In the time since we last talked about the imperative of self defense and agency and getting your shit together you have purchased:
glock 43x
aimpoint COA
surefire XSC
a good quality claw style IWB holster or a phlstr ‘nigma (it’s getting warmer out)
like 2000 rounds of range ammo
eyepro
earpro
and more! (no safety classes)
all on credit hopefully
Since that time about a week ago you’ve practiced your draw from concealment 10,000 times and you’ve dryfired around the house any chance you get and you’ve worked on your meek herbivore grip strength with a gripper made for rock climbers. So you’ve been to the range 3 times in the last week, so you’ve burned through 1000 rounds of 9mm fmj and so you have a few ziplocs of spent brass to show for it. Great! Way to go! Wow! Good job, seriously! I knew you could do it!
You’ve completed the first steps and received your praise and feel more agenic yet a nagging hollow feeling remains. A twinge of lacking persists despite your implicit strappedness, a feeling of inadequacy, a deep yearning for something more.
Am I a shotgun?
You are not a shotgun, you can have a shotgun as a treat but you’re not going to clear your house room by room with a shotgun. You don’t want to put the time and energy into shotgun proficiency and I’m beginning to think you may have been exaggerating a bit, for effect, how much serious consideration you have given to your near-obsessive handgun training mentioned above. Okay we can of course work with this, you’re looking for a simple and robust way to make your domicile defensible from man, beast, or government busybodies. A shotgun is not what you want despite your impassioned retorts (did not read btw), we must cast off the specter of fuddite boomerlore that clouds gundiscourse and grow together toward a brighter gunfuture. You must remember that gunboomers or fudds or neofudds (gen X fudds) have irresponsibly high lead levels in their bloodstreams and are erratic and prediabetic and lived in an age of total hollywood narrative control gunlore and telephone-game information (the viet CONG used the soviet AK-47 because while their guns could shoot OUR [american] bullets the crafty devils knew that if a US SERVICEMAN tried loading one of them c*mmie rounds into his service rifle it would make the gun explode etc etc). We should treat them with patience and grace and smile politely until they waddle back off to the jerky booth but we don’t need to listen to a word they say because they’re WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING and they hoard all the interesting milsurp which will be smugly trash compacted by their bitch wife when they die.
My uncle dad family friend grandpa stepdad said…
We don’t have to listen to old people at all actually we can just not listen to them or interact with them it might actually be in everybody’s best interest if we did this.
The fuddlore is preventing your transmigration from gun owner to firearm acolyte. Boomers love three types of firearms: deer rifles, 28” barrel shotguns, and featherweight .357 magnum revolvers with pink grips. The latter is responsible for more women giving up on guns than any of bloomberg’s nonprofit works. They hate plastic mattel barbie guns, they hate communist USSR soviet guns, and they (bizarrely) hate machineguns unless they own them for investment purposes (NFA items have tremendous YoY growth, forbes did an article about this, treat this as real financial advice).
No, loading a blank followed by rock salt followed by birdshot is not a good or lucid or clever idea this is a lead poisoning truck stop t shirt idea so is just a-rackin’ it for the intimidation factor. If you’re in a situation where you are levelling a gun at someone you should be trying to KILL them otherwise don’t waggle guns around in front of people it’s rude.
bu bu bu bu bu bu bu but he’s a cop! He knows his stuff!
Have you ever (you have not) been to an indoor shooting range and had a glance at the ceiling? If you ever find yourself in such a place, take a look up there. You will find, if the facility is at least a little broken in, at least a few conspicuous holes in the drop-ceiling1 over where you stand. This isn’t a morbid tidbit or non sequitur about gun shop suicides (which do happen), this is evidence that cops train here. I still don’t have a clear answer as to how they manage to do this so consistently, but it’s such a problem that cops have to use clearing traps2 to PROVE they don’t have a round chambered when they leave a firing line. They shoot less per year (on the job, some cops do train on their own and are competent) than your average american and their qualification standards are a joke. More importantly do you really trust cops? Have you seen their aesthetics? Punisher skulls on the truck window, I’m not listening to what that guy has to say.
So what then? Tell me, please!
That emptiness? The void? The pit? The unsated hole in the chest? The twinge at the base of the spine? The gnawing. It comes from a place of contradiction, a secret kept from yourself, that what is known but not acknowledged. You are in denial of course, everyone can tell. It’s true! Say it! Say it!
All handgun calibers are pretty much the same, and they’re all far weaker than the smallest caliber poodle shooter varmint rifle.3 I am, of course, referring to the assault rifle 15 here. The smallest of calibers, the weakest of rifles, somehow so small and wimpy that in some states it’s a crime to hunt deer with it. This is true more or less. As far as modern intermediate rifle cartridges go 5.56x45mm tends to be at the low end of the power scale. The projectile is nominally wider than a .22lr projectile (like the guns children get for Christmas shoot), but it’s much longer and much heavier. I am not turning this into a high school essay don’t worry. It fragments and yaws and does crazy shit to the body if you get it going around 3200 feet per second (like out of God’s intended 20” barrel length), but it’s not a “war crime” or anything. It will not overpenetrate interior walls more than lead buckshot from a shotgun will (your american walls are made of paper and a 9mm FMJ projectile will easily railgun its way through a whole house if it avoids studs). You need no fancy ammo, you need not concern yourself with reloading, you need not be an expert. You need not think about anything at all in fact.
Am I a rifle?
You are a rifle. Have you ever been told you contain multitudes4?
You are rifle, you are handgun and shotgun.
You are carbine and subgun and levergun and puntgun and beltfed
