20 Oct 02

From a large gun retailer in the Midwest:

"Today, I had a couple come in the store looking for a concealable handgun that they could both use. The husband wanted something in 40S&W, saying his friends all told him the 9mm was 'largely ineffective.' I asked how many of his friends had ever been in a gunfight.

Of course, none of them had. I said that I was not trying to sell him on one caliber or another, but that, if both he and his wife were going to have to use this gun, both would have to be able to carry and use it comfortably.

I went on to say, 'There are no ineffective calibers, just ineffective shooters.' I indicated that both he and his wife would have to be trained to the point where their personal expertise was sufficient so as to make caliber irrelevant. After that, discussions about caliber would be largely extraneous.

I believe both he and his wife finally began to understand the undertaking they were contemplating. This is a discussion I have will all first-time gun buyers."

Lesson: ALL pistol cartridges are "largely ineffective!" "Effectiveness" comes from the shooter, not the gun.

/John

20 Oct 02

"Unintended consequences?" From an LEO friend in Baltimore.

"Drug dealers here have now realized that police in my city (Baltimore) have begun to enter cartridge cases found at the scene of our (daily) murders here into a state database for comparison. Of course, the effectiveness of this database is highly dubious, but their universal response has nonetheless been to abandon autoloading pistols and instead carry and use revolvers exclusively, so they don't leave cartridge cases at the scene.

The PD, most of whose members don't even remember the "revolver days," has thus had to refamiliarize itself with S&W, Colt, and Ruger revolvers."

Lesson: No matter what laws are passed, criminals will quickly develop ways to work around them, in most cases, with scant inconvenience. Restrictive gun laws thus have no effect on crime, but do have the effect of discouraging gun ownership among noncriminal citizens, which is, of course, their only real purpose.

/John