26 Mar 2020
When unpreparedness meets opportunity?
From a gun-retailer in the Midwest:
“Gun ranges, indoor and outdoor, are all closed.
We are sold-out of just about everything that shoots. Even cheap junk that I was embarrassed to have on display is all long-gone!
Only ammunition remaining are a few boxes in obscure calibers.
Side note:
Women who come into our store are solid with their decision to be armed. They are determined and willing to learn.
We do our best to educate them.
Conversely, I have witnessed many men literally tremble and stutter as they handle a gun at the counter, obviously for the first time in their sheltered lives, then bruskly claim they need no advice, nor training.
Some insist that video games have prepared them!
Arrogance, particularly when it has no factual basis, can be fatal!”
Comment: I’m sure those same men think that watching TV police drama has made them experts on our criminal-justice system!
Many, probably most, of the guns currently being acquired in a panic by otherwise “non-gun people” will spend the next twenty years in the boxes they came in, tucked-away in a drawer.
The problem arises when the untrained get an unfamiliar gun in their jittery hands, for whatever reason.
A UD often occurs shortly thereafter!
The majority of these UDs will not result in personal injury. In fact, most will never be reported!
Predictably, the person responsible for the UD will never learn, and his next UD is thus assured!
Of course, the foregoing has always been the case, but it is greatly exacerbated in the wake of our current national crises.
Modern firearms are as “safe” as it is possible to make serious guns, and still have them reasonably functional for that purpose. And, guns that are “inaccessible” have no chance of improving one’s personal security.
There is no “easy answer!”
Right now, opportunities for training are unavailable. Even police are unable to train.
You’re prepared, or you’re not!
“The battle has opened, Gentlemen. It’s too late to change our dispositions.”
Confederate General, Albert S Johnson, at the dawn of the Battle of Shiloh, 6 Apr 1862
/John
