Self-Defense on the Cheap

[Guest oldhack62]

I'm an ol' farm boy. I grew up with several long guns around the house, and carried whichever was appropriate to the woods hunting from about the age of 10. I'm neither a stranger to, nor afraid of, a firearm.

That said, I'm a workaday schoolteacher, with minimal savings, and a limited income. When I bought my first handgun -- a .380 Bersa Concealed Carry -- in February, even its $329 price tag was a major expenditure for me. Luxurious, even. Since then, I've paid $110 for the Handgun Carry course, and the $115 application fee for the appropriate license to become a conscientious, legal citizen. I've also bought, on a spendthrift whim, another gun, a 1977-78 version S&W Model 59 9mm, with which I crossed paths in a local gun shop. I've also laid away a Taurus PT145, which I hope to redeem before the inauguration of an Obama Administration in January. I have about 1,500 rounds of ammo -- in three different calibers -- stashed in the closet. All of this has been at the expense of almost all my discretionary income over the past few months -- and I live pretty frugally! Sure, maybe I could have combined all that expense, plus my range ammo consumed during several practice trips, for a single, pricier weapon, but not sure I could have filled its magazine!

Anyway, in perusing many self-defense and gun-rights forums over the past few months, I see a conceit toward a "self-defense/gun rights-at-any-cost" attitude. Well, I can't afford ANY cost. I do the best I can to be a responsible, legal citizen as well as one who assumes responsibility toward my own safety.

Believe me, I'd love to own a Kimber 1911, or an Ed Brown customization. But, all I can reasonably afford is a Bersa and Taurus Millenium. Please take into account that there are probably many more like me than there are for whom cost is no object buying self-defense weapons these days -- or any other day -- when you comment about our choices.

It's not really fun to have our best efforts belitted constantly as insufficient and, well, cheap. I coulda bought a Lorcin or Davis .380 in almost any local pawn shop. Instead, I've done the best I can for now.

Edited December 1, 2008 by oldhack62

[Guest billwilly73]

WELL SAID!!!!

I'm still looking for a good deal on a pistol. Every time I about get enough saved I end up finding a good deal on a long gun, and I love my long guns.:D:D

[Guest cjr]

Is there a part of this thread Im missing?

[xd shooter]

Hey in my eyes you can't go wrong with the Bersa. I bought one for my wife from another member here on TGO. It is very acurate & dependable not to mention easy to clean. She also picked out the Taurus 24/7 in 9mm, witch is also a fine wepon with no complaints. I know what you mean about wanting the higher end guns (maybe one day I can have one too). I look for something that goes bang every time she or I pulls the trigger, one that we can hit the target that we are amming for, & one that is as confortable in the shooter's hands.

I think you have not made any bad choices. No need to let someone set behind a keybord & tell you otherwise.

[Moped]

Just because your not spending a mint on a 1911 or the next Uber40 doesn't mean you can't be well armed. I saw nothing wrong with any of the pistols you've purchased. The only thing I would have done a little different than you is look for a good, clean, used snubbie. You really can't beat them and there are several good cheaper ones out there, such as Charter Arms (get a new model), Rossi, or Taurus. Among those three, you'll find just about every caliber covered, from .32 to .44 spl. As a matter of fact the next handgun I purchase may well be a little 5 shot .44 spl.

Personally, when I feel the need to go armed, I carry a .38 snub most of the time. I think they are the best value out there.

[Guest Astra900]

I have carried a PT145 for the last 7 years. I'll put it against many of those "high dollar custom" any day for dependability. 10+1 .45's will get you out most any bad situation:up: I think you made some rather good choices meself.

[TripleDigitRide]

Is there a part of this thread Im missing?

He's probably already had a chance to read some of the Hi-Point threads.

I'd say you'll be perfectly safe with the choices you've already made.

At least none were a Glock!

Edited December 1, 2008 by TripleDigitRide

[Guest c.a.s.]

Sounds like my situation, except you're old enough to purchase firearms AND you have income!

I'm stuck getting gifts.

[Guest bkelm18]

I know the feelin. I haven't been able to actually afford a new gun in quite some time. I just wheel and deal, selling and trading to get new ones.

[Guest bluecanary25]

Hey oldhack62,

You have purchased some good guns. Don't sweat it.

Learn how to operate your handguns safely. Practice so you can hit your target. A hit with an affordable gun is much better than a miss with any expensive tricked-out ubber hand cannon.

For self defence, your gunz are more than adequate.

