Pennsylvania man, 65, fatally shoots teen who pushed him off bicycle
And why did the teen push the elderly gentleman off his moving bicycle? So the teen and his friends could assault and rob him.
A more apt headline would be “Elderly man saves own life, teaches valuable lesson to local teens”
When looking for a new gun, it’s fairly common to come across the advice of “you should spend a little more and buy x instead of y.” Especially if you’re a new shooter or looking to pick up something outside of your normal field (you’re a rifle guy looking to get into pistols, etc). Sometimes it’s because the firearm in question really is a bad choice, sometimes it’s because the person giving the advice, and sometimes it’s somewhere in between. One thing I’ve noticed is that the person giving the advice often has what I would consider a strange notion of what “a little more” is.
One great example is my first pistol purchase. I wasn’t making huge amounts of money, and I wasn’t real sure I was going to like pistol shooting. So, I didn’t want to brake the bank on something that may collect dust in a drawer. I started looking around and saw that I could a HiPoint 9mm or .40cal for under $200 and, via extensive research, shouldn’t explode in my hands.
One thing I kept reading was “don’t buy that, spend a little more on a Glock, 1911, Sig, Beretta, etc. The cheapest on that list? The Glock at roughly 3 times the amount. I kept being told “oh, you can get one super cheap through police a police trade in, etc,” but I never figured out where this mystical land of half priced slightly used firearms were (and still haven’t).
I ended up finally go down to the local gun shop to buy my HiPoint, with the thought of buying one of their carbines down the road to match (and still spending less than for one “brand name” pistol). Got talking to the guy behind the counter and he told me that I’d probably wear out the HiPoint fairly quickly if I was hitting the range on a regular basis, and that he wanted to show me something.
He pulled out a Bersa Thunder .380. I loved the look and feel of it (instantly recognizing the resemblance to the Walther Bond carried), and it wasn’t dramatically more expensive than the HiPoint. (I think $225 at the time) After more research, I came back and bought it.
That was 7 or 8 years and thousands of rounds ago. The slide release recently became worn down to the point that it needs to be replaced. Oh, and I think I’m more accurate with it than I am with my Berettas, XDm or 1911, and it’s just as reliable.
The point of the story is to consider what the person is looking at already before giving recommendations. Chances are it’s going to be difficult to convince them that it’s worth dropping $600 when they could drop $150 (as was my case). It becomes even more so if they’re looking at dropping $600 and you’re recommending they drop a couple grand (as I’ve seen with rifles and shotguns). On the other hand, from $150 to $225 or $600 to $800 is a lot more likely.
1 injured in East Nashville shooting
East Nashville, regular readers may recall, is the “up and coming” and “hip” neighborhood where twenty-something white kids move in next to crack houses and the projects because it’s cool, or something. Crime is rampant, and shootings occur daily. So the hipster businesses ban carry permit holders.
I really clicked on the story to see what part of East this was in, but…
Authorities told Nashville’s News 2 a man was in front of the complex when he was approached by a man armed with a handgun.
Police said the man shot the suspect, who was wearing a ski mask at the time, in self defense.
Well, that’s a horse of a different color! Good for the victim!
More stories like this and the crime rate in that neighborhood might actually go down!
A pro-gun article in…Elle Magazine?
It starts off slow and it’s kinda long, but well worth the read. A couple of pull quotes:
On terminology:
For hands-on shooting practice, we separate into three groups: pistols, shotguns, and rifles. On my way to the pistol instruction area, I stop to ask a tall man with an NRA belt buckle for directions. “The handgun clinic is that way,” he says, pointing over my head.
“I’m looking for pistols,” I say.
“Honey,” he tells me, with an indulgent smile, “pistols are handguns.”
On that first time shooter experience:
My first thought is, I can’t believe how loud that was. I’m wearing earplugs, but you don’t just hear the firecracker noise in your ears; you feel it with your whole body. Even if, like me, you’ve never handled a gun, they figure so heavily in the entertainment we watch—from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to Sarah Palin’s reality show to movie trailers and video game commercials—that firing one for the first time is a weird combination of startling and banal. Guns are (pardon the pun) loaded with so much cultural baggage that you think you know what to expect. You don’t. TV gunshots sound and act no more like real gunshots than construction-paper snowflakes resemble real snowflakes.
My next thought is, I want to do that again!
All this comes from a woman who grew up in Chicago and has lived in LA and NYC.
A 48 gun safe with ethernet, USB, and power plugs.
I may need that later. FYI, you wouldn’t want to put a computer in there because of the lack of ventilation, but a small NAS
In response to me asking how, exactly, I should gain experience if he would bar me from attending, Paul Helinski says:
So, apparently there is no value in going to the media only events. If it offends him so much that bloggers get media credentials, then perhaps he should stop going to the media events. He also refers to media as “we” or “us” so clearly he thinks he’s attending SHOT in a media capacity, not in a vendor capacity.
