Our hero was in his early twenties and came dressed in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. He limped into the Emergency Department under his own power complaining of spontaneous left knee pain. I asked if he had fallen, twisted his knee or otherwise injured himself, and he said “no.”
His examination was significant for a painful range of motion. There were no obvious external wounds, but his knee was indeed slightly swollen. His four ligaments were grossly intact on exam.
Diagnostic Imaging
If you sit still long enough in the ER, somebody will throw you into an x-ray machine. This kid’s radiographic study was unremarkable save a small quarter-inch metallic foreign body residing awkwardly within the joint space between his femur and his tibia. At the time we were using old plain film x-rays, so I snatched a copy down from the light box and showed it to him. A look of realization then trekked crossed his face.
This young man explained that he had spent the previous evening out at some sketchy nightclub dive partying with friends. The music was hot, and the women were even hotter. At one point he was fishing around in the right front pocket of his blue jeans for a cigarette when he brushed the trigger on his cheap .25 ACP handgun. The pistol discharged and startled him, but no one else was the wiser. The muffled sound of the gunshot was drowned out by the DJ’s thumping beats. Nobody around him even noticed a gun had gun off. So, this maniac kept right on partying.
Fantastic Voyage
As near as we could tell, the diminutive bullet had transited from right to left, narrowly avoiding his manhood along the way. The round then entered his left leg via his medial thigh and tracked downward until it came to rest within his joint capsule. There was a tiny red spot on the skin that was, no kidding, no more impressive than might be a typical mosquito bite. That’s what passed for an entrance wound. The young man got a little queasy when I explained how close he had come to shooting himself in the penis.
I consulted the orthopedic surgeons and introduced them to their new play date. They fished the slug out and sent the kid home with some antibiotics and a little pain medication that he likely sold to somebody else. No harm, no foul. After all, a guy’s gotta eat…
The lessons to be gleaned from that kid’s sordid sojourn in the ER are legion for gun owners who carry. For starters, gun safety is no joke. Anyone dim enough to pocket carry a hot pistol loose in their Levi’s likely shouldn’t collocate their heater with their smokes. That and, as is invariably the case, always pack enough gun. That adorable little .25 ACP will only just barely kill you. In this case, the wounded was literally able to walk away.
I recall a conversation with a Dayton police officer back in 1972. He told me of a man who had answered his door to be confronted by his girlfriend’s ex. Ex emptied 7 rounds of .25 acp at bad breath range into him, the final round entering his mouth and exiting under his left ear, which knocked him unconscious.
He was taken to the ER, treated, and released the next day with his jaw wired shut. Being a heavy-set individual NONE of the other six rounds had done anything more than superficial damage.
“Never carry a .25. If you do you might shoot someone with it some day and if you do and he finds out about it he is likely to be very angry with you.” – Col. Cooper
Bullcrap. Both the author above and the venerable Col Cooper (sorry, Colonel, all due respect sir) are showing their biases.
Should one carry as powerful as he/she reasonably can? Of course. No disagreement there. But don’t ever…EVER…dismiss a .22, .25, or other “mouse cartridge” as being worthless. My best friend from my youth died from a single .22LR as a young adult. Grown bears have been recorded as being killed with a single .22LR to the skull. Yes, a .25 ACP might only serve to piss off an attacker sporting ample muscle mass or clothing, but change your aimpoint from center mass to the ocular area and things get spicy real quick.
TEHO, but not all of us are “Reacher” size and can stuff a .50AE Deagle in our waistband. I’m a fan of 9mm subs such as the Shield or Hellcat, but if I were in a situation and only had a .22LR micro available, I’d certainly take it over a bat or rock to throw.
Shot placement, shot placement, shot placement.
I’ve seen it work both ways. I know a then young man shot in the face at close enough range to leave powder burns with a .25 and it did little more than mess up his sinuses. And I’ve seen people dropped with a .22LR at 200 yards. Sometimes it’s just sheer dumb luck with the smaller/lighter caliber weapons. Some punk gets a 380 mag dump center mass and has impressive scars and thinks he’s bullet proof. Mad woman tries to scare cheating boyfriend and puts a .25 center mass by mistake and he’s ended by a single round through the pump.
I concur. The average person is not going to stop and ask you what caliber of bullet you plan on sending his way. The same goes for the color of the gun. Can’t you see this play out: A guy tries to attack and take hostage a female that carries a pink .22 caliber handgun. She draws the weapon and points it directly at him, and he doesn’t have a gun. What’s his first reaction? Excuse me mam, but that little pink toy you have their isn’t going to do squat. Not likely. In that case, a gun is a gun. And 2-3 rounds might not kill him instantly, but it’d be enough to back him off. Might not stop a bear, but it can stop a man.
