About Gun Noob

A few years ago, I went to a gun show. Wait, let’s go back a bit farther….

Quite a few years ago, I was married. My ex-wife was from another country and that particular country didn’t have the gun rights that we have here. One day, my father-in-law at the time came to the U.S.A. for a visit. Every time he came to this country, he made a point to go to a local gun range that rented guns. This particular visit, he invited me along. I guess it was supposed to be some kind of a bonding thing.

Before that, I had never fired a gun before in my life and to be honest I was a bit nervous around them. Still, he was paying for the rentals and the ammo so who was I to say no?

So he handed me a .45 caliber Glock, a box of ammo and then went to the lane next to me. It occurred at that point that he probably figured that I, being an American what grew up in the South, knew all there was to know about guns. So, I bumbled my way through loading it, took aim and BLAM! First shot ever fired. It kicked like a mule and scared the living hell out of me. Still, it was a perfect head shot. I finished off the box (with shaking hands) and thanked him for a fun afternoon then went home and pretty much wrote off guns.

Some years passed and my job required me to have to visit its datacenter about once or twice a month…in the middle of the night…in a less than wonderful part of town…while carrying thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment.

Well, time to get a carry permit.

So there I was at the aforementioned gun show. I found this awesome Taurus PT92 9mm that looked like something straight out of an action film. Admittedly, a bit difficult to conceal but still, if I was going to own a freaking gun I wanted it to be an awesome looking one (I was so young and naive back then). I took it to the range the next day and had a much more pleasant experience than my first time years earlier. I was hooked from that point forward.
Hello. My name is Erick Stover and I am a gun noob.

Which Leads Me To…

Why “Gun Noob”? Well, I admittedly haven’t been using guns very long. Even though I bought my first one relatively recently, I haven’t had as much time to shoot it and learn it as I would have liked. Pretty much everything I know is self taught as I haven’t had time or money to hire an instructor/attend classes.
In the process of teaching myself, however, I’ve found most information on the internet seems to assume you’re either an active NRA instructor, ex-police or ex-military. There’s surprisingly little information geared towards a noob and what little there is turns out to be boring and not well organized or somewhat inaccurate (I’m looking at you, 90% of YouTube videos).
The purpose of GunNoob.com is to pass on to you the beginner’s things I’ve learned along the way, questions I’ve had that I ultimately had to discover on my own, and observations I’ve made throughout the process.
In other words: this site is by noobs, for noobs.

One More Thing…

One other thing I feel I must get out of the way:
I highly, HIGHLY encourage you to hire an NRA instructor. I am in no way an expert by any stretch of the imagination. Heck, half of what I say here may be so horribly wrong that your average instructor would instantly suffer an aneurism after reading a single paragraph. This is more of a…supplemental reference. At the very least it’s a wonderful (and hopefully marginally entertaining) compendium of that NOT to do.