Girl-Friendly Home Defense

**Vengeful Scars** · 06-21-2009, 08:47 PM

Originally Posted by Syme

This is not good advice. Your HD weapon's effectiveness should not rely on people deciding to run when they get shot. It should rely on wounding power and thus the ability to incapacitate rapidly. Anything else is irresponsible.

So in order to defend my home I need to be able to kill with the weapon by hitting someone in an easily targeted area(body).

I've only have the experience of shooting a .357, some sort of 9mm, a .22 and I don't remember the name of the other pistol.

If a .22 is not enough to stop an intruder(because unless the person is hopped up on PCP or a ridiculous amount of Adrenaline I think a single .22 shot would be enough to stop someone, and if one isn't that's what the remaining bullets are for), then I'd say a .357 with hollow tipped rounds would be more than enough. But then I do not know if a woman with no experience would be able to fire that accurately, that is why I suggested the .22

Granted I know little about firearms, other than what I've personally used. So my input should be taken with a grain of salt

**Syme** · 06-21-2009, 08:53 PM

Originally Posted by Vengeful Scars

So in order to defend my home I need to be able to kill with the weapon by hitting someone in an easily targeted area(body).

I've only have the experience of shooting a .357, some sort of 9mm, a .22 and I don't remember the name of the other pistol.

If a .22 is not enough to stop an intruder(because unless the person is hopped up on PCP or a ridiculous amount of Adrenaline I think a single .22 shot would be enough to stop someone, and if one isn't that's what the remaining bullets are for), then I'd say a .357 with hollow tipped rounds would be more than enough. But then I do not know if a woman with no experience would be able to fire that accurately, that is why I suggested the .22

Granted I know little about firearms, other than what I've personally used. So my input should be taken with a grain of salt

If someone has no experience, the solution is not to get them a .22; it's to get them experience. Whatever pistol they get for home defense, she needs to learn to use it, which means practice and training. I agree than a .357 might be too much gun for her, but any of a number of 9mm automatics should be perfectly reasonable.

Any bullet is capable of killing people, including a .22; remember that the security guard who just recently got killed at the Holocaust Museum was killed by a single bullet from a .22. However, there is a minimum threshold of wounding ability that a gun should meet in order to be able to reliably incapacitate someone, and a .22 falls below that threshold even against people who aren't hopped up on PCP or something. It can certainly kill someone, but it can't be relied on to rapidly incapacitate them, because it doesn't inflict much of a wound channel. Peppering someone with tiny, weak bullets in the hopes that multiple hits will incapacitate them is not the right way to approach the home-defense issue.