Defending Your Home, Food & Family With a Handgun

As promised in my blog post on defending your home, food and family, here's the last of my suggestions for your must-have weapons.

  A hand gun. A hand gun is a great addition to your home defense plan. When your shot gun or rifle is out of ammo or craps out on you it's great to have a handgun of some kind to fall back on. I say fall back on as a handgun is not the best choice for home defense. A hand gun is a last ditch weapon for when you have nothing better. Handguns are much harder to use effectively and have really limited range.


Choice of Manufacturer & Ammo is Important
Now as to what kind you get that's up to you. Just stick to a well known manufacture. Ruger, Colt, Smith and Wesson or one of the others. And stick to a common caliber like 9mm. .40cal. 38special. 45auto or the like. I love my old .455 Webly but it would be really hard to find ammo for it in an emergency.

My gun of choice is my CZ75. It's a great gun and it fits my hand like a glove. I have mentioned how important it is to pick a firearm that ammunition is readily available for. It should be said that this is of course much more important in a long term survival situation than it is in the short term. If you are only planing for the short term than you may feel that a few boxes of ammo are fine and you are probably right.

Any gunfight you find yourself in will probably be over quickly with only a few rounds fired. Long gunfights are rare. Most only last a few seconds before someone runs away or is shot. For proof of this look at how much ammo your average police officer carries. It's not much.

 One other firearm I like
 In a long term situation you would be wise to have a .22. I myself like the Ruger 10/22. I think it's the best on the market. The .22 my not be the best self defense firearm in the world but it does have a few good points for self defense that are worth mentioning.

#1 the gun itself is cheap.

#2 the ammo is cheap. And as the ammo is cheap you can practice shooting it a lot and you can stock pile so much of it you can afford to waste it. Wasting ammo can be a useful defensive tactic. Large volumes of fire can deter potential aggressors. Some people call this spray and pray. I call it spray to make them go away.

#3 low noise and recoil. Because of the low noise a .22 will attract less attention. The low/no recoil makes accurate shooting easy. It's easy with a .22 to put all your rounds into the target really fast. And it's better to hit the bad guy 2 or 3 times in the chest with a .22 than it is to miss him with your M14. And of course the .22 is great for hunting small game to put some meat on the table.