[Guest Revelator]

Anything that is going to increase one's security, safety or health is going to cost money. It really is all about money in this world in so many ways, and those who have it are generally going to fare better than those who don't. However, there is a difference between doing it less expensively and doing it cheap and it looks like you've found that balance. Good deals can be had if you look around, and that's part of the fun of it. Personally I would not spend less than $400 or more than $700 on a handgun.

It looks like you're pretty well-covered for guns...and ammo, I'll add. If you haven't already, make sure you get some premium quality carry ammunition. Don't skimp there. The start up costs are the most; it gets better after you've got your strap and your card. Of course you've also got to get a holster, an extra mag or three, all that crap. One thing I skipped was a real honest to goodness "gunbelt." For $75? Mehhh. Maybe they're the cat's meow; I don't know I've never tried one. My $35 Kenneth Cole belts have worked just fine, although I've practiced drawing from concealment only about 3,000 times the last fifteen months. By the time I actually started carrying I'd spent about $1000. You could do it for less, but probably not a whole lot less.

[Guest cjr]

Hey Oldhack,

As long as you are happy with your purchase Everyone should be happy and proud for you.

This is off topic but,If everyone in our Great Country only purchased what they could afford we would not be in the situation we are in now.You only need one for personal defense,anything over thats just braggin rights.

[Guest grimel]

When I bought my first handgun -- a .380 Bersa Concealed Carry -- in February, even its $329 price tag was a major expenditure for me.

Please take into account that there are probably many more like me than there are for whom cost is no object buying self-defense weapons these days -- or any other day -- when you comment about our choices.

It's not really fun to have our best efforts belitted constantly as insufficient and, well, cheap. I coulda bought a Lorcin or Davis .380 in almost any local pawn shop. Instead, I've done the best I can for now.

Just remember, it isn't a requirement to have a semi-auto for self defense.

I see S&W K frames for $250ish at every gun show. I've bought TWO M36 (hammer visible J frames) for less than $350 each.

Then there are the numerous Com-bloc compact service pistols (copies of Walther PP and PPK's) from CZ, FEG, and a few others in 32, 380, and 9mm Mak. Usually, these are available in the $200 range. Rarely, are they over $250 (except the 12 shot CZ's). SOME can be had for under $150.

Com-bloc FMJ 9mm Mak can be had cheap. If you are truely strapped for cash, buy a Taurus 22lr revolver ($350ish blued new) and a S&W K frame 38spl (3" prefered) used in the $250ish range. Use the 38 enough to familiarize yourself and stay familiar (say 1 box a month) and practice with the 22lr (less than $25 per 500 bulk) and dry fire the 38 (snap caps are cheap).

[Guest grimel]

By the time I actually started carrying I'd spent about $1000. You could do it for less, but probably not a whole lot less.

HCP class $60 (hunt for the low ball)

HCP permit $115

Don Hume holster $25 (gun show prices)

Blackhills/Wilderness/Don Hume gun belt (that looks decent) $40

Used S&W J frame $325

Doc Roberts recommended carry ammo - 4 boxes of 20 $$100 (or $50 for 100 38spl)

Winchester Whitebox 100rd packs 4 for practice $120

$785

Shopping Gunbroker and Ebay should save about $20 on the holster and belt. Switching to a S&W M10 would save another $75. Dropping to 2 boxes of carry ammo would save another $50. That would drop the final tab to $640.

With some of the deals I've picked up in the last month, a start up of around $550 could be done.

[wjh2657]

Retired School Teacher here too! Also retired Marine (30 years).

I carry S&W J-frames and have Mossbergs at home for hunting and House Defense. I have never felt undergunned or "low class". Also have a BERSA, but found J-frames easier to carry, nothing wrong with the BERSA though.

I also was raise with guns, did some trapping when I was a kid, and consider a gun primarily as a tool. The guns you named are good tools.

[Moped]

+1 on the J-frames and other small snubbies!!!

[Punisher84]

I say get what you can afford that is reliable. That being said, I'd rather have a Bryco/Jiminez/Hi-point when I needed it than nothing. Even if it jammed after a few rounds I could retreat or throw it at them.

I love Ed Brown. he doesn't love my budget I also like Harley Davidson, 50 year old wines...

[towerclimber37]

It doesn't really matter WHAT pistol you carry all the time..as long as you're proficient with it and it works for you...

I own a couple of those "high dollar" pistols...I have an EMP and my wife owns a couple of very nice full sized .45 pistols.