For many, many years I pocket carried “mouse” guns. Most times it was when I was somewhere that you couldn’t take something larger, but I also kept it in my pocket on the jobsite. No pocket holster, just loose in the pocket. It never discharged and it was always loaded and at the ready.
These days I still carry a little mouse gun, but it’s my backup. I still carry it in my pocket, though these days it’s a cargo pant pocket. It’s still loaded and at the ready should my primary weapon malfunction or run out of rounds. (highly unlikely I run out of rounds as these days I carry the S&W M&P 5.7 with 23 round capacity) But I still keep the old mentality of “two is one and one is none.”
Next time you have the misfortune of having to draw your weapon, ask the person who’d be on the receiving end if caliber matters when it’s pointed at them and see how they answer.
The heck is going on in Dayton?
When my buddy ended up in the ER there (life-flighted from another town) for a GSW to the dome from a .22, the attending neuro doc told us all that my buddy was the first small-caliber headshot they’d ever seen that was conscious and had a decent prognosis. The vast majority died shortly before or after imaging or were permanently, and quite severely, crippled.
He went on to say that the gun-guy in him (he was a gun guy, as it turned out) loved small caliber firearms but the doctor in him kinda-sorta wished he could make all the .22 varieties along with .32 and .25ACP plus .380 disappear from the Dayton area because they were far and away the rounds that killed or permanently fucked up the most people who came through the ER/neuro ward.
Easily concealable and several to the chest plus one to the head tended to get it done, at least well enough to make sure that your competition was out of the game. The ‘bangers #1 choice in that area of the world according to this guy.
He suggested that the right remedy in situations like my friend’s was to avoid the hospital by getting a bigger, better gun, learning to use it and shooting them before they shot you with whatever ghetto blaster they happened to be carrying.
SW Ohio is a very strange place.
dayton shmayton, sin city to athens via lake vesuvio.
“SW Ohio is a very strange place.”
Dayton is a small city of contrasts, to be sure.
“…lake vesuvio.”
Lake Vesuvius in the Wayne? I’ve hunted down that way in the past, pretty jagged country, really enjoyed it.
Somebody was drankin’
In the pre cell phone days I had a cousin shot himself in the leg with a .45. Got himself to the car and then the ER without help.
I also watched a guy walk into an ER under his own power with the handle of a steak knife sticking from his chest. I must assume that the entirety of the blade was in his chest.
It’s one of those things they teach in basic First Aid and EMT training.
Do NOT pull out the embedded object..
Let the surgeons do that.
This subject has been beaten to death, and this sounds like a story from years ago. Why are we talking about it in 2024?
Here’s the obligatory “I’ll see your wound anecdote and raise it with a death anecdote”
https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2000/09/27/gun-purchase-turns-into-a-sword-attack/
Would I carry a 25? No. If my choice is a sharp pencil or a 25, I’ll take the 25.
“We” talk about it because there’s some silly chit about 22 lr being a viable defense caliber lately. Never any talk of 25 except here. Any gun is better than none but if it’s just for intimidating maybe not. Some lame dudes use BB guns & fake crap to rob🙄
A Kel- Tec P17 in .22lr makes a decent defensive pistol for an extremely recoil shy person, or the severely arthritic. Then again, a Ruger Security .380acp would work a lot better.
Biden classified docs report shows enough evidence to invoke 25th Amendment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb1YBY6xRE0
apehanger mike was shot in the face point blank by a shorty with a .25. mike was fine; shorty’s last day.
bedrocks bar is long gone.
A shot in the heart is a shot in the heart, doesn’t matter the caliber as long as there was enough penetration to make it through. A shot to thr knee is a miss with a .25ACP,, 32ACP, 45ACP. or even 10mm. This “enough gun” Fudd Lore is getting old when almost all DGU’s happen at bad breath ranges. But mall ninja away if it makes you feel better. Hits matter, anything outside of the vitals is a miss.
Nikita Tesla,
“This ‘enough gun’ Fudd Lore is getting old when almost all DGU’s happen at bad breath ranges.”
Yes and no. The more that a caliber/platform penetrates and destroys tissue, the more effective that caliber/platform will be at incapacitating an attacker.
