Great gun.
Posted on 08/24/2020 7:32:46 PM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
My sister just turned 67 and wants to purchase a pistol for self-defense.
I do not think she has ever fired a weapon before in her life. She is sufficiently concerned about the crap going on that she wants to be able to defend herself. She works in downtown Baltimore and commutes from her home in suburban Maryland between Baltimore, Wash DC, and Annapolis.
What do the FR firearms experts recommend for the pistol, ammunition, and training? How do you evaluate trainers and their training programs? What do you look for?
My wife got her CCW two years ago. My son took her out a few times to the range where for $25 you can try out as many guns as you want.
Then a half-year later we did that again. (She was not all that anxious to purchase anything).
I suppose it was May of this year when she finally figured she should get something. So my son and I went with her and let her shoot what she liked based on her earlier attempts. She didn’t like revolvers (too much of a trigger pull).
There was the S&W easy(?) in 9mm that she was leaning too - but really liked the four .380s that they had. She would go back and forth to the counter “Hey - can I try that S&W again??” She had it narrowed down to two and would go back several times. (The Ruger was too small and difficult to control. I forget the others.)
The two guys at the gun range said to get the one that felt best in her hands and that she was most comfortable to operate. The one guy liked her 1st choice, the other guy preferred her 2nd choice. They both explained why. She shot the other gun better with limited experience, but they told her not to worry about that. Get the gun that feels better, and the accuracy will come with training.
She ended up liking the Sig 238 (of course the most expensive of them!). While she was still in the process of deciding I figured it would be one of the .380s and bought what I thought was plenty of ammo, and hoping she would pick the .380 as supplies were starting to run low.
Looking back I wish that I had bought twice as much ammo. 800 rounds of target and 300 of self defense seemed plenty at the time. Except now most websites show “zero” boxes of either one available. There are a few sites with training ammo at around $1.00 a round! I think I got them at $0.30 per round and her self defense at $0.60 a round.
She’s gone through about 200 rounds of target at the range. I still need to get her out to the gravel pit to try out the defensive rounds in her gun.
200 rounds at the range with no failure to feed or eject. Except when she (or I) put a full magazine into an empty gun with the slide locked back - the slide will come forward part-way and the shell is only half-way in.
There was no problem for about 150 rounds, and then this started to happen. And of course I don’t recall if early on it was racking the round when installing the mag, or if she was hitting the slide release to rack the round??
I’ve searched the net for some clues but so far have come up empty.
Note to her: “Don’t run the gun dry in a gunfight before swapping magazines.” That’s good advice for everyone.
$579 MSRP? $500 +/- over the counter...? It’s been inching up in price.
https://www.luckygunner.com/labs/self-defense-ammo-ballistic-tests/#380ACP
Above is a link to a summary of all of the various trials with the ballistics. The Hornady Critical Defense is a great round.
I went with the Federal HST. Better penetration but less expansion. Either one would ruin a bad guys day if placed (2 to 3 times) in the right spot.
I was watching a video the other night of an active shooter getting shot from 30 feet with an AR-15. (Several shots, not sure how many connected)
After 15 seconds with the cops yelling at him he dropped his rifle. It was another 30 seconds before he dropped to the ground from his wounds. He lasted a little while in the hospital before he died.
https://ammoseek.com/ammo/380-auto
Note to myself primarily. Ammoseek is a website that searches ALL of the websites that sell ammo. Hornady CD is still available at 95 cents a round. 7 to 14 day wait.
Great gun.
“Don’t run the gun dry in a gunfight before swapping magazines.”
Why is that?
That means you have to count the rounds you’ve fired which must be terribly hard to do in a stressful situation.
