A .22 for defense? To what end, Sir?! To what end?!
If someone breaks into my home while I’m out of town, I want my wife to have the biggest handgun she can possibly hold. I want that gun to hold 150 rounds and shoot bullets the size of my thumb. And when those bullets hit that home invader, I want them to magically turn toward his heart, pierce his aorta and explode.
Unfortunately, even if that gun did exist (stop googling, it doesn’t), my wife would never shoot it. It would sit in the safe, untouched. It’s not that my wife isn’t aware of the possibilities. She grew up in a rough neighborhood and knows that if something happens when I’m not around, she’s going to be the one who has to cowboy up and protect our boys, and she wants to be able to do that. Thing is, she’s very recoil-averse and handguns intimidate her. Which is why the answer for her and people like her may be a .22 pistol.
Guns can be very intimidating, especially for people who have had no experience with them. To those people, they’re not tools. They’re small pieces of steel filled with small packets of gunpowder that explode near your face. And worst of all, when they go off, they move. They jump around in your hand, and it can hurt your wrists. So even my wife, who wants to be able to comfortably shoot at a threat in her home, hates shooting handguns. She tried. I’ll give her credit. During a recent trip to my parents’ place in the country, we loaded up a 9mm and a .38 Special and let her go to town. But although she did very well for a beginner, she hated the experience. And if you don’t like something, you’re less likely to do it. As my father once said, “Never carry a weapon you’re going to be afraid to use.”
The answer to this problem may lie in the diminutive .22 pistol. Now, the .22 long rifle round will never be my first choice for a defensive weapon. It may be a man-killer, killing more people every year than any other cartridge, but it’s not a man-stopper, which is what you need in a defensive situation. You want something that’s going to knock a man down right now, not an hour from now when he finally dies of internal bleeding in his apartment. However, in this particular situation, when you’re dealing with a new shooter who’s intimidated by a gun, you have to modify your approach. A .22 pistol fits the bill for three reasons.
It’s better than nothing. Although it’s small, it’s still a gun. It’s still loud, and it still launches small pieces of lead at a person’s vital bits. You’re not dealing with the Terminator, here. Most aggressors, when merely faced with an armed defender, will withdraw rather than push a bad situation. My wife just has to hold the bedroom, not a FOB in Afghanistan. Combined with the right plan, the right ammo and the right aimpoint, a .22 will be adequate. Not ideal, just adequate… barely.
She’ll want to practice with it. If the problem you’re having with a handgun is the recoil, then remove the recoil. Lots of people who want to shoot are put off by the recoil in a small, powerful handgun. Among them is Washington Times’ Emily Miller, who is currently blogging her battle with the Washington, D.C. bureaucracy in getting a legal handgun. In the entry where she first learns to shoot, she starts with a .22, which she likes, but when she moves to a more powerful .40 handgun, she doesn’t like it at all and wants to go back to the .22.
“BOOM. BOOM. I did not like this. My hand hurt. The explosion on each shot scared me. I shot until there were no more bullets and didn’t get a single one in the red of the target. I put the gun down.
“That’s it, I’m done with it. I want to go back to the .22,” I said. I finished off two more rounds and got good grouping with the last one. I was thrilled.”
I’ll be honest with you, .22’s are fun to shoot. They’re cheap to feed and there’s almost no recoil giving you an ache in your wrists like with my .357. As a matter of fact, a lot of people who own a .357 practice with .38 Specials for exactly those two reasons. If there’s no negative to practicing, then a person will want to practice more, and that brings me to the third reason…
It’s a gateway gun. You know how pot is always referred to as a “gateway drug,” because it leads a person to using harder drugs? A .22 is the same way. Shooting a .22 lets a new shooter get comfortable with the fundamentals and learn the rules without having to worry about a sore shoulder or wrist. When I first introduced my wife to firearms, she was of the opinion (being a liberal city girl with no experience with firearms) that guns were “icky,” so I started her with my father’s .22 rifle, which she ended up loving so much that I had to buy it for her. Imagine if I had started her with a .308. A .22 pistol can serve the same function. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of .22 pistols out there that mimic larger caliber guns. The SIG Mosquito and Walther P-22 are two examples. Teh Noob will be thrilled, I’m sure, to learn that the 1911 can be bought in .22, and Ruger recently introduced the .22 22/45 pistol, which incorporates a grip the same size and configuration as the 1911 for people who want to practice with a .22 that feels like a .45 in their hands.
If it were up to me, my I’d only leave my wife home alone with a weapon that hits a person so hard it knocks them back in time. But I also know she’s not going to go for that and that if I push her, she’s going to resent it and hate it and only do enough to convince me that she knows how to use it. That’s not enough. For one thing, I don’t want my wife to have to practice something she hates, and two, she will need to practice to become proficient. A .22 pistol lets her practice with a more comfortable weapon until she’s ready to graduate to something bigger. And even if she doesn’t graduate to something bigger, a .22 is still far and away better than hitting a home invader with a lamp.
TJ
Like what you read? GunNoob is now part of Pew Pew Tactical. Check out the rest of our awesome resources:
Leave a Reply