Les Jones

Guns > The Cube Needs Gun Advice

Cubicle over at Sandcastles and Cubicles is asking for advice on purchasing his (her?) first handgun. Here's the non-gunny part of what I posted in comments. The gunny advice is here.

Whichever gun you choose, take a class in gun handling and shooting. You're pretty much guaranteed to learn something.

If you're buying a gun for defensive use, make sure you know what the legal standard of self-defense is so you don't wind up getting dragged through the legal system, or worse, the penal system. Most people have wrong ideas, and haven't thought it through as much as they should. My ideas have evolved quite a bit after doing some reading.

Massad Ayood writes about self-defense and the law quite a bit, and has testified at a lot of trials as an expert witness. Another good source is Mark Young. As a starter, read this page and this page on the difference between self-defense and fighting.

Someone else I like is John Farnam. I'm considering his class in Atlanta this February. He's a very no-nonsense kind of guy who emphasizes that the best way to win survive a gunfight is to arrange to be somewhere else.