Jul 17, 2012

Not a gunchick

She's a pretty blonde woman. She's married to a close friend. She thought she would feel safer with a handgun in the house.

Up here on the lake she feels secure enough, but she gets nervous in winter when they return to their gracious old neighborhood in the heart of a big city. There, the Vandals aren't far from the gate.

After chatting about it for years, her husband led me to believe that she now definitely wanted a pistol and enough training to use it in an emergency.  He's a veteran hunter but claims he's never fired a handgun. She  has never even held one.

So far it sounds like a routine exercise in introducing a neophyte to the world of practical defensive shooting. Ground School 101 to outline the concepts --, practical, legal, moral. Discussion of the available hardware. Hit a good gun shop to let her handle steel and select a few possibles. Then some range time with a pro who knows what he's doing. (EDIT: I don't mean me.)

It was more complicated because Mrs. Pretty is well into her 80s. She thinks she might not be able to kill and would shoot him in the leg.  This is not a promising student.

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Nevertheless I thought about it for a while, then, when the subject came up again, decided to lend my  smallest DA, a ported Taurus .357 snubby,  on condition that no ammo would be allowed in the same house. She would handle it and dry-fire it for a couple of weeks. The idea was to introduce a bit of reality into whatever mass-media-derived notions she harbored about pistols. Mrs. Pretty's husband, the hunter,  would  "supervise."

It turned out just as we expected, and the lady is no longer interested in late-life  handgun education. Her man returned it to me a few days ago. "She's says it's too heavy but  I think she's just afraid of it."  We agreed that if she had second thoughts down the line -- unlikely --  we'd put something different in her hands, probably a .22 rimfire, K22-ish.

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There's no cosmic lesson here,  but if anyone cared to interpret the exercise as a reason to teach our daughters about shooting, I would be the last to argue,















3 comments:

strandediniowa said...

Sam's mom over at http://truebluesam.blogspot.com/ handles the big iron and she's in her 80's.

Sam and her might have some advice.

Jim said...

I remember that lady and think I wrote some thing about her. She's the woman who stills loads her own .45 Colt for a Black Hawk, right?

strandediniowa said...

I believe that's right, she does like the big guns. She qualified for her permit using the big wheel gun while others brought 22s.

She lives just one county south of me.