Just got back from a day-long basic handgun course. It’s colder than a witch’s tit outside, and it’s actually going to get worse (somehow) over the next couple of days, so I figure I might as well blog while my brain is still defrosted.

Taking up pistol shooting has taught me quite a few interesting things- among them, that while I am at least somewhat competent with a semiautomatic pistol like a Glock 9mm with a .22 conversion kit, or a Springfield Armoury 1911 (great handgun, by the way), I suck at shooting with a revolver and that I need a lot of practise if I’m to get good at this. (Which I fully intend to be.) It also taught me a few other lessons that I think are worth noting down:

1. It’s all about safety. Shooting begins and ends with good behaviour and safe handling of weaponry at all times. When you pick up a gun, you are handling something with lethal potential. It is your responsibility to use it carefully and intelligently. If you are not capable of understanding this, don’t bother learning how to defend yourself, because you’re going to be completely useless to those of us who do want to learn how to do this properly. Just line up with the rest of the sheeple and wait for your government to escort you to your assigned re-education camp.
2. Shooting in real life is nothing like shooting in video games. Yeah, I know, this should be so obvious that I shouldn’t even have to spell it out. I’m sure that if Tam were to read this, she’d laugh her shapely arse off at what I’m writing. But it’s a fact that the youth of today are conditioned to think that shooting at stuff for real is a lot like shooting at stuff in video games. In real life, you have to deal with the weight of the gun, the movement of the target, the recoil and the way your body anticipates that recoil (and messes up your shot as a result), crosswinds, the (lovely) stink of gunpowder, and other people around you. Oh, and you don’t have a targeting reticule in your HUD, and your bullets don’t have hitscan properties. Bottom line: learning how to shoot well is difficult, challenging, and totally bloody well worth it.
3. What you see in movies and on television is completely wrong. How many movies have you seen where the good guy shoots about a thousand bullets in the space of ten minutes? The reality is very different. Guns get very hot, very quickly, especially when fired in full-auto mode. If you were to fire a loaded assault rifle on full auto for more than a few minutes, the gun would get so hot that the barrel would melt. I surrender to no one in my love of the HALO franchise, but I know now that those drawn-out skirmishes with Covenant Grunts and Elites and Flood that chew through 600 rounds of ammo in the space of 20min are complete fiction and will never really happen. And forget about those pitched battles in the “Gears of War” games against Grubs and Lambent Locust; it doesn’t matter how realistic the “cover” system is in those games, you’re still going to get your ass handed to you if you did that in a real live gunfight.
4. Pretty much everything society has ever taught you about guns is wrong. Especially if you grew up in a “right-thinking”, “progressive” milieu like I did. Not all guns are equally deadly. Not all guns are equally accurate. Not all ammunition is the same. Take a .22 round, for instance. That calibre of round is actually pretty harmless, overall- except in the hands of a skilled and talented assassin or sharpshooter. The round is so small that at a range of greater than, say, 20m, you would need to pull off a headshot every time in order to achieve full lethality- though you can do a lot of tissue damage if you hit someone in the right place with such a round. There is also the difference between a .45 and a 9mm round. The former is slower in flight, but delivers much more kinetic energy. The latter is just about the same diameter, but travels much faster and yet delivers far less stopping power. Even if you don’t like guns, there is no reason to think that they are all the same, because they just aren’t. Inform and educate yourself, and then criticise guns and those who own them. Otherwise, you’re just another leftist dolt with more opinions than brains.
5. If you are trained well and carefully, there is no reason to fear the gun in your hand. If you maintain your weapon well, exercise safety best practises every time you step out onto the line, and maintain awareness of yourself and your surroundings, your gun is nothing more than a well-functioning instrument. There is only a finite number of things that can go wrong with it. If you are careful and restrained in your use of that tool, you will have a lot of fun and you will have learned a very useful and important life skill. Do not be afraid of your weapon, but respect it. Accept its limitations and your own. Work within them. Understand your gun, take care of it, and honour it. That respect and honour will be returned to you on the range.
6. Women should learn how to shoot, it’s good for them. And for the rest of us too. The class I was in today had 5 women in it, and they had a very good time. (No young women, sadly; in fact I was the youngest person there.) Women also should not be afraid of the bigger-calibre weapons; most women would in fact be able to handle a 9mm 1911 or a .38 revolver without too many problems. The recoil is just a mechanical property of the gun; don’t be afraid of it, learn to work with it and get used to it.
7. The laws concerning handguns in certain parts of this country are positively insane. The state that I live in is among the top 5 in the country in terms of its utter antipathy towards private and legal ownership of weapons. It’s not as bad as Taxachusetts, Lord be praised, but it’s still pretty rough. Obtaining and keeping a firearm here is unbelievably complicated, as it is throughout most of New England. (It is a source of no small irony and absurdity that the part of the country that spawned the Revolution, is now the most hostile to the very freedoms that the Founders sought to protect.) It was truly bewildering to hear the number of hoops one has to jump through simply to enjoy and exercise the God-given right of self-defence, and everything that entails.
8. Learning how to use a gun is getting more and more difficult. With very, very few exceptions, politicians are morons. They don’t understand guns, they never will, and they will always seek to take them away from you because they don’t understand them. (They’re doing the exact same thing to my industry via regulation right now- they don’t understand exotic derivatives and so they’re trying to regulate them away, but in the process they’re destroying the very industry they sought to protect.) The cost of ammo right now is skyrocketing (there are actual shortages in parts of the country), and police departments everywhere are inundated with all of the new requests for concealed carry and weapons permits. While I am pleased to see that some Americans have suddenly found renewed faith in their Second Amendment rights, I am also rather irritated by the fact that they’re only now discovering that they ought to be worried, and are doing so very little to stop these bastards from stripping them of their rights. After all, you people just re-elected a narcissistic, lazy, whining socialist back into the highest office in the land, despite people like me telling you what a horrible idea that was.
9. Shooting is not just a diversion or a pastime, it’s a valuable life skill that EVERY man should learn. I don’t care if you’ve lived your entire life in an effete suburban community surrounded by rich liberals up in Nyack, NY. (I drove there once. Hilarious place- it’s like Mecca on a postcard for SWPL liberals.) If you want to be good at being a man, being able to defend yourself is absolutely critical. You don’t have to necessarily be marksman-rated with pistols and rifles, and you don’t have to take your Winchester out every hunting season for deer, but you should at least be able to hold a gun without fear, hit something that you’re aiming at, and consider buying yourself a handgun or rifle. I only came to this country a few years ago, and I really wish I’d learned this stuff much earlier in life.
10. You Americans really don’t know how good you’ve got it, even now. I come from a country where even the concept of individual self-defence is something that most people simply don’t understand. My family lives in a country where you cannot own private firearms, at all, unless you buy them and keep them at a licensed gun club (of which there are maybe two in the entire country of 5 million people), and the government tells you when you can use your own legally purchased property. I live in an area where the nearest police station is minutes away and people think, for whatever weird reason, that the police are more or less on their side. All of this leads my liberal family and friends to believe that guns are a barbaric relic of a forgotten time, that civilisation has moved beyond such anachronisms. I’m here to tell you that if you fall into the trap of thinking the same way, you have no one to blame but yourself when the day inevitably comes that your government strips you of whatever few rights you have left. In this country, at least there’s still a debate about gun rights. In most parts of the world, there isn’t even that much- Guns Are Wrong And Evil And That’s The End Of It, as far as most people are concerned. Don’t sacrifice your few remaining freedoms in the name of expediency or charity. Don’t destroy what your fathers left you.