Consider the story above. While the “hero” was able to walk around with a .25 ACP bullet in his knee, I doubt that a 165 grain expanded hollowpoint .40 S&W bullet would have been so “gentle”. More than likely, that 165 grain .40 caliber bullet would have blown through his knee and caused so much damage that his knee joint could easily have been toast. And even if the bullet had somehow lodged in his knee, I doubt that he would have been walking around with an expanded .40 caliber bullet in his knee joint with not much more than minor pain.
Don’t get me wrong–I am not advocating that everyone should carry around .357 Magnum, .40 S&W, .44 Magnum, .45 ACP, etc. What I am saying is that the more substantial calibers are quite a bit more likely to cause more substantial damage which should, in turn, provide a greater disincentive for an attacker to stop his/her attack. My personal advice to family and friends is carry .38 Special or 9mm Luger at a minimum. And if they insist on carrying .380 ACP, then they better load it with high-performance Underwood 90 grain XTreme Penetrator bullet cartridges.
But, but, “tHeRe’S nO sUcH tHiNg aS sToPpInG pOwEr!!! ShOt PlAcEmEnT iS fAr mOrE iMpOrTaNt ThAn CaLiBeR!!!
Muh modern powders and bullets, muh, muh, muh
What is with the weird capitalization thing Jonny? Are you twelve years old or something?
“…weird capitalization thing…”
It is meant to add a tone of mockery to the text.
.25 ACP launched from behind and into C2, C3 or C4 and it’s lights out…
Someone managed to collect and sort a LOT of data on the fatality rate of the most common handgun calibers. While larger calibers had a slight edge over smaller calibers, the difference was unremarkable since all handgun calibers are “weak sauce” (with the possible exception of .44 Magnum and larger high-pressure calibers shooting full power loads and high-performance hollowpoint bullets).
Having said that, I will add an important detail which the data and subsequent analysis did not review: larger calibers make larger holes which are likely to incapacitate faster than smaller calibers and their corresponding smaller holes.
Look at it this way: while both .22 LR and .45 ACP will impart fatal wounds with good shot placement, you stand a better chance of surviving if the .45 ACP incapacitates your attacker significantly faster than .22 LR. Do attacks play out that way in the real world? Perhaps. As far as I can tell, though, how fast a defender dissuades or incapacitates their attacker is mostly a function of shot placement and how determined (or drugged-up) the attacker is.
Conventional wisdom tells us to carry the largest caliber that we can shoot quickly AND accurately. I subscribe to that conventional wisdom and recommend the same to you.
Yes. I’ve linked to it before. .380 did just fine. I often carry that in the summer simply because it’s easy.
I owned a Baby Browing just like the one pictured, sold it for $100 to a close friend who loved it more than I.
Good grief. Many writers on TTAG have told me there is no such thing as “stopping power.” If that had been a .357 he’d have lost his leg, and quite possibly bled to death before an ambulance could reach him.
100%, although if it had been a 357 revolver the chances he would accidentally have shot himself in the first place are extremely slim.
The concept of ‘stopping power’ is not an actual thing. It’s something to ‘believe in’. Either you do or you don’t. Since it’s initial creation, 9mm has stopped plenty of people. So has many other things. Arrows have been known to do that too. Just like poisoned blow darts.
Where it is very true that calibers that produce bigger holes tend to end the fight faster, the human consciousness acknowledging just being shot (regardless of caliber) is often enough to make someone run away. Thereby ending the fight.
We can debate the so-called one-stop-shot all day long but that never had much of an effect on a particular vice president and his shotgun in a boat. As far as I know, this shooter is still out there.
Don’t get me wrong here. I completely believe in the power of .357mag. It’s simply not the be-all end-all of effectiveness. Otherwise, no one would have anything else.
I have a S&W 442 in my pocket now. It’s in a Mitch Rosen pocket holster. I’m not worried about it discharging at any parties I won’t be attending.
I also like to pocket carry. It’s the 642 or LCP, and occasionally the Max-9. Always use a pocket holster. 💥
Here we go again. Another attack against a pocket gun caliber. This is gun industry propaganda. An attack on the competition. Let me say it again.
“Any gun is better than no gun at all.”
Several years ago. An 8 year girl used her 22 caliber single shot Cricket rifle, to defend herself against 3 teenage boys who broke into her home.
The invaders were arrested.
If your attacker is frightened away or is shot and runs away while bleeding, then you have successfully defended yourself.
The goal is to stop the threat. It’s not necessary to shoot the bad guy all the time.
