Thinking about Buying Your First Gun Part 4

Now that I have brought up the issue of size you might be wondering what is a good size?
Like a lot of things there is not just one answer, just about every model of handgun is at least a little different in size.

Often pistols are categorized into size classes like Large, Full Size, Mid Sized, Compact and Subcompact, but these terms are used not really standardize like they are with cars. I tend to steer new shooters towards the middle sizes.

In the picture above you can see 3 pistols, the top one is a Smith and Wesson 4506 (45acp)which is on the larger side of standard handguns.
The middle pistol is a Ruger P95 (9mm)which is pretty typical of your average current production 9mm or 40cal.
The Bottoms pistol is a Glock model 27 (40sw)which is consider a compact or subcompact pistol.

New shooters are often concerned about the weight and these days most pistols have frames made out of polymer which has cut down on the heft and the cost. Pistols in general do seem to be a bit on the heavy side to people in the beginning, but it is what it is. If you do choose a 22lr like the Ruger SR22 or the Walther P22 the weight is only 15-17 ounces. Most of your 9mm and 40SW handguns will be 24-30 ounces. There are plenty of compact pistols that start around 17 ounces but as I stated before a compact pistol is probably not the place to start for a new shooter. It seems as though once a new shooter starts practicing and spends some time shooting they don’t really seem to think about the weight much anymore.

This picture is of a Ruger SR22

The other concern some new shooters have is the grip size, people with small hands or short fingers are often wondering if they will have a hard time pulling the trigger. In my experience this tends to not be that much of a problem. For the most part many of the handguns on the market today are well sized for just about all full grown adults. More and more handguns are coming with grips that have changeable parts to make the fit more customizable. If you start out with a 22LR pistol you will find that they tend to have smaller grips then the 9mm/40SW weapons as well.

Here is a little explanation of Calibers or sizes of the bullets. 22LR is the common name for a type of round or bullet formally know as 22 Long Rifle. In spite of its name it is a small round commonly used in handguns as well as rifles. It belongs to a category or bullets known as Rim Fire. The projectile is usually made of lead and measure about 0.22 inches across.

1. .22 LR shot
2. .22 Winchester Magnum Rimmed
3. .25 Automatic Colt Pistol
4. .38 Smith & Wesson
5. .357 Magnum - budprop
6. .357 Maximum - budprop
7. 9mm Luger
8. 9mm Japanese Revolver
9. .40 Smith & Wesson
10. .45 Automatic Colt Pistol - budprop
11. .44 Special - cycle61
12. .44 Magnum
13. .45 Long Colt - budprop
14. .454 Casull - budprop
15. 5.7x33 Johnson Spitfire
16. .25-20 Winchester - budprop
17. 4.6x36mm Hk
18. .223 Remington
19. 5.56x45 NATO
20. .300 Blackout
21. 7.62x39 - budprop
22. 6.5 Grendel
23. .338 Spectre
24. .30-30 Winchester
25. .308 Winchester Accelerator
26. .270 Winchester
27. .416 Barrett
28. .410
29. 20ga
30. 12ga

New Pistol for a New Shooter Part 3

One thing I noticed while standing at a retail counter showing and selling firearms was that people are often drawn to the very small pistols. This has come up in many conversations as well, people talk about derringers and ‘gamblers guns’, ‘belly guns’, ‘pocket pistols’ and so on. I understand the attraction to the small pistols myself but I try to steer new shooters away from firearms like these. In short my reason is that the smaller the pistol the harder it is to shoot. I think most new shooters and perhaps experienced shooters will find small pistols very frustrating and far from ideal for self defense. This diminutive class of weapon does have the advantage of being easier to conceal, lighter weight to carry and are often less expensive but again there isn’t much point in having a gun if you can’t hit your target and hitting a target with a really small pistol can be very difficult. I suppose if you thought you were never going to shoot at something more than five feet away it might work, but I would not want to stake my life on that sort of limitation. I also don’t think it would be much fun recreationally to try hitting targets that close nor would it be an effective way to become a good shooter.

You will notice in the picture above that the sights are so small you can't even see them in this profile shot.