My daily carry is a 200.00 PA-63. why? because it's sufficient for my needs and I know it will work when I need it to.

those very high dollar pistols? I don't carry them because I don't want to see them go into an evidence locker and come back scratched or messed up.

that being said, I will eventually be looking for a Rock Island arms 1911 compact...a little more money..but you can't beat a .45...

[DWARREN123]

You do what you have to do to get to where you want to be.

I think you have done well, maybe I would have stayed with one caliber to keep it less expensive but whatever you feel comfortable with.

[Angus]

Oldhack, we are all just a bunch of goofs here, smartallecks You may have kicked one or 10 of us out of a class at one time or another.

That said, any gun that fires true, and keeps you safe is a good gun. Hell I found one hell of a deal from a co-worker, and my Ruger security six I got for $20, with 2 boxes of ammo. Price, caliber and new/used doesn't matter. You bought it, do YOU like it? If yes, then the rest is cake. A couple folks actually chuckled at my revolver when I took my CCW class, course there was hardly any red left in the center when I was done.

[Guest bluecanary25]

angus, so they bled copiously? (Grammar naziis go away!!)

At 25 yards, aiming center mass, firing rapid style...

if I shoot a siloutte in the head and in the nads, what more do I need?

[poak]

I just so happened to run into a VERY good article about cheap guns for self-defense and to a further extent, why so called "Saturday Night Specials" shouldn't be banned (as the liberals have called to do, all the while the media demonizes bargain guns).

Link to original article:

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/ayoob62.html

Cheap guns

are good enough

By Massad Ayoob

More than 10 years ago, my friend Mark Seiden called me in on a murder case in Miami that Janet Reno, then State’s Attorney for the county in question, had ordered prosecuted. A woman named Mary Hopkin had killed her common law husband, a man named James Yarolem.

James was in his forties. Mary was 63. Her life had been hard, and when she found a younger man who convinced her he loved her, she took him into her home. This did not turn out to be a wise decision.

Mary worked. Jim didn’t. He drank and smoked up all the money she brought in. He abused her, with the classic escalation. First, verbal derisiveness. Then the shove with the palm. Then the slap of the open hand. Then the blow of the closed fist. The time came when she confronted him and said, “Jim, you drink all my beer, and you smoke all my cigarettes, and you won’t get a job, and … I think it’s time you left.†Even then, being in the classic denial pattern of a battered significant other, she couldn’t bring herself to say, “Oh, and by the way, you beat the crap out of me whenever you feel like it.â€

She didn’t need to say it. Jim didn’t handle her declaration well. He began to beat her up with more vigor than before. She went to call the police, and Jim ripped the telephone out of the wall, wrapped the phone cord around her neck, and strangled her unconscious. He left her for dead and went off to the nearest bar. When Mary awoke, she crawled—she couldn’t walk on her arthritic and aging legs, she crawled—to the nearest trailer to hers and when she got there blurted, “Call the police.â€

The cops arrived. When Jim came back Metro-Dade officers were there. They arrested him. When they dragged him away, the cops testified later, he was screaming “Mary, you f---in’ bitch, I’ll kill you for this!â€

Very soon thereafter, he was out on bail and he came to make good his threat. By now, Mary was in terror of him, and had borrowed from her son the cheapest revolver available, an RG .22. The RG is the gun that Handgun Control Inc. is trying to talk about when they rail on about “Saturday Night Specials.†If you left it on a hot stove it might melt.

Jim pounded on the door like the big bad wolf. “Mary, let me in!†“Jim,†she answered, “I know what you’re going to do! I have a gun! I won’t let you kill me! Go away! Don’t make me shoot you!â€

He didn’t listen. He smashed the door off its hinges and came at her, and she fired three shots. All three .22 bullets hit him. He turned and ran, got about 20 feet, and collapsed and died. To make a long story short, she was charged with murder.

She had no money. Mark Seiden, her attorney, took her case anyway. Mark was a former homicide cop for Metro-Dade before he became a lawyer. I did what he did, after he called me. I took the case pro bono, at no charge. After I spent an hour with Mark on direct examination explaining to the jury why she had no choice but to shoot, I took out the prosecutor in a little less than a minute of cross examination. The jury was quick, too: they took about two hours to acquit her of all charges.

