Buy a Gun Day

So I bought my gun for Buy a Gun Day today. Okay, so technically, today isn't Buy a Gun Day. But I live in New Jersey. My (two) pistol permits came in a week ago (after only six weeks.) My FFL ordered thw gun for me the day he got my check in the mail, it came in a couple of days ago, and I picked it up today. I can't just go out and buy a gun on a whim[1]. These thing have to be planned out.

And, of course, given that I did the transfer today, I wouldn't be able to go out and buy another gun on Buy a Gun Day, as that's less than 30 days from now, and New Jersey now has the one-gun-a-month law.

But on the bright side, this is a really sweet piece, a Smith and Wesson Model 41, a .22 target pistol. I brought it home, cleaned it, then took it out to the range to try it out. I don't know if the gun shoots much better than my other .22 (a Kimber), or if I just shoot much better with it. (Or if it's just the honeymoon phase.) But it seemed to shoot really well. The trigger is certainly better. The out-of-the-box trigger on my Kimber leaves a bit to be desired. The trigger on the S&W needs no work. I'll need to get used to it, though, as it's a bit lighter than I'm used to.

[1] Well, it's still possible to go out and buy a rifle or shotgun on a whim, but I'm not really in the market for either of those right now.

Mothers-in-law and guns

Mother-in-law has discovered that I own guns. We've tried to keep this
from her, and we've been remarkably successful. But I think this was
mostly because the guns were kept in their cases (locked) up in my
office, and she never goes into that corner of the house. But she
happened to walk through the garage on Saturday morning and saw the
recently-installed gun safe.

As some background, my mother-in-law has very definite opinions about
certain things, mostly concerned with what people do and don't do. Or,
to be more specific, what decent people do and don't do. These
opinions are simply prejudices based on her experience growing up
in a middle-class neighborhood in Philadelphia surrounded by decent people.

As additional background, she doesn't always handle things in the most
mature of manners. For example, when a boy of the wrong religious
affiliation called my wife at home when she was in high school, her
mother sulked about it for weeks. As another example, when my
father-in-law bought a pool table some years ago, she was unhappy.
(Decent people don't even play pool, much less have a table in their
house.) She made him put it in a very cramped corner of the basement
where it was impossible to make a decent shot. She then proceeded to
move a freezer right next to the pool table, making it even harder to
use.

So I now wait to see what my punishment will be for having guns in the
same house as her grandchildren. This should be an interesting
experience, as I've not yet really been in the doghouse with her (even
after 10 years, and even though I don't have the correct religious affiliation.)

OTOH, this could be a good thing. I wouldn't mind moving somewhere
with better gun laws and lower taxes. This could open up my options.

Aperture sights

I've decided to give front aperture sights a try on my 10/22. Specifically this Lyman globe front target sight. I'm currently using a Tech-Sights TSR-200, which is an aperture rear sight combined with a post front sight. While I certainly don't expect to suddenly start shooting 400-40x's with these sights, at least it will be an interesting experience.

Gun safe

Gun safe's a-comin'. Back before the Great Gun Hiatus, I got by without a safe because I was single and lucky. Now that I'm a responsible homeowner with kids, and now that my post-Hiatus collection is getting big enough to warrant it, I've decided to get a safe. (A Liberty safe, if anyone's curious.)

I've ordered a model that holds up to 30 long guns. I can't imagine that I'll end up owning more than 30 long guns anytime soon. Of course, having said that, I'll probably be wishing soon that I'd gotten a bigger safe. I'd be hard-pressed to buy more than one a month, so it should last me for at least another couple of years.

The times they done changed

Last night, the guy shooting next to me had some sort of Mossberg bolt-action .22. Before we got started, he mentioned that he'd gotten it when he was a kid using S&H green stamps[1]. He walked into the store, gave them his book of green stamps, and walked out with a rifle. No background check, no concern that he was a minor, nothing.

This reminded me of the Andy Griffith Show episode where Opie tries to win something at the carnival using his shooting prowess. Here's a 10-year-old-or-so kid being handed a gun with lots of other people walking around, shooting targets, and handing the gun back to the adult. Nowadays, a 10-year-old with a gun on TV is fodder for after-school-special-quality morality plays about the evils of firearms.

[1] Boy, that took me back. I remember being a kid going to the grocery store with my mother and getting the sheets of green stamps and then later licking them and pasting them into the little booklets. I have no idea what we ever got with them, but I remember having them.

The Great Gun Hiatus

I've mentioned before that I owned no guns from 1998-2008. The reason I got rid of everything is because I was going to grad school in New Jersey. I knew enough about New Jersey to know that I didn't want to go through the hassle of proving that I was worthy of owning guns, and I decided to just do without. (Not to mention that, as a grad student, I wasn't going to have a lot of time to go shooting even if I could find someplace to shoot.)

I hadn't planned on sticking around New Jersey after grad school, but I was also planning on actually finishing my Ph.D., and we see how well that worked out. In retrospect, it was frighteningly easy to get out of the lifestyle. And this is what the gun control folks (or statists in general) rely on. They're essentially sniping the people who don't want to put up with the hassle, and as they thin out the herd, they change popular culture. People stop viewing guns as everyday objects and start seeing them as things that only police, military, and homegrown terrorists have.

At my local gun club, they open every monthly meeting by welcoming any guests and asking them to introduce themselves and say a little bit about what brought them there. At the first meeting I attended, I expressed my reason for coming thusly: "I'm here because I'm looking for someplace to shoot. I also believe it's part of my civic duty to promote responsible gun ownership." What's unfortunate about summing things up in that latter sentence is that one might naturally assume that the emphasis is on "responsible". The emphasis was actually on the "gun ownership" part. I want more people to own guns, or at least know reasonable people who own guns and don't see anything peculiar in it. I can't go head-to-head with Michael Bloomberg, but I can do my small part.