thought he had fired an empty gun. Later, when he was thirty or older, he was walking down the road and heard a faint wind behind him. He stopped and turned around and the bullet hit him squarely in the eyebrow.
......
Sure enough, there came that gunshot in that bright sunlight. That gunshot was dull as hell.
--Stevenson, "A Humanoid Blank