Listen, I bought this gun because there's a squirrel eating the apples in my apple tree, and even though I'm trying all the non-lethal alternatives I can to dissuade him from encroaching on my food supply, I still maintain a backup plan that, should those fail, I will kill him, Cool-Hand Luke-style, with this gun.
The problem is, I live in a city neighborhood and this gun has a fairly loud report when it fires. First, there's the sound of the hammer hitting and the CO2 discharging. Then, there's the sound of the pellet hitting its target, a quarter-second later. Now, if I do hit the squirrel instead of the practice target I've been shooting at in the back yard, I won't have that second sound to worry about, but the thing there is that the apple tree is in my front yard and a squirrel is a small, moving target. There's a good chance I'll miss it. Then what? Well, best-case scenario, the pellet hits a branch or a cluster of leaves in the tree, and drops before leaving my property. Worst-case, it proceeds past the tree, into the street and hits a cop on patrol, blinding him and resulting in a fatal car-crash into the fire station at the end of my block. I guess there are in-between options but the idea of hitting a cop in the eye with a pellet while trying to protect an apple from a squirrel gives me the heebeejeebees (sp?).
So I wonder if buying this darn gun is going to turn out to be the silver bullet I had hoped for. I wonder if it's even going to be good for anything, in fact, other than shooting at a paper target from my back porch while sipping prodigiously on rye whiskey and singing Tom Waits songs to myself over and over until they morph into silly revenge fantasies wherein I raid that squirrel's den, steal from his cache of nuts and acorns, and laugh as I trot away, firing pellets wildly into the air behind me.