5 Guns EVERY American Should Own…

On the 28th of February, 1997, two men walked out of a bank in North Hollywood, California, wearing homemade body armor that covered them from the neck down. And for 44 minutes, they held off the Los Angeles Police Department in the middle of a residential street on live television. The officers who got there first had 9 mm pistols and .38 caliber revolvers.

They put rounds into those two men, and the rounds did nothing. So, some of those officers got in a car, drove to a gun shop a few blocks away called B&B Sales, and borrowed rifles off the rack in the middle of the fight. Roughly 1,100 rounds came out of the robbers’ guns. About a dozen officers were wounded. Bystanders were wounded.

And when it finally stopped, the only two men dead were the two who started it. Now, here is the part that matters to you and me. Millions of people watched that unfold from their living rooms. Police departments across this country changed what they carried because of it. And a great many ordinary men sat there watching the smoke and made a decision that day about what the first gun they ever bought was going to be.

I want to ask you whether that was the right lesson to take. Not whether the rifle is good. It is good. Whether a man who is not a police officer, a man with a house and a wife and children and a lane that comes in off the road, ought to start there. So, we are going to talk about five guns.

Which five? And just as important, in what order you should buy them, because the order is where nearly every list on the internet goes wrong. I am not going to give you that order yet. I am going to lay out the candidates first, one at a time, and tell you what each one actually does. Not what the fellow behind the counter says it does.

And at the end, there is a sixth thing on this list that is not a gun at all. And in my judgment, it decides whether the other five were worth a dollar of the money you spent. Hold on to that. We cannot start at the end. Start with the smallest one because the smallest one is the one people laugh at. The .22 rimfire. The cartridge itself dates to 1887.

The .22 long rifle, older than the automobile, older than powered flight, and still by a wide margin the most produced cartridge on this earth. Billions of rounds a year, not millions, billions. The rifle most men mean when they say .22 is the Ruger 10/22, which came out in 1964 and has never once left production since.

Ruger says more than 10 million of them have been built. Only the Remington 870 and the Mossberg 500 are anywhere near that company. Here is the thing about that little rifle that most owners have never been told. It’s rotary magazine, the flush one, the one that does not hang down under the stock. That idea is not Ruger’s.

It goes back to the Mannlicher Schoenauer bolt action and Arthur Savage’s Model 99 lever gun. Bill Ruger borrowed it and used it for a good mechanical reason. A rimmed cartridge stacked in a straight column wants to hang up on itself, rim catching rim. Lay them in a wheel and each one sits in its own pocket and cannot touch the next.

The whole reason that rifle feeds as well as it does is a solution to a problem that was solved decades before it was born. Now I have to correct something you will hear because I have heard it my whole life and it is not true and it is not harmless. You will hear a man you can kill anything from a ground squirrel to a moose with a .22.

You cannot. Not lawfully. Nearly every state that regulates big game forbids rimfire for deer, let alone elk or moose, and it forbids it for a reason. And not decently, either. A .22 will absolutely kill an animal that size eventually, after that animal has run a very long way and suffered a very long time. That is not hunting.

That is a wounded animal in somebody else’s timber. If a man tells you that with a straight face, take everything else he says a good deal lighter. What that rifle really does is this. It kills the raccoon in the corn, and the possum in the hen house, and the groundhog whose hole will break a horse’s leg. It puts rabbit and squirrel on the table.

And it does the thing no other gun on this list can do, which we will come back to. Second candidate, the shotgun. And for our purposes, the pump gun, which for most Americans means a Mossberg 500 or a Remington 870. The 500 came out in 1961. Mossberg has built something on the order of 10 million of them. It has two extractors instead of one, which matters more than it sounds.

It has the safety on top of the tang, where your thumb already is, and where it works the same whether you shoot right-handed or left. And the barrel comes off with one knurled nut, which is why you can buy that gun as a combination. A short barrel for the house, a longer vent ribbed barrel with choke tubes for birds and for deer, where slugs are the law.

Let us talk about buckshot, because there is a myth here that has gotten people in serious trouble. A standard two and three quarter inch double aught load holds nine pellets, each about 33 hundredths of an inch across. Nine pellets, each one about the diameter of a small pistol ball, all leaving at once. And people hear that and conclude that a shotgun does not need to be aimed.

That you point it in the general direction and the room takes care of itself. That is wrong and the numbers say so. A rough working figure for an open bore is about an inch of spread for every yard of distance. Across an ordinary room, say 7 yards, that is a pattern you could cover with your fist.

You have to aim that gun exactly the way you aim a rifle. There is no magic spread doing your work for you. And the second half of that thought is heavier. Nine pellets go out. If eight strike and one does not, that one does not stop. It goes through the drywall and the next wall, and it does not care that your children are asleep on the other side of it. You own every pellet.

The law will treat every one of them as a decision you made. Third, the handgun. The one nearly everyone names is a Glock and the story behind it is stranger than the gun deserves. In the late 1970s, the Austrian army wanted a new service pistol. Gaston Glock was an Austrian manufacturer who made curtain rods, field knives, and entrenching tools.

