Pocket Pistols

Following the Top New Guns Of 2017, we now have the list of 14 Great Pocket Pistols for Personal Defense.

I’m going to start off with a question: how can a pistol with the following characteristics be called “great”?

The magazine is, of course, a proprietary design, and only certain kinds of ammunition can be used in the BullPup9. If bullets aren’t crimped tightly enough, the extraction of the round from the magazine can mechanically disassemble the round inside the gun. Also, only a limited number of guns are produced by Bond Arms each month.

Forgive me if I shudder at the thought of ammo being pulled apart inside the gun. I’m a huge fan of Bond Arms Derringers — owned one for many years and carried it as a backup with complete confidence — but I can’t help thinking they’ve stepped outside their area of expertise here.

But that’s just an aside. There’s a bigger issue at play, and it’s this.

I see the need for a pocket pistol (or, as we used to call them, “7-11 guns”) — you shove it in your pocket when you’re out running an errand simply because any gun is better than no gun, right?

Well, not exactly. If you peruse the above list of pocket pistols, what will strike you quite forcibly is that they mostly shoot lil’ tiny boolets because if you shoot something manly (i.e. effective), the tiny frames of said guns makes them almost impossible to control with any degree of confidence and therefore of accuracy. I’ve fired enough of the pistols on the list to be pretty sure of my ground on this issue — the little Kel-Tec, for example, is cheap, handy and not too nasty, but at any distance outside halitosis range, you’re almost better off throwing the gun than shooting it.

The guns that look as though they will be effective are, surprise surprise, the ones which are basically shrunken full-size pistols like the Kimber Micro 9 and the Glock 42 — which begs the question, “Why not, then, just carry their slightly-bigger brothers with confidence?”

I don’t like pocket pistols much, and I hate them as a primary self-defense weapon. And yes, I’ve been as guilty as anyone else when sticking a little popgun into my pocket when running out to make an emergency purchase from the liquor store or convenience store, because yes, I too can be lazy.

But it’s a bad habit, and I’ve worked really hard to overcome it over the years. Now, in those circumstances, I forget the pocket pistol and go instead with my backup handgun, a S&W Mod 637 Airweight chambered in .38 Special +P.

A wise man once told me: “If you use a pocket pistol on someone, there’d better be some serious powder burns on his skin afterwards” — in other words, you use it with the muzzle pressed up against his neck or chest before you pull the trigger.

And under those conditions, don’t bother with a pocket pistol shooting its BB +P rounds; use a decent pocket pistol, such as made by the aforementioned Bond Arms, but chambered in something like .357 Magnum, .45 Long Colt or .410ga (the last two, of course, being interchangeable).

If you think of a pocket pistol as being “last-ditch” rather than “primary”, you won’t go wrong, I promise you.

To spell it out: the pocket pistol should be the third gun you carry, rather than the only one — and I would suggest that under those circumstances, you can do a lot better than any of the fourteen listed.

 

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings – 2017 Roundup

Courtesy of some smart guy (sorry, lost track of who you are) comes this excellent summary of over two dozen cases where citizens whacked goblins during 2017.

Feel free to comment on your own favorite, but mine is this one:

A man was shot and killed by his ex-girlfriend after he allegedly threatened her and showed up to her house with an “assault rifle.” The incident occurred in Florida’s Pasco County around 10:30 pm. According to Fox 13 News, law enforcement officials said 45-year-old Frank Harrison had “previously threatened his ex-girlfriend.” When she saw him approaching her home she opened the front door and shot him dead before he could enter.

Preemptive gunfire… hubba hubba.

Fuck Off Granddad, They Explained

As a sexagenarian who has pretty much resigned himself to an employment future which consists of WalMart greeter or Uber driver, I read this little piece (found at Insty’s) with something of a mordant attitude:

A few weeks ago, Verizon placed an ad on Facebook to recruit applicants for a unit focused on financial planning and analysis. The ad showed a smiling, millennial-aged woman seated at a computer and promised that new hires could look forward to a rewarding career in which they would be “more than just a number.”
Some relevant numbers were not immediately evident. The promotion was set to run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36 years old who lived in the nation’s capital, or had recently visited there, and had demonstrated an interest in finance. For a vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people who check Facebook every day, the ad did not exist.

In other words, they’re only interested in hiring younger people — no doubt because inexperienced young people don’t cost as much in salaries as experienced older people who might actually, you know, be productive on Day One.

Fine; it’s their business, let ’em hire who they want. When companies like Verizon discover that their future employees have the loyalty of dockside prostitutes and are not only ignorant of finance beyond their student debt, but insist on being accommodated in all their snowflake demands, the companies deserve everything that happens to them.

Older employees are not only more knowledgeable about the work, they’re also less demanding because they’ve walked this road many times before and understand how the world works.

For myself, I’m perfectly happy to try and find some kind of employment which makes me my own boss — the thought of working for Global MegaCorp Inc., with all its bullshit PC workplace regulations, makes me feel slightly ill. And by the way, Verizon is guilty of a bald-faced fucking lie in the above ad: all their employees below a certain level in the hierarchy are just numbers — witness how layoffs always refer to “headcount” which, lest anyone doesn’t know, is a number.

And just in case anyone from Global MegaCorp / Verizon happens to read this post, allow me to be completely honest with you: go fuck yourself.  I don’t need your pissy little job that badly, even though I could probably do it in my sleep. And frankly, if you don’t hire the best person for the job regardless of age, you’re even bigger fools than I thought you were.

And just FYI: I don’t read Faecesbook anyway.