You may notice that small pistols often have very small sights on them. I always say I can shoot any pistol as long as is reliable and it has decent sights, so I put a lot of weight on the sights when it comes to evaluating a pistol. The grip or handle of the small pistols is also rather small and this adds to the challenge of being proficient. Another feature of small handguns that is less obvious at the onset is that they often have very heavy trigger pulls. Since very small firearms are often carried in a pocket rather than a holster they often come with a trigger that is hard to accidentally pull, the easiest way to safeguard against pulling a trigger is to simply make it very hard to pull back. By the way I don’t recommend that anyone carry a pistol in their pocket, I don’t recommend they carry it in anything but a well fitted holster, it is just not safe no matter how experienced you are.

Often times the less expensive to manufacture firearms are not quite as durable.


Not so much now but in past years there were a lot of inexpensive ultra compact pistols on the market. I suppose if that was all you could afford it is better than nothing but I would not recommend them. For one they were not all that reliable and I would not expect them to last very long, if you can’t practice with them then there is a good chance they won't do you much good if you really needed. You are also not going to have much fun at the range target practicing if the weapon is constantly jamming or just plain hard to shoot.

One interesting tidbit that may also encourage you to buy a regular size pistol is this, most people who draw or brandish a pistol in self defense do have to actually fire the weapon to scare off or discourage their assailant. So if you have a really small pistol that someone may not even see or recognize, you may have lost your chance to successfully defend yourself without a fire fight and let us not forget that you are just less likely to hit your target with a small pistol.

Well I hope to have plenty of photos and new links in my post soon.

Buying your first handgun continued. Part 2

I often encourage people to start with a 22lr and I have in fact tried this out with new shooters but lets say you don’t want to buy a 22lr, you want something ‘more powerful’? Well then I would suggest you just buy a 9mm handgun. (9x19mm or 9mm parabellum). Again the reason is economy, there are many fine 9mm available, so many it may be hard to choose and 9mm ammunition is going to be less expensive than 40 cal (SW), 45ACP, 380 acp,32, 38 spcl, 357 magnum etc. Other calibers such as the 45acp and the 40sw (cal) may have more “knockdown” power and are often suggested as superior self defense rounds. I recommend starting with the 9mm because it is more cost effective and more manageable. It does not matter how much knock down power you have if you don’t hit your target, so I think you are better off learning to shoot with the ‘lighter weight’ 9mm. If you are one of those people that tends towards a survivalist mentality or are a self professed ‘prepper’, you might find that after the ‘SHTF’ that there is more 9mm available then the other calibers. 9mm x 19 is very widely used, produced and is less expensive to ‘Stockpile’ should you be planning for disaster preparedness.

One other advantage to 9mm over say 40, 45, and most other rounds is that its smaller size and weight makes it easier to carry. should you need to carry ammunition around with you or store it in a small storage area, you can carry/store more of it. Here in California we are only allowed to buy 10 rnd magazines for semi-automatic weapons, but 9mm handguns often have higher capacities than 40 and 45 caliber weapons. At either end of the spectrum you will find that most 9mm handguns are designed to carry 15-17 rounds in one magazine, where as a 1911 45 acp typically holds 7.

Another notable advantage is the recoil. While the felt recoil of 40 and 45 are not particularly uncomfortable for most it can be a bit of hurdle for new shooters in a couple of ways. The more recoil the more the gun moves around. New shooters may find it more challenging to maintain a consistent grip with the larger recoil. There is also another consideration of the follow up shot. Follow up shots are the shots you take with a weapon after the first shot. After the first shot the muzzle of the end of the barrel where the bullet exits will tend to rise. The shooter must then ‘recover’ their aim. While just about every type of weapon behaves a little different, typically the lighter the round, the less recovery is needed. In self defense the follow up shot is very important. It seems to me that follow up is often not given enough weight when it comes to selecting a firearm. The same argument would apply to a 22lr over a 9mm as it does to a 9mm over a 40cal or a 45.

I have another personal bias I would like to point out for the purposes of purchasing a firearm and that is that I will lean towards buying American made or made in the USA. I figured with our current economics there was no point in buying a foreign made firearm without a compelling reason. I bring this up because I know quite a few people who are out of work, people who are losing their homes and many more who are just plain old struggling to make ends meet. I have heard it said that if each American simply about about 15% more American Made products then it would have a very positive impact on our economy.