There are far more women who are alive today, because they carried a woman’s gun. A 25acp semi auto. Is a 38 special snubby revolver better? No that is an experts gun. I suggest folks use wadcutters. They shoot much softer.
The best snubby caliber is a 32 s&w. Or a 38 colt if you can find one. Both are far more controllable than a snubby in 38sp.
Been looking for a P-32 for a while now for a lady friend. Hard to find isn’t the half of it.
I have a couple of DeSantis Super Fly holsters. They work great.
That is on my to buy list!!!
This reminds me of the “Lucky bastard!” scene in Lock, Stock.
In the early ‘80s my next door neighbor was an Officer in the City PD. He was off duty, in line at the local bank when a young punk walked in with a .38 Spl in his hand and announced a holdup. My neighbor pulled his Colt .25 from his pocket, said “____ PD, drop the weapon”. The punk looked at the tiny little pistol and laughed. My neighbor shot him through the eye and dropped him dead right there. I would never trust my life to a .25 but that day in the bank it delivered.
A study done some decades ago showed that the most deaths were from the .25 acp and the .32 acp. I imagine that has changed now with all the junk plasticky micro .380 and 9mm handguns that now infest the gun market.
One shooting a number of years ago was very sad and tragic and shocking. A church group was picking apples in if I remember correctly was Cleveland, Ohio when a bunch of scumbags drove by and shot a kid through the heart with a .177 pellet gun. The kid was dead before he fell off the ladder.
In another tragic shooting a kid who just got a pellet gun for his birthday shot a 6 year old girl and killed her.
Once again we have irresponsible parents buying what they think is just a pellet gun not realizing how deadly a pellet gun can be. There is a damn good reason Britain restricts the velocity of pellet guns sold to the public (no magnums). The British know that many gun owners are just irresponsible morons. It goes with the hobby.
I remember reading in the now defunct “Gun Week” which was a damn good weekly gun paper that one lady cab driver was kidnapped and was about to be raped and strangled by a serial killer. The killer even took her glasses away so she could not see. She fooled him and pulled out a .25 acp and blasted him with a clip full and he fell dead while trying to strangle her.
I remember at a local bar a guy was jumped by 3 thugs and he shot and killed all three with one shot a piece with a .25 acp.
Another moron gun owner heard from.
He’s not a gun owner -he owns a Internet access device which allows him to do web searches and Internet research that substitutes for real knowledge. It’s merely cut & paste “wisdom.”
He claims to have used guns and owned them for decades. You know. A hobby. So by his own statement he is likely a moron.
Well, not likely. We know for a fact he is.
While I agree that shot placement is extremely important, my aim is still going to be center mass. If I get a headshot, it will likely be by accident. Now, if I DO get a center mass hit, what do I have to hit them with to make them stop? That said, I’d rather hit center mass with a .22lr than miss with the .357 sitting back home in the safe.
Or you could hit them with a 357 you carry, there are a plethora to choose from that are slim or even pocketable.
2nd attempt to post in 2 days
A study done some decades ago showed that the most deaths were from the .25 acp and the .32 acp. I imagine that has changed now with all the junk plasticky micro .380 and 9mm handguns that now infest the gun market.
One shooting a number of years ago was very sad and tragic and shocking. A church group was picking apples in if I remember correctly was Cleveland, Ohio when a bunch of scumbags drove by and shot a kid through the heart with a .177 pellet gun. The kid was dead before he fell off the ladder.
In another tragic shooting a kid who just got a pellet gun for his birthday shot a 6 year old girl and killed her.
Once again we have irresponsible parents buying what they think is just a pellet gun not realizing how deadly a pellet gun can be. There is a damn good reason Britain restricts the velocity of pellet guns sold to the public (no magnums). The British know that many gun owners are just irresponsible morons. It goes with the hobby.
I remember reading in the now defunct “Gun Week” which was a damn good weekly gun paper that one lady cab driver was kidnapped and was about to be raped and strangled by a serial killer. The killer even took her glasses away so she could not see. She fooled him and pulled out a .25 acp and blasted him with a clip full and he fell dead while trying to strangle her.
I remember at a local bar a guy was jumped by 3 thugs and he shot and killed all three with one shot a piece with a .25 acp.
One time at band camp…
As was mentioned above, anything is better than nothing. And a larger projectile, with more energy behind it is likely to do more damage and marginal impacts will produce enough shock to convince even drug or rage fueled miscreants to cease and desist in their attack.
