What part of simple

do some people fail to understand?

I was on this Internet thread earlier today. Some guy with a college aged female relative wanted to buy her a pistol for self-defense, as she probably does not live in the nicest part of town. The young woman is of legal age to own a firearm and Texas law permits this.

OK, fair enough.

I do not want to argue gun control here, so that’s not the issue at all.

So, being a shooter’s forum, the place is full of shooters, which is to be expected. Now, shooters are shooters and they are generally pretty competent with various types of firearms, in this case we are talking about pistols. Pistols are generally of two types, automatics and revolvers.

Automatics are quite a bit more complex to operate, as there are slides to be racked, magazines to be inserted; safety catches to be operated and in some cases various other mechanical contrivances to be dealt with.

Double action revolvers are a lot easier to operate. The shooter simply aims at the target being engaged and pulls the trigger. There are no safety catches, magazines or anything else to deal with. A double action revolver is simplicity at its finest.

Now gun guys know guns, but we are not talking about buying a pistol for a shooter, we are talking about buying a self-defense pistol for a college age girl. She is probably not going to be able to spend either the money or the time on practicing a whole lot, as ammunition is expensive and college kids are pretty busy. She probably has less than a passing interest in the damned pistol to begin with.

I, being fairly simple minded, suggested a basic revolver for the young lady and it opened quite a can of worms.

Someone took my post out of context and suggested that I was stating that women were stupid, when I never said any such thing. Had I been suggesting a pistol for a college aged young man I would have suggested the same thing.

Why?

Simplicity. I like keeping things simple. The simpler things are, the more likely that it is that they will go as planned.

Lets face it, if the young lady has her apartment broken into in the middle of the night, the last thing she is going to want to do is fumble with safety catches and rack a slide, which requires a certain amount of strength. She is going to want a simple tool that she can pick up and use without having to operate a somewhat complex piece of machinery.

Of course, quite a few of my fellow shooters could not fathom the idea of simplicity and were suggesting the antithesis of simplicity.

While an automatic in the hands of a well-trained person may be a very efficient tool for defense, the trained person sometimes fails to remember that they are trained and that not everyone else is.

You have to put the right tool in the right hands to make things work well.

If a person isn’t trained with a certain piece of equipment, then they are not going to reliably operate it under pressure. Training takes time and dedication and practice.

We are not talking about some Delta Force Commando here that’s going off on a raid to rescue hostages from a gang of die hard terrorists here, we’re talking about some college kid on a very limited budget that is looking for a reliable tool to be used in the unlikely event of a break in.

In a case like the one I have described, the best way to go is generally the simplest.

I suggested the simplest and then the automatic shooters piled on top of me.

I can’t see what part of simple people can’t understand until I look at the time I dealt with a hot rod guy.

I wanted an engine fixed once and played hell trying to get this gear head to replace everything stock. It got so frustrating that I took the job away from him and paid a basic mechanic a small fortune to do the job I wanted.

The hot rod guy just KNEW that he was smarter than the engineers that designed the damned engine and that he could make it run a lot better after repeated explanations that I liked it stock because I wanted durability and economy instead of speed.

It finally occurred to me that this guy had modifications stuck in his head so badly that he was not physically and mentally capable of giving me a simple stock engine.

I guess there are a lot of shooters like that and I probably just better get used to it.

Of course, there were quite a few that understood simplicity and that was a joy to know that there are people like that

A couple of days ago I did a piece on the P-38 can opener, and some of these guys are of the mentality that would require rebuilding a P-38 with a bunch of moving parts, battery packs and computer chips.

It was good to find that there were a few people that understand P-38s and other simple things well enough to leave them alone.




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http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/