Four Rules

If you've been around firearms for even a short time you know there are four basic rules of firearms safety.  Here's a particularly catchy way to remember them.  

HT: NAAGA

 

Analysis Paralysis

This article is obviously about radios but the diagnosis and prescriptions are the same for firearms.  Define as well as you can what you want to do with your gun, narrow down available choices online and through friends then head on down to your local gunstore and put you hands on them to find out which one feels best to you.  You'll learn more pertinent information from this exercise than you can from hours of YouTube videos.  Follow your heart. 

HT: The SWLing Post

Laughing Wolf: Thoughts on buying your first gun

Preparedness blogger Laughing Wolf has some good ideas on how to think about things before buying your first weapon.  He uses the term "weapon" a lot as most folks trained by the military do while we suburbanites prefer the term "firearm" or just "gun", but no matter.  Solid information all around.

HT: Instapundit

A Very Lucky Woman

I just shot him out of the house': Woman who never fired her gun before wounds burglar who's now behind bars — and she tells other women to get armed, too

Buying a gun and then sticking it in a drawer for that "just in case" situation is like buying a car but waiting until you have to take someone to the emergency room to figure out how to drive it. Not particularly smart.  Glad she's well and good on her but the obituary pages of newspapers across the country are littered with the stories of people who weren't so lucky.  Just sayin'. 

 

 

Gun Sales still strong

 

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Little guns hurt your hand!

A lot of folks will come into the store with little idea of what kind of gun they want.  Now that's fine of course.  You have to have seen a YouTube video or two to really be an "expert"/sarc. Most of them will want "just something small to start with".  What these folks don't yet realize is that small guns produce more felt recoil and are generally harder to shoot because you can't really get your whole hand on them.  

Recoil is a function of the size of the powder charge in the cartridge (the bang) and the weight it has to move before that bang gets to your hand.  "Felt" or "perceived" recoil is what you feel in your hand.  Any given cartridge, say a 9mm with a 115 grain (weight) bullet goes boom the same way no matter what gun it's properly loaded in.  It follows then that the difference in the recoil you feel is a function of the weight of the gun. Further, that recoil can be spread across a larger or smaller surface of your hand depending on the size of the gun (the gun's grip) and how you lay your hands on it (your grip). Smaller guns, like a Ruger LCP, Smith &Wesson 380 Bodyguard or any small revolver have smaller grips and less weight and will produce a lot more felt recoil than say a 1911 or any 5" barreled Duty gun which are both much bigger and heavier.   

This is important because I've seen folks get one of these smaller guns to learn to shoot with only to be massively turned-off by the recoil.  They'll generally shoot a round or two then put the handgun down on the bench, pack it up and you never see them again. It doesn't have to be that way.  Your handgun-buying experience will always be a choice between a smaller, more concealable gun that takes expertise to shoot well and a larger gun that shoots wonderfully but makes you look and feel like you have a small boulder on your hip.  

It would probably not suprise you to know my solution to this dilemma is to buy one of each.