Guns, Glocks, Shooters, and a Day at the Range

The anniversary of the Newtown murders passed quietly, with no serious effort by liberals to revive their failed gun control proposals–none of which would have done a thing to prevent the Newtown murders, as pretty much everyone now understands.

In Colorado, high school student Karl Pierson was suspended for threatening to murder his debate coach. It turns out they should have arrested him, not just suspended him. Pierson wasn’t kidding. He showed up at Arapahoe High School with a shotgun, looking for the coach, and shot a fellow student, critically wounding her. The incident didn’t turn into mass murder, even though Pierson was armed with a shotgun, a machete and three Molotov cocktails, apparently because there was an armed deputy sheriff stationed at the high school. When the first shotgun blast went off, the deputy sheriff raced to the scene and, reportedly, “the heavily-armed shooter realized he was about to be confronted by an armed officer, and he took his own life.” My kids’ high school has an armed guard; does yours?

We won’t hear much more about Mr. Pierson, since 1) he didn’t use one of the guns disfavored by liberals, like an AR-15; 2) he was stopped by an armed guard at a school; and 3) fellow students described him variously as a “communist” or a “socialist” who was contemptuous of Republicans, in part because they oppose gun control–facts which mainstream (liberal) news accounts either ignored entirely, or covered in a single grudging word.

The positive side of gun ownership is reflected in this excellent Glock ad, which Glenn Reynolds linked to last night:

I had never fired a Glock until today. I don’t own one, and I tend to prefer more traditional handguns on mostly aesthetic grounds, but no one ever accused Glocks of being inaccurate or unreliable. I went to our favorite range today, the Gander Mountain in Lakeville, with a friend who is a former Marine and a very good shot, better than me. I brought my usual arsenal, and he brought a SIG P938 almost identical to mine and a Glock 17. I shot the Glock, and enjoyed it. But I shot this group at 6 yards with my Armalite AR-24:

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On the way out, we shopped revolvers. I am planning on buying a revolver before long, and have been looking at Rugers and Smith & Wessons. But today we checked out a Chiappa Rhino, a unique pistol that shoots the bullet from a position below the cylinder and has a flattened cylinder to make for easier concealment. The design is unusual, but the gun feels good in the hand.

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We also looked at an EAA revolver that the salesman we were talking with likes a lot. It, too, feels good in the hand. It has a more traditional design, and is much cheaper than the Rhino.

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The occasional psychotic in a land of 315 million is inevitable, but puny in comparison with the many millions of law-abiding gun owners who hunt, enjoy shooting sports, and employ firearms in self-defense hundreds of thousands of times annually (low estimate) or millions of times annually (high estimate).

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