I remember this, and I flash forward to yesterday, at one of the regularly scheduled qualifications for my police department. I shot a gun the agency has already approved as optional and is thinking of adopting for standard issue, the Ruger P97 that I’ve written about in this column before. This .45 automatic recently put 60 bullets into less than 3.5 inches during a timed FBI-style shooting qualification. I am authorized to carry whatever pistol I want, including my custom $3500 “LFI Special†Colt .45 automatic. Instead, right now, I carry this $460 Ruger. The qualification also encompassed the .223 rifle. I didn’t shoot that with the $2,000 custom CAR-15 from Olympic Arms that I’m authorized to carry; I shot it with our department issue Ruger Mini-14 .223 that would cost you only a few hundred bucks. Price one at Wal-Mart or K-Mart and you’ll see, though I’d rather you spent a couple bucks more and bought it from a gun dealer who supports your Second Amendment rights, which is why I buy my guns at gunshops instead of Monster Marts. But, I digress.

The pistol course required 60 shots. All 60 went center and I scored 100%. The rifle course was 50 shots, actually 45 with the rifle including half a dozen head-shots, and another five rounds with the pistol in “rifle-to-handgun-transition.†These “cheap guns†gave me a 99.6% score that wouldn’t have been different with my more expensive guns, because it was me who jerked the trigger and blew the shot that cost me one point.

My department regulations allow me to carry a custom made rifle that costs several thousands of dollars with me in the patrol car. I used to do that. Frankly, I don’t bother anymore. Each of our cruisers contains the Mini-14 for any of our officers to access, and to be blunt, it does the same job just about as well.

The last time I carried my $3500 custom pistol in uniform was a couple of years ago. I and some other officers were working security for a double police funeral where it was feared that the cop-killer—who himself was slain by police on the day of the murders—might have friends who would want to avenge him by harming any of the several thousand police officers in attendance for the funeral. We who covered the perimeter were ordered that we couldn’t have rifles evident, for fear of people being frightened and made paranoid. I carried that expensive .45 pistol that day because I knew that with 185-grain +P hollowpoints, it would hit what I aimed at from 100 yards if something went down in the wide-open venues that ranged from a downtown cortege to the burial at the equally wide-open cemetery.

Nothing happened. The cop-killer, it turned out, had been a lone wolf. After it was over, I went to the firing range and tested my department issue Ruger P90 .45 automatic. It shot eight rounds for eight into a man-size target at 100 yards. It would have done the job all along.

So, what’s the lesson? It’s simple, really, and it touches deeply upon the values that make you read publications like Backwoods Home Magazine.

Simple can be as good as fancy, and is sometimes better. Inexpensive can be as good as expensive, and sometimes is better. “Reliability†is more important than “esoteric†in the final balance. Something cheap, now when you need it, beats hell out of something costly that you have to save up for, to buy later, when it may be too late. “Something is generally better than nothing.â€

Mary Hopkin couldn’t have afforded an expensive gun. If she had needed $800 to buy a state of the art defensive pistol, she wouldn’t have had it, and she would have died. She would have been another statistic.

[Guest oldhack62]

Am both surprised and gratified at the general tenor of responses here. Thanks to all.

Frankly, I coulda dropped this thread into almost ANY of the handgun forums out there, because I was beginning to feel like the unwelcome little sister in most of them, with my budget-conscious choices. Seems I'm not the only one, and am relieved that many of you feel like I've made some decent choices under my fiscal circumstances.

Ya know, there is a vast majority of citizens out here who walk around 'naked' every day who can afford not to. By comparison, I can't begin to afford monetarily to take responsibility for my (and dear ones') own safety. And, yet, I -- and all of you, too -- do. I don't want us to make each other feel inadequate in our efforts. There are already too many others who don't understand.

[Garufa]

I personally think you've made great choices, in caliber and delivery mechanism. I don't personally own either the Bersa or PT145 but have wanted a Bersa for a long time. I really like them alot and the only knock I've ever heard against them was the caliber. Well guess what, a .380 will drop a bad guy just as well as any other caliber - depending on shot placement and what you're hitting. That cartridge was developed over 100 years ago (between the 9mm and 45 ACP, roughly) and has been going strong ever since.

Never handled the PT145 but saw one in action at the range the other day. The accuracy was astounding at 25 yards! I also know Taurus to be a good, solid manufacturer.

Seems like the Spaniards and Argentinians are making some darn nice pistols at an affordable price. No wonder both are very popular.

You chose wisely. Be proud of that.

[Guest GLOCKGUY]

He's probably already had a chance to read some of the Hi-Point threads.

I'd say you'll be perfectly safe with the choices you've already made.

At least none were a XD!

Their you go TripleDigitRide I fixed your post.