The far better choice, particularly for one getting started, is to pick up a solid, double-action .32 revolver. I suggest .32 because it’s a great, gentle caliber that still has decent stopping power, and I suggest a revolver because it’s a lot easier to point/shoot in the heat of the moment than having to worry about whether you’ve racked the slide on a semi-auto. It’s a gun that’s a lot less likely to kill the innocent as well, should you accidentally aim poorly. There are a lot of other factors as well (e.g., penetration depths for typical home construction, better accuracy, etc.), but like I said, you’re welcome to write me should you want to ask any questions.

Oh, and let me congratulate you on your perspicacity in changing your views on the subject. That takes a fair amount of intellectual honesty, something I both respect and find all too rare.

I just talked to my friend in California, the professor at USC, and he says he only uses Jacketed Hollow Points for his .45 caliber 1911. He made the same argument I made. For home defense, you won’t usually find attackers wearing body armor. And if you shoot a wall, a JHP round will not penetrate the wall and hit your neighbor’s house. FMJ rounds are great for target practice, since they seem to be really cheap and plentiful.

You must train yourself and use utmost care. There’s lots of good advice here.

I must admit, I had been handling weapons for 35 years. A church member offered to refinish the stock of my military carbine. He, his wife and baby came over to the house. I removed the clip and handed the weapon to him in the cab of his truck. He immediately checked the chamber (which in my haste I had not done) and he ejected a live round. This was NOT Ymarsakar’s “Magic Trick” but it was for real.

Even though a hardened gun user, I became weak-kneed and just about passed out. What could I say — that was the dumbest thing I could ever do. It was a hard lesson to learn… but I have NEVER repeated it, nor have I forgotten it from 30 years ago. (Nor has my friend).

Train yourself and use utmost care and you won’t be as dumb as ExPreacherman.

Seriously, what kind of an idiot cleans his gun before checking the breech/chamber? Did he just think putting the safety on was enough?

Talk about survival of the fittest. He might as well just play Russian roulette.

You can’t accidentally discharge anything when there are no bullets/rounds in the gun. First safety procedure they teach (maybe the second one even). A good trick to do that is to show someone that you unloaded the gun. Then give him the gun, and wait for him to try poking his eye down the barrel. Then nag him into checking the ammo chamber, and walla, the bullet was still in there. A little magic trick that goes a long way into putting the fear into someone, so that they will always check that the gun is unloaded and no bullet is in the breech/chamber.

I don’t know why Danny didn’t mention on that fact that you NEVER do ANYTHING with a gun, including cleaning it, unless it is empty and there is no round in the chamber. Guns are for shooting things and people, if you want to do anything else with it, make sure there is nothing in it. It takes discipline, but so does making sure you don’t drink water down the wrong tube in your throat.

As for the emotional argument, book, I recommend you read a book by a Colonel, called “On Killing” the psychology of killing. In essence, the calmer you are and the more in control you are of your breathing, the better your decision making process becomes in terms of what to do or kill. Your eyes start tunnel visioning when your blood pressure and heart rate go up, as it would go in a life and death situation, i.e. combat. It is very hard to aim when you can only see like a few inches of a circle in front of you.

There’s no emotion there, and so too with guns.

Emotions and guns don’t mix. Look up Tony martin if you want to see the logical conclusion of “emotions with guns”. But I recognize this philosophy. It is the philosophy that says weapons are killers, rather than people are killers. To me, people are weapons, because the brain is a powerful weapon in its own right. A good brain can beat a piece of metal any time of the year. For an untrained person, a gun is more liable to kill themselves than hit the right target. Because everything has to be filtered through the brain, by training the brain, you get a weapon nobody can take away from you. The mind, the body, and the spirit that is.

A game like quality implies that people have fun and feel emotion with it. The point of training, military training, is to make sure that the brain controls the body, not the other way around. Fear, joy, sadness, terror, these things can be bypassed by the brain or they can bypass the brain and take control of the body. In conclusion, the philosophy I have and most military members have, are diametrically different from that of Democrats. Democrats concentrate on emotion controlling them, I concentrate on controlling emotion.

http://www.blackfive.net/main/2006/07/soldiers_family.html

A soldier’s family was murdered with a knife. 2 women and 2 children. The father was deployed in Iraq, and was just about to return. The women could not over-power the man, and so they died. The story didn’t mention if there was a gun in the house.

Logically, you’re absolutely right, Danny. However, logic has nothing to do with visceral reactions. All of us were raised in and around cars, so familiarity has bred, if not contempt, emotional apathy. Guns, however, have always had a mystique. Even in the old days, before the anti-gun movement, guns had this powerful romance, exemplified nowhere better than in the old Hollywood movies. Guns made the bad guy worse and the hero better. They augmented things, in a way that drips into the psyche.

As I said, Danny, I’ve come around to your way of thinking, but I certainly understand the weird aura that surrounds guns in American society.

Here is a really good insight on guns in our society: http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000013.html.

A decade later, I heard a similar story from the physician who treated the victim. This time, the victim was sitting in his apartment watching TV. In the apartment next door, his neighbor was cleaning a gun. Again, the gun accidentally discharged, the bullet flew through the common wall, and the victim was left brain dead. I heard the story because the physician was telling me about the Mom’s decision to donate her child’s organs.

I was in San Francisco at the time of the 101 California shooting. You may remember that — a crazy guy got himself a big gun, went to a law firm, and started shooting people up. He killed several. Through legal circles, I distantly knew some of the victims. My thoughts at that time were, if guns were illegal, this would never have happened. I’ve since realized, with D.C. and London as examples, that bad guys will always have guns. The damage could not have been prevented, but it could have been lessened if some of the people in the shooting gallery had been able to fight back.

So, my responses are very pragmatic. But as an ex-liberal, I can tell you that guns are evil. They encourage people to kill. They make killing easy. And they make killing clinical. In this regard, it’s akin to the vegetarian argument: Vegetarians always point out that modern society makes meat eating easy, because we have no connection to the living, breathing animal who ends up dead for our gustatory pleasure. To us, meat is just a little slab on a styrofoam plate. There’s no emotion there, and so too with guns. They give killing a game like quality, that’s different from such hands-on methods as strangling and stabbling. And that’s the view from the liberal side.