Smaller caliber weapons are more dependent on shot placement and sometimes are not going to stop the perp from continuing their assault. Sometimes the toy poodle gets the pit bull by the testis and sometimes it becomes the chew toy.
My advice has always been to carry and train with the largest caliber weapon you can comfortably use and accurately shoot. And yes, there is some consideration to concealability as well. Not everyone is able to conceal something like the 1911 type I carry. But, since I am a large young un, I can get away with it. And the micro pistols some favor are hard for me to hold and contort my finger down to the trigger. My wife’s little micro nine disappears in my hand.
All in all, usually, larger, more powerful rounds impart more terminal energy and have better expansion if using expanding/hollow point bullets.
If he had shot himself in the penis you would have needed to call a brain surgeon
Doc Dabbs is our modern day Faulkner
When it comes to firepower, bigger is better. In real life though, carrying a firearm for self-defense requires a compromise — a combination of power, weight, size, ease of handling and specific environmental circumstances. If I’m in outback Alaska, a .500 Desert Eagle would be a good choice. If I’m going to church or attending an event with large crowds, I would want something more easily concealable. If I’m jogging, biking, walking, etc., I would want something even smaller to carry. It depends upon the circumstances. Working in uniform, I carried something bigger with more firepower than when I worked UC. Any caliber will kill you. I have worked numerous homicides where the lowly .22LR killed them just as dead as a .45ACP. A defensive handgun should be big enough to get you out of the danger zone — that’s all you need. If you are police or military and your job is offensive use of firepower, then load up to max capability by all means. Wyatt Earp said it best — ‘I prefer a .44, but in a pinch, any gun will do’. Good advice from someone who had done it and lived to tell about it.
I know two men who were shot with a .25, and the bullets bounced off ribs. Another case a man was hit 4 times on the skull, and was mightily pissed off. But then we had 5 homicides where each decedent went down with one shot each. Two were shots to the back and the other three were head shots.
Col. Cooper carried a .45 because there was no .46. Having a father and several cousins that were LEOs, when the issue revolver was a S&W model 10 loaded with standard 158 grain bullets, heard of numerous cases where those rounds failed to stop a felon even with a center of body hit. Note that in the 50’s, 60’s, and even into the 70’s that most felons were not high on drugs. Mob hitmen back then would use a 22LR handgun but would aim for the head/throat, and fire numerous rounds. A 22LR, 25 ACP, and for some, a 32 ACP handgun are useful for self-defense. Downside is that they require shooting at near contact distance, and a high degree of knowledge about the human body, because only a “Kill Shot” will work.
And that’s why the 9mm got such a bad rap.
They load the damn thing like a .38 special and GET .38special performance.
Luger designed it to be a high pressure, high velocity round.
I run CORBON P 115gr JHP and get over 400 ft/lbs at the muzzle, and they use a reduced ‘muzzle flash’ powder.
Expensive, yes, but for carry / defense ammo, it helps to raise the chances of really screwing up some dirtbags day…
Perhaps the author ought to realize that John Hinkley almost killed President Regan with a 22lr bullet, I believe. It’s not necessarily the size of the bullet but the placement and if I recall correctly, it just missed the President’s heart.
A retired paramedic of my acquaintance told me a story, perhaps true, of a call in which he’d participated, in which domestic violence had escalated. A gentleman was beating his girlfriend. She shot him through the heart with a .38 Special J-frame loaded with wadcutters. When the paramedics got there, a few minutes later, he was sitting calmly on the curb smoking a cigarette. He died in surgery, but he walked out of the apartment, down the steps, and out to the street under his own power, and got in the ambulance unassisted.
A retired cop I used to know told me of an incident in the 1990s where a mentally ill guy was stalking a woman and broke into her home to threaten her. With another five-shot J-frame .38, she fired all five shots, hitting with four of them. One missed. The other four hit him in the head and face. All four skidded off his forehead and cheekbones and did not enter his skull, leaving him disfigured and momentarily dazed. He didn’t even fall down and he hardly slowed. She was reduced to yelling at him and hitting him over the head with it when he continued to advance. The only reason she lived is because he didn’t feel like killing her that day.
