Robert Green wrote:
"Stormin Mormon" wrote in message
...
You bought a .380 to take out a 300 pound crazy man? Do you
think that's enough gun? I doubt it.
I bought a .380 because I was applying for a carry permit and a 16
gauge would have been awkward to carry around in a ankle holster.
(-: This was way back in the day when money (for me) was pretty
scarce and it was "either-or." I had to make do with a weapon that
could be both carried discreetly and used for home defense. A couple
of well-placed shots from a .380 will take out a fat man or a thin
one unless he's wearing a bulletproof welder's helmet. One or two
shots up through the jaw will do it. Very little bone between the
barrel and the brain.
But I will agree that a .380 is not an intimidation weapon, it is a
weapon of last resort. I wouldn't shoot a 300 pound man in a leather
jacket in the center of mass and expect good results. I'd aim for
the head and pray he wasn't a relative of Joe the Boss Masseria, the
man who could dodge bullets:
http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Joe_Masseria
He eventually ran out of luck and died in a hail of .32 and .38
caliber slugs. As someone else noted, the Mob has historically made
very effective use of the .22 caliber round as a murder weapon. It
all depends on how you use it.
Ironically, the only time I had to depend on my .380, displaying it
was enough. The guy on the other end weaved his head from side to
side to try to determine if it was a real gun (it's pretty damn
small) and ran away when he concluded it was. It was good for him
that he just moved side to side because I had already decided he was
close enough to grab it from me and if he moved forward even an inch,
I would have shot him. And emptied the clip.
Eventually I graduated from the Beretta to a Browning 9mm HiPower.
There's no way that the Browning was anywhere near as conceable as
the Beretta, although it had tremendously greater power as well as a
13 round clip v. the Beretta's 7. It had substantially greater
intimidation power as well. Now I have a .40 Glock, a Ruger mini 14
and a few others around the house.
I still prefer a pistol to a shotgun for really tight quarters but
for carry purposes, a Baby Browning .25 with 7 rounds of steel-tipped
ammo is enough gun for most situations. At least for me. As someone
else said a while back, a powerful gun that's too big to take
everywhere is no better than a small caliber gun than can go
anywhere. Escape is still preferable to a shootout, at least for me.
The Baby is for when escape is not an option. Even a justifiable
shooting is going to cost big bucks, especially if you're arrested as
a result. But being arrested is still a lot better than being dead.
Your points are all excellent.
I carry two guns. In addition to my regular concealed gun (a CZ-82), I have
a fold-up .22, five-shot, single action revolver that I keep in my back
pocket. It's a "Back Up Gun (BUG)". Our local range has BUG matches, and
you'd be surprised at the devastation some of these BUGs can cause to a
paper target!