Buying American may not be quite as straightforward as you might think. Take for example the Springfield XD series, a very popular handgun as of late. Springfield has produced firearms in the US for many years, the History of the name “Springfield Armory USA” actually takes some explaining that you can read about here and here , but the XD series Pistols are actually made in Croatia. (for those of you new to geography, Croatia is not in the USA). I have nothing against Croatia and I think the XD pistols are good products. On the other hand FN or FNH actually makes a Pistol in the USA. (FNP, FNS)

Another point on firearms from overseas is that unlike the Springfield XD pistols many of them have gotten very expensive. I think this is probably do mostly to the fact that the American Dollar has been losing value compared to other currencies. Your Sig Sauer P200 series and Hk USP pistols have risen from the $600-$700 range to the $900-$1100 range. Sig Sauer does have an American made pistol that is considerably less expensive than its European counterparts. the SP2022 AKA the Sigpro.

Are you thinking about buying your first gun?

I got an early start handling firearms and then I worked in a gun store and a gun factory. I have been a bit of firearms enthusiast for a long time, after decades of being around firearms I have spent a lot of time answering peoples questions of about guns. I figured it only made sense to write down the questions and answers in some form so more people could share the information. I am going to try and focus on the answers where my opinions depart from the traditional or more popular answers. There is plenty of other people out there that write and teach about these subjects and I don’t want to spend too much time saying what has already been said many times over.

I would say the most common question I have been asked is “What gun should I buy?”. There is no perfect answer of course but two of the biggest problems is that there is no end to individual opinions and style/brand loyalty. If you start doing homework you find that there is also no end to the technical minutia. You could spend the rest of your days weighing the details and never really find the ‘Best’ weapon.

To best answer the question of what is the best gun to buy you have to know what you want it for. Typically most people want something for home defense,plinking at the range and something to take with camping and what not. Often a pump shotgun is the first recommendation for home defense but we will get to that later. Most of the time people want a handgun or a handgun makes more sense for their needs so I will start with that.

In times past the discussion would have gone to revolvers vs Semi Automatic pistols. [inset pictures of a revolver and a semi auto.] These days revolvers are less of a contender if for any reason that the price of revolvers has gotten rather high and so has the price of the rounds they fire. The longer I have been discussing firearms with people the more important price has become. Maybe I don’t need to say this but if you have a large budget by all means ignore my low cost bias.

Let me explain that when I talk about keeping costs down I don’t want anyone to do it at the expense of reliability. But here is why cost is important. First of all no matter what you own in the way of a firearm the only way it is of any practical use to you is if can use it well. The only way you will be able to use it well is if you are confident, comfortable and well practiced. In order to get to this place of being proficient you need to shoot quite a bit. When you add the cost of buying a firearm to the cost of buying ammunition you can be looking at a sizable sum for most of us. In general I would say you are better off buying a $500 handgun and $300 worth of ammo rather than a $700 handgun and $100 worth of ammo.

Another reason not to spend too much money on your first handgun is that you can’t really develop a taste for what you like or what suits you until you have had spent some time shooting. I would hate to see someone spend $1000 on a nice Sig Sauer or HK USP and decide they don’t really care for it. While quality handguns often go up in value it could take some time before you could come close to breaking even when you factor in the fact that it is now a used weapon, sales tax, registration fees and the loss you are likely to take on accessories.

Even though 22lr is not a traditional self defense round it still has a lot of upside especially for a new shooter. I think people should consider starting with a quality 22lr handgun because of the lower cost. Currently there are several 22lr handguns around or under $400 and while you will pay around $25-$30 for 50 rnds of 45acp, that same $25-$30 will buy you 500 rnds or more of 22lr.

This is a picture of Ruger MKI 22LR

It is much easier to learn to shoot with a 22lr as well, it is far less intimidating and that helps a new shooter focus and builds confidence in aiming and operating a weapon.
list of American Pistol Manufactures
More later

Cows, Whisky and Corn

Perhaps there is nothing new under the sun except a new audience or a new opportunity for old ideas?

So what is possible when it comes to producing Energy, Food and jobs and keeping money local?

I covered the uses and advantages of alcohol as a fuel in my previous post. So how can it all play out? Lets start with Corn, we all have some idea how much corn is grown in this country and plenty others. So lets say you take the corn or some other grain and ferment it and then distill out the alcohol for fuel. Then what you have left is mash, this mash has a lower carbohydrate content than it did before before fermentation and this actually makes it more suitable as cow food (and other animals). Cows eating distillers mash is not anything new,you can see some of the nutritional data at this link provided.
http://ohioline.osu.edu/as-fact/distillers.html
http://pubstorage.sdstate.edu/AgBio_Publications/articles/ExEx2036.pdf

So we feed the mash to the live stock as part of their diet and naturally they produce waste. One of the qualities of cow manure is that it is actually ideal for producing methane or natural gas. So once again we have an opportunity to recover fuel, but this is a fuel that we already use for heating, cooking, and in vehicles.There is even a proven technology available converts methane into electricity without combustion. link This sort of technology is a good alternative to reducing future electricity costs that can compete quite well with solar and wind.