Ah. Now I see. You want to be more specialer than us icky bloggers. Note he says “internet readership” and he’s been saying all along he’s an internet journalist. If he were complaining as a vendor or buyer, that would be an entirely different kind of stupid.
Since he likes to harp on the fact that the commercial site GunsAmerica.com has high rankings from arbitrary sites like Compete.com (which, until today, I’d never heard of) and Alexa, let’s see how his internet journalist site–or what the rest of us would call a “blog”
–fares. My arbitrary metric?
Google Reader. Here are the subscriber numbers for this site, which has been open for about 5 months:
Here are the numbers for JayG’s site, open since March of 2007:
And here are the numbers for the GunsAmerica blog, “after 15 years of hard work and dedication”:
So please, tell me why you should be there with a media pass but me and JayG shouldn’t.
Refer to the people who have an audience and might link to your site “nobodies” and insinuate they are fraudsters and thieves, like Paul Helinski of GunsAmerica:
Now the question is when you are going to start qualifying internet media? We have to crawl over nobodies who can install wordpress and have nobody reading anything they write, It isn’t so hard to qualify internet media using Alexa.com and Compete.com. Why do you waste the manufacturers’ time and make the real internet media have to deal with wish I were internet journalists who are just using your stamp of approve to solicit review guns and accessories? You’ve created this giant gorilla in the room and we all have to deal with it, and you may think the industry takes your numbers seriously, but everyone sees things for what they are. If you are serious about bringing value to your exhibitors, you need to vet the press list.
In a later comment, he argues for protectionism by denying press credentials to any “internet journalist” who hasn’t been covering SHOT for years. Pulling up the ladder is always a winning strategy!
Also: What Alan said.
ETA: Just in case you were wondering, you can’t go to the SHOT show as a member of the general public:
That’s me!
This year is the year of training for me, so I started off early. Last weekend I took the NRA CPI class put on by Leroy Farris of Farris Firearms Training in Murfreesboro, TN. It’s a two day course where you don’t learn how to shoot–you learn how to teach people to shoot.
There were about twenty of us in the class and I’m pretty sure the vast majority of students strap on a Glock as part of their day job. I made some good contacts with people who already run training facilities across Tennessee and I’ll be reaching out to them later for class offerings.
One thing I did learn is that I really need to progress from shooting for precision to shooting for speed. When I started carrying 5 years ago, I could hit a silhouette at 10 yards about 80 percent of the time. Not the x-ring, or centermass, or headshots: anywhere.
Yeah, I was pretty terrible. I’m much better now 😀
On day 2 we did a little bit of shooting and the first exercise was 6 rounds in a target about 3×5″ at probably 10 yards. We paired up and one person watched while the other shot, the point being for the non-shooter to learn to look at the gun and not the target while giving instruction. After all twenty students had put six downrange, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who made six hits. That’s probably because all I practice is slow, aimed hits at a known distance against a stationary target with no stressors present. At the LuckyGunner class by Tom Givens, I was the only student to miss an a-zone hit when we were shooting against each other. So I know what I need to work on, now.
All in all, it was a good class. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes taking new shooters. My paperwork should arrive in the next few weeks and then I can submit an application to the state to teach the Handgun Permit class. I haven’t decided if I’m actually going to do that, though.
My niece got a flashlight for Christmas as a stocking stuffer. Cute little Disney Princess one
But the thing I found interesting, which you may have already noticed, was the head on the flashlight:
Is it just me, or does that look a lot like a crenellated strike bezel?
Over the weekend, a 24 year old vet with PTSD and a restraining order (read: Prohibited Person) shot a bunch of people at a party and then took off to Mt Ranier National Park. When he ran a snow chain checkpoint, Rangers followed him. He killed one of them before evading the other.
Clearly, this is the NRA’s fault:
The shooting renewed debate about a federal law that made it legal for people to take loaded weapons into national parks. The 2010 law made possession of firearms subject to state gun laws.
Bill Wade, the outgoing chair of the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, said Congress should be regretting its decision.
“The many congressmen and senators that voted for the legislation that allowed loaded weapons to be brought into the parks ought to be feeling pretty bad right now,” Wade said.
Wade called Sunday’s fatal shooting a tragedy that could have been prevented. He hopes Congress will reconsider the law that took effect in early 2010, but doubts that will happen in today’s political climate.
Calls and emails to the National Rifle Association requesting comment were not immediately returned on Monday.
The NRA said media fears of gun violence in parks were unlikely to be realized, the NRA wrote in a statement about the law after it went into effect. “The new law affects firearms possession, not use,” it said.
The group pushed for the law saying people have a right to defend themselves against park animals and other people.
The shooter died from exposure.