Back around 2017 or thereabouts I heard of a law enforcement lethal force incident in Ohio. There was a traffic stop, and the driver, it was learned later, had multiple prior violent felony convictions and multiple violent felony warrants out for him. He got out of the car and began blasting with a potmetal .380 and hit one of the officers in the neck, who later died of a severed carotid artery. While dying, the officer returned fire with a Glock 22 and got more hits than misses, despite his fatal wounds, and he wasn’t the only cop there. The bad guy soaked up over twenty rounds of .40 caliber hollowpoints, seventeen of them to the body cavity. The other cops on the scene had to chase him twelve blocks and taze him, and it still took four guys to get the cuffs on him. He was still fighting when they put him in the ambulance and he was still fighting when he got to the operating room, though he did die a few days later of multiple organ failure.
More recently I saw body camera video, which was almost immediately taken down, of an intoxicated mentally ill individual taunting and threatening police officers with what was later found to have been an unloaded hunting rifle. He was attempting to commit suicide by cop and eventually won himself nine pellets of #00 buckshot in a pattern four or five inches across that looked like it was centered just above his navel. The impacts were visible. He did not fall down. He dropped the rifle and began staggering back and forth, shouting obscenities. It took both responding officers to get the cuffs on him. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, but none of the pellets hit his spinal cord and for a couple of minutes he was in a fighting mood.
Back in the 1890s, when their officers were armed with .32 caliber blackpowder service revolvers, the NYPD began recording statistics about how many rounds an officer expended, on average, when there were incidents in which he had to defend himself or others with lethal force. That number has held steady at between two and three for a hundred and thirty years, and other agencies report numbers within margin of error of that, decade after decade. All of this is despite “powerful” .38 Special revolvers replacing the .32s, “scientific” aimed fire, weapon lights, “realistic” silhouette training using paper targets with scoring rings, tritium sights, weapon mounted optics, and hollowpoint bullets, each of which was supposed to change everything.
“Stopping power” is a myth. It appears to be principally a psychological phenomenon. The guy in Ohio with the felony warrants didn’t even have alcohol in his system–he just knew that if he got caught he was going back to prison for a very long time, and he was determined not to go back. To the extent that anything correlates with anything it seems like better bullet placement stops fights faster, and destroying more tissue stops fights faster. But barring the shot that hits the brain or spinal cord–much harder to do when someone is charging you with a rusty machete in a dark alley than when it’s a paper silhouette hanging motionless in a well lit range–it mainly seems to come down to how badly the other guy wants a piece of you.
All of that having been said, I am personally really, really unenthusiastic about anything below 9mm, either for my own use or to recommend to others outside of the elderly or infirm whose physical limitations preclude them from being able to use anything more effective. A 400 foot-pound 9mm bullet, whether or not it upsets in soft tissue, is more likely to smash through bone and keep on going than a < 140 foot-pound .38 wadcutter from a snubby, or any .380 or .32 or .22. Energy is the capacity to do work. Breaking through hard barriers like bone is work. Human beings are not homogeneous blocks of calibrated 10% ballistic gelatin. People don't think kinetic energy be like it is, but it do.
“It’s a big gun when I put it on, but it’s a big gun when I pull it out”
-Clint Smith
“Big gun, big cooperation”
-Brother Grimm
Which nobody can deny?
I’d love to see an event where a victim pulled a mouse gun out and the attacker said haha that’s a .22/.25/.32 and won’t do squat. A gun is a gun. Sometimes you go places that a larger weapon simply isn’t feasible to carry. I carried a .22 or .32 for years on the jobsite. It was far easier to conceal and that was the goal as to keep customers from getting nervous should they see something. It was always loaded and ready to go. Most of them had no functional safety. Never once was I worried about it discharging in my pocket. The only downside is there is a ton of lint in your pockets so it needs to be torn down and cleaned more frequently. These days I own my business and I do what I want. I still carry most days, though my business isn’t a cash heavy one so there isn’t a lot to steal at my office beyond office supplies and old computers. I also keep a 9mm in a desk drawer and another in a quick release safe under the desk. They stay in the desk. The mouse gun stays in my pocket.
I had one occasion in which I did draw the mouse gun that I just recalled, it being so long ago. Probably late 90’s or early 2000s I went to see Chris Rock’s comedy show in Atlanta. I felt like the token white guy in this auditorium. It was 99.9% black attendance, and besides our group of 4 (two white guys, two white women) I think we saw 3 other whites in the place. I’m not stereotyping, but it’s easy to see when your presence isn’t desired. As we left the venue a homeless guy walked up and pulled a knife. I turned and already had my hand in my pocket. He said wallets now. I said how about this pointing my little .22 at him? He departed the area in a hurry. He didn’t question caliber. In my 25 years of carrying a weapon, that is the only time I ever had to draw it and that little mouse gun did the job just fine.
Comments are closed.