Once the cow manure is fermented once again and the bacteria has produced the methane the manure is now ready to be used as fertilizer. So it can be used to grow more corn or some other crop.

This cycle may be more expensive or less convenient in some cases then using commercial fertilizers or large industrial production of fuel or crops but it does offer the opportunity to do all these processes on a local level keeping the money local, the regulation local and it also offers better pollution controls.

There are many sources for the ideas in this post, i will add the links in for people to do their own home work. I hope everyone keeps in mind that it is hard to find anyone that we agree with 100%, so don’t be too quick to discount everything based on minor misalignments.

Guys like David Blume have been talking about small scale alcohol production for a long time and he wrote a book that has been kind of the gold standard for a long time.
http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/

Robert Zubrin also has had a lot to say on the subject
http://energyvictory.net/

http://www.waff.com/story/20537445/company-to-create-electricity-using-methane-gas-in-dekalb-co

http://smarterfuelfuture.org/impacts/vehicles-and-small-engines?gclid=CLTl47bE8LQCFUdxQgodb3YARg

Putting Whiskey in Gasoline, E85 and beyond

This blog post is in reference to the email going around about "Warning from AAA" and the Video on Fox,(see video and email below if you didn't already get one in your inbox) I have a lot to say on the subject. I am taking the time to write all this because I hope people will know more about issues like this and have a deeper understanding of the possibilities. There is a lot here that could help our economy and the environment.

Maybe it should go without saying that if you have not modified your vehicle you should run the fuel that the manufacture recommended especially if you expect them to honor a warranty. Most vehicle can be modified to run on just about any percentage of gasoline and alcohol, but that is another story.


Your vehicle can be damaged by running Gasoline that contains more then 10% ethanol (if it is not a flexfuel vehicle or modified), As they mention in the in the video there are Flexfuel vehicle that can run on higher alcohol content (some as high as 50/50 or more).


There is a House bill to set a national standard for cars so in the future they can run on any mixture of Gasoline or Alcohol. (open fuel standards (H.R. 1687))
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Fuel_Standard_Act_of_2011


Gasoline has more chemical Energy then alcohol so most vehicle get more miles per gallon out of gasoline then alcohol and typically more miles per dollar of fuel as well. But you are still only using about 20-30% of the chemical energy in the gasoline.That being said there are some up sides to alcohol. (The most efficient engines only get about 50% efficiency from petroleum, but that is another story as well)


Pure alcohol has a higher Octane rating then Gasoline (typically around 109), so you can run much higher compression, this potentially lets you build an engine that can actually have greater efficiency then gasoline engines in spite of the fact that Gasoline has more chemical energy.


Alcohol is a single chemical, Gasoline contains hundreds of chemicals, so Alcohol can be much easier, less expensive and safer to manufacture, store and has a much, much longer shelf life. You do not need a giant refinery to make alcohol. You wont need different blends for different seasons or different states.


Alcohol is very clean burning, it does not need any emissions controls in order to meet current EPA standards, like catalytic converters and such which actually make combustion engines less efficient. (You motor heads know what I am talking about)


Ethanol is only one of several alcohols that can be used as fuel (methanol, isopropyl etc). These alcohols can be made from lots of different substances from Crops like corn, cow manure, coal, crude oil, lawn clippings etc. I personally don't want to see fuel compete with food on the open market so lets not get focused on just corn. Oddly enough even though we experienced a drought this past year, the U.S. still has a surplus of corn, just like it did the year before. You can make ethanol from other crops like fodder beats, Jerusalem artichokes, Cat tails, Switch grass and on and on.


Alcohol fire are much easier to extinguish then gasoline, if you put water on a gasoline fire you will probably cause it spread that is why fire fighter use chemical extinguishers or foam. You can put alcohol out with water so it is much safer in an accident or to handle in general. You would not need that ridiculous nozzles they put on gas cans if you lawn mower ran on alcohol, which means you would not spill it all over the place.


