Love this article.
One thing it really highlights, to me, is the incredible difficulty a naive consumer faces when she tries to research her first gun.
When she was new to guns, this woman did what nearly all new gun buyers do:
- She consulted with an experienced shooter that she trusted (her husband)
.
- Based on his information, she made a list of features that she'd like to have on her gun
.
- She discussed that list with a trusted, experienced shooter (husband)
.
- When her trusted, experienced friend made a list of potential purchases for her, she worked her way through the list until she found the one she liked.
She was even smart enough to realize that the person paid to
sell guns might not have her own personal best interest in mind when he recommended a product for her -- which was why she stuck to the list of recommendations from her trusted other. That's pretty good for a first time purchaser. (Of course, the advice the gun clerk gave her was every bit as bad, or worse, than the advice she got from her trusted other. A lightweight snubby remains one of the worst possible purchases for new shooters: nasty recoil, heavy trigger, short sight radius, vestigial sights, low capacity and complex reloads. Snubbies are experts' guns and should be reserved for experts, not thrown willynilly at every woman who walks into the shop.)
To me, the brilliant part of this article was how she admitted her stubborness on the caliber issue. This is one I see all the time in classes: women relatively new to shooting, whose old-school husbands have recommended "calibers that begin with .4-", and who take pride in "being able" to shoot a larger caliber. What I also see in class is that beginners who start on a .40-caliber pistol nearly always develop a nasty flinch pattern that becomes very difficult to overcome as time goes on. The longer they stay with that caliber, the more difficult it is to teach them to shoot
well.
Can these women shoot the guns they're so proud of being able to shoot? Oh yes. They can point the muzzle at a target and yank the trigger easy as pie. But they can rarely shoot do it as well or as quickly as they would be able to do, had they started with a caliber more suited to learning. And because the recoil tends to be too much for them at that stage in their learning, they do often induce malfunctions in guns that would be reliable more experienced hands. (My perspective: 9mm or .38 usually work best for newbies, .45 okay but not great, and .380 either wonderful or awful depending on gun design. But .40 nearly always sucks for newbies, regardless of platform. YMMV.)
The funniest part of this article is reading the comments. Guys seem to think they've discovered something nasty about the author when they say stuff like, "She was just stubborn" (when she herself says flat-out that her stubborn insistence on sticking to the gun her experienced-shooter husband recommended was part of the problem).
Or they get down on her for "not doing her research" when in fact she
did her research in exactly the way that most new shooters do.
Or they insult her for not asking someone who
really knew what he was talking about to recommend guns for her or guide her own research. That one's the funniest and most tragic of all the responses I've seen to this article, because for naive consumers, it's so dirty-word impossible to find good and knowledgeable gun recommendations.
People think the guy behind the counter at the gun store is an expert. He's (probably) not. He's just a guy who sells guns.
People think the guy who likes to shoot on Saturdays is an expert. He's (probably) not. He's more likely the moron who drives sales of the [really popular but sucky firearm].
People think you can just go online and ask for recommendations in a gun forum. Notsomuch; the voices of the idiots always outnumber the voices of those who actually do in fact know what they're talking about. Add in a few fun little academic concepts such as the Dunning Kruger Effect and Advice Discounting, and the naive consumer has a genuine problem finding trustworthy information.
For most people, the first gun purchase is little more than a crap shoot. It's frankly a miracle when anyone gets it right the first time.
But isn't "having to" buy another gun, and another, and another, a big part of the fun?
pax