11 year LEO veteran, pistol instructor for a couple of my units, an armor as well. Second the folks recommending hammerless revolvers I own a number of them as boot guns or back up guns. My favorite is my Ruger LCR in 357 mag. My wife and 85 year old grandmother both carry LCRs we all train the same way light low power 38 spcl wad cutters that I hand load to 700fps for target practice and trigger familiarity. Then loaded with full bore 357 for protection. Just like with hunting when you fire under stressfire conditions you will never notice the additional recoil and after the first shot without hearing protection the noise is also moot all you will hear is the ringing regardless if you are shooting 38 or 357s. For my grandmother we spent every afternoon for a week getting up to speed with the basics of safety, grip, sight picture, then trigger pull. On that note absolutely you need to own snapcaps so the new shooter can dry fire again and again and again until the trigger pull is second nature. Only after 4 days of drills did we go to her land and start shooting at paper and by day 7 she was capable of putting 5 for 5 in a softball sized group at 15 ft which is as far as any self defense shooter really should shoot 21 at most any farther and the argument of immediate life danger starts to be questioned especially in blue a$$ San Antonio or Austin. My wife is a former Lt. In the Army she is frightfully good as a pistol shooter one of many reasons I live by happy wife happy life :-)
My 1911 locks the slide on the last round.
If you’re going there (380 ammo) I’ll plug my own blog where I grabbed those results and 300+ others and churned data. (No monetizing, just hobby)
Nothing shocking (good) but more solid IMO than any one tester and their 5 rounds alone.
https://wereratgames.azurewebsites.net/
I use Ammoseek and gunbot for the calibers that I don’t reload for. Mainly 7.62x39 that I throw at feral hogs with FMJ in steel cases as it’s cheaper to buy bulk Russian ammo than load brass cased 7.62 for the few hundred rounds a year while hog smashing off season. And of course for rimfire 22lr, 17hmr, 22mag due to most WMA lands being shotgun and rimfire only near DFW.
Gunbot is as good as ammoseek and finds things that ammoseek misses and vice versa.
My wife’s Sig .380 (similar to the 1911 I think) also locks back on the last round. (As does my Springfield XDM).
But when we jam a new mag into the Sig the slide releases, but without enough force to engage the round. Obviously a problem - I’m thinking it is supposed to stay locked back (like my XDM does) until one releases the slide.
To add to my post, women’s needs many times — in spite of the “equality” thing — are very different. My wife is a good example of that.
She’s 5’3” and weighs 103 pounds. She had a very tough time racking the slides on my Glocks, and a hard time with the 14 pound trigger pull of the S&W .38 Airweight I bought her. Another problem with women is concealment. If they have a purse, that part’s easy, but like my wife, many wear close fitting garment like yoga pants and the like, which makes concealment on her person difficult.
While there’s nothing more reliable than a wheel-gun, I wanted to make sure she A. Had enough firepower and not be overwhelming and B. Could operate the gun effectively.
She first carried an M&P Bodyguard .380, but I didn’t like that size round for stopping anyone. To me, a .380 is a shoot-and-scoot gun. Stepping her up to a 9mm would put her in rack-trouble. So after a bit of waiting for the right solution, the M&P Shield 9mm EZ came out which solved many of her problems. It’s small, easy to use, and easy to conceal — in her purse at least. It only took a few trips to the range for her to become comfortable for the increased recoil. Now, she shoots many times better than me with a comparable Glock 19.
Thanks!
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Thanks for nothing! (j/k) After looking at about 8 of the websites, .380 is all gone!
Still -thanks for another site to come back too. I was at the local sporting store and they had perhaps 6 boxes of training rounds at $1 a round. I passed.
I DID pick up a butane gas can (limit 1) for the camp stove. Those are also in low supply due to folks going camping during the Covid shutdown.
yeah - the 5.56 is wounding round... we found that out in Iraq... the M-240, not so much...
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Don’t worry about magazines. Simply having a gun will be enough to deter most problems. And you are correct, counting rounds in a stressful situation is next to impossible. Stick with the Ariweight S&W hammerless revolver model 442. It’s reliable, it’s reasonably accurate, it’s simple, and it’s safe.
I started hunting shortly after I started walking, and I love guns, but if I was in your sisters situation I’d seriously be looking for a different job. Preparing to operate a gun is not the same as preparing to kill someone. Having a gun will not protect someone not prepared to kill and live with the results. If she’s just now looking for a gun it’s unlikely she was ever in the military or a LEO so it not the cure all she thinks it is.
I need a couple of Those ,,
Who makes them,
if you
Please?
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