Alcohol burns much cooler then gasoline, there is a lot of advantages to this when building a vehicle, you don;t need a liquid cooling system which robs power and adds weight to a vehicle which of course just wastes more gasoline and money in building the vehicle like emission devices do.


The problem is trying to burn alcohol in a vehicle designed for gasoline with out modifying it, not that alcohol can't give you good MPG, because it can and you can do it with a simpler more reliable engine.


To me the most important thing is that alcohol does not require any dependence on foreign oil and it is not subject to prices on the world oil market. Alcohol can be made locally, when I say locally, I mean in your town, you don't have to buy or transport stuff all over the place. When you go fill up at the local gas station how much of your money do you think goes to a multinational oil company? How much of each dollar goes over seas? Now if you made alcohol locally your money could stay local. Right now Ethanol is trading at some where around $2 a gallon.


I think the same is true of natural gas or methane, we have an abundance of methane and we can make methane from manure, lawn clippings, garbage, agricultural waste, sewage, etc. Methane has a lot of the advantages that alcohol has and it is far more powerful as a green house gas is then CO2 so why not capture it and use it for energy? Did you ever drive by a water treatment plant, oil refinery, or garbage dump and see one of those giant flames on top of a stack burning off the methane?


Why not keep all that money we spend on imported oil and refining at home in the US, or in our home town? Right now a lot of Gasoline is refined for us in other countries because we are not allowed to build new refineries in the USA, so imagine how much money and energy is spent moving the oil and the gasoline around? Go down to the harbor and see all those enormous tankers full of fuel.


I am a big believer in making things more local, this holds true for Government, Economy, Food and Energy. If we all have good information we can change things like this to our advantage. This is great opportunity to go on an anti big government rant, but I won't.


Here is the link for those of you who want to cut straight to the Video!
VIDEO

This is the email that inspired my response.

"For those of you who do not have 2012 cars or newer please watch this video from Fox Business news-very informative. Donna
If you have cars/trucks, YOU NEED TO WATCH THIS and pass it on to all of your friends.
We ALMOST screwed up a few days ago and came close to using this fuel at a recent fillup.
LOOK CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU PUMP.
Void your warranty!!!! All from our wonderful, benevolent and protective government. If you 've got a car you need to watch this.

Watch this video from Fox Business...if your CAR IS OLDER THAN 2012 you need to AVOID THE NEW E15 GAS that is just starting to show up at gas stations. Most car companies will not honor the warranty on your car if you use this new gas"


This is a response that was forwarded to me after my initial response got forwarded.

To: AC
Thanks for forwarding that piece on alcohol for fuel. I have been researching for two years on this and everything he said is true. The primary reason we have been on gasoline still and for so long is too many politicians own oil stock....or oil company "kick-backs".

One of the best sources of methanol fuel stock for production is overwhelming us in Big Bear. Did you know that a single piece of paper contains 2 liters of hydrogen ? Methanol is the simplest on the hydrocarbon chain at CH3(OH)......notice that the primary element is hydrogen......

Want to know something really cool? Plastics....we all know that they are manufactured from oil (primarily)......the most used today are the Polyethylenes and the Polypropylenes.....more commonly all the plastics we use in food and beverage containers and packaging.....

Here's the cool part.....they can be shredded, cooked (actually distilled) in a kiln (a quality builder can build one for home use) and powered by electricity.......2.2 lbs of plastic yields 1 liter of diesel.....almost pure diesel....purer and with less problems than "McDonald's" french-fry oil.....AND.....(at Bear Valley Electric rates).....can be done for about $1.00 of electricity per GALLON of diesel produced from waste plastic.....AND....if part of the diesel is used to heat the kiln instead of electricity.....then only 20% is needed of the product.....leaving 80% of the produced diesel fuel produced for free!!!

And shredded plastic can actually be bought for about $50 / per ton.....that's enough to produce close to 250 gallons of diesel or only 200 gallons of diesel if the diesel is used to heat the kiln........let's see...I think that equates to about 25 cents / per gallon of diesel fuel.....how much would you like ??

And do you know why you don't hear about this.......???

Same reason as the alcohol fuel issue......

BTW......a small propane tank is perfect for a scaled-down version of this.........

So now you know more of what I do in my spare time.......research first.
From: TF

I was kind of surprised I got a response like this in about 12 hours, I guess there are plenty of people around who are thinking about subjects like this?