I’ve started posting more about guns over the last few months, and that’s a trend that’s probably going to continue. As I’m learning more about concealed carry and self defense with firearms, I’m learning exactly how much I don’t know. Though I’ll still post about other stuff, I think the firearms and self defense posts are going to increase sharply. I’m not entirely sure what that means yet, but that’s going to be part of the project.

I just added the following to the about page, which will maybe make things a little clearer.

I’ve been around guns most of my life, but until recently only used them for plinking or keeping on the bedside table for home defense. However, as I’ve gotten older and started a family, I’ve been thinking more and more about the human right to self defense, and what that means.

As such, I’ve got a new goal: to become competent with firearms for self defense. Not an expert, not a gunfighter, just competent. I don’t have the thousands of dollars lying around to attend classes at Gunsite, but I do have a public library where I can request books on firearms and self defense. I have also lucked upon a fairly good archive of firearms videos. And I live near a free shooting area in a national forest.

To start, I’ll try to achieve my goal by:

• Shooting no less than once every other week, even if my budget only allows me to fire a hundred rounds.
• Performing dry-firing exercises, including the practice of drawing from my concealed carry holster, at least once every other day.
• Carrying everywhere that I’m legally allowed, or that will not lose me my day job.
• Doing all of the above with exact attention Jeff Cooper’s four rules of firearms safety and Xavier’s five rules of concealed carry.
• Studying everything I can get my hands on to expand my knowledge.
• Learning the 1911 platform.

That last one’s a little involved, if the least important of the items. I have a Springfield GI 1911-A1 that I’ve been tinkering with. I love shooting it, but it’s not as a reliable as my Glock or my Ruger GP100, and it suffers from some deficiencies. The Springfield will become my carry gun when I’m able to do the work necessary to make the improvements it needs, to maintain it, and to be able to detail strip and reassemble the goddamn thing without cursing.

These seem to me like pretty modest goals, but we’ll see. I assume they’ll evolve as I learn. I’m a fairly new to most of this stuff, so I hope that no one will take anything written here as anything but the jotting down of ideas.

We’ll see how this goes. Those established gun nuts among you are going to probably read a lot of stuff you already know. Hell, I’m probably going to write a lot of stuff I already know. But just scratching the surface of this over the last couple of weeks, I’m realizing that much of what I thought I knew is dead wrong, and part of what I want to do is start from the beginning.