He had never designed a pistol in his life. He built one anyway, and in 1982 it won the trial and became the Austrian P80, what the rest of us call the Glock 17. The compact, the Glock 19, came along in 1988 and it has been the default American handgun ever since. But, the argument that actually matters about a handgun is not the brand.

It is the cartridge, and the federal government has argued with itself about it in public for 40 years. In 1989, the FBI’s firearms training unit published a study on handgun wounding factors. Yuri Patrick’s work at the Ballistic Research Facility at Quantico. Read it, and it will take the wind out of you. It says in plain language that most of what passes for common knowledge about ammunition is folklore.

It says the only reliable ways a handgun bullet stops a determined man are to break the central nervous system or to bleed him out, and that nothing else, no energy figure, no shock, no knockdown can be counted on. And it says the deciding factor is penetration. 12 in minimum through soft tissue, 18 preferred.

That report is a large part of why the Bureau spent the ’90s and 2000s chasing the 10 mm and then the .40 Smith & Wesson. And then, on the 6th of May, 2014, the FBI training division sent its law enforcement partners a summary explaining why it was going back to 9 mm. Their own reasoning included this. A surgeon or a medical examiner looking at a wound track cannot tell you whether it was made by a .

35 caliber bullet or a .45. The wounds do not sort themselves by caliber. What sorts them is where the bullet went and how deep. 40 years, the same agency, back where it started. Anybody who tells you the caliber argument is settled has not read either document. Fourth, the centerfire rifle. The AR pattern, the black rifle, the .556.

Eugene Stoner designed it at ArmaLite in the late 1950s. Colt bought the rights in 1959, and the story everybody knows is that it went to Vietnam and jammed and got men killed. That much is true. What almost nobody knows is why. And the why is the most useful thing in this entire video. By 1967, the failures were bad enough that the House of Representatives formed a special subcommittee under Congressman Richard Ichord to find out what had happened.

Their report came out that October, and it did not blame the rifle. Three things had gone wrong, and not one of them was Stoner’s design. In 1964, the military had approved a different propellant for the cartridge than the one the rifle was developed around, a ball powder instead of the original stick powder.

It ran the action faster and fouled it worse. Second, the chamber was not chrome lined, so it corroded in that climate, and a corroded chamber grips a fired case and the extractor tears through the rim instead of pulling it out. Third, and this is the one that ought to stay with you, the rifle had been sold to the troops as needing little cleaning.

So, cleaning kits were not issued in anything like the numbers required. Men were handed a rifle and no way to maintain it. The subcommittee’s language about the officials who let it happen was blunt enough that men lost careers over it. And soldiers wrote home describing dead Marines found beside rifles they had stripped down trying to clear.

The gun was not the failure. The ammunition it was fed and the upkeep it never got were the failure. Remember that. We are coming back to it. Now, I will say a word here about something I heard a man recommend once, which is that you and your friends pool a couple of thousand dollars, buy a crate of surplus rifles and a pile of ammunition and arm 10 men.

I want no part of that and I will not help anybody do it. I am not raising anything. I am not arming anybody. I have a wife, a house, stock in the barn and one lane coming in off the road and everything I own a gun for is inside that fence line. A man who is buying rifles by the crate for other men to carry has stopped thinking about his family and started thinking about something else entirely and I would ask him kindly to think again.

Which brings me to the fifth candidate, honestly this time. The bolt action. The Mosin-Nagant 91/30 gets named here constantly and it deserves respect. It was adopted by Russia in 1891. Its cartridge, the 7.62 by 54R rimmed, was adopted the same year and is still in front line service somewhere in the world today.

The longest serving military cartridge on Earth, better than 130 years old and still going. But I am not going to let you believe an outdated price. There was a stretch of years when those rifles came into this country by the shipping container and sold for less than a hundred dollars with a bayonet in the box.

That time is over, and it is not coming back. The surplus dried up, the crates emptied, and prices have multiplied several times over. If somebody tells you to arm a dozen men cheaply that way, he is quoting a market that no longer exists. What has not changed is the principle. A used bolt action in a common chambering with a modest scope on it and a hundred rounds through it will still reach farther and hit harder than anything else we have talked about for less money than any of them.

And while we are on the subject of things men repeat without checking, the suppressor. A suppressor is not illegal in this country the way people assume, but it is regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934. That means a federal application, fingerprints, a two hundred dollar tax stamp, and a wait measured in months.

It also means some states forbid them outright, regardless of what the federal government says. And it does not make a rifle silent. It takes a report that would injure your hearing and turns it into a report that is merely loud. That is genuinely worth having, mostly so a man does not go deaf and can hear his own children in the field.

But if the reason a fellow wants one is so that nobody can hear what he is shooting or when, I would tell him plainly that he has just described poaching, and he should examine that thought before he spends the money. One more minute and I will give you the order. I know you have been ranking these yourself since about the second one, and I would guess you have me starting where every list starts.

Hold that guess a little longer. The order itself is not the interesting part. The reason behind it is. All right, here it is. The five, first to last. The .22 rimfire, the shotgun, the handgun, the centerfire rifle, and the bolt gun. Now, watch what that order is built on. It is not built on how bad the worst day could be.

Every list you have ever read is built on that, and that is exactly why they all start with the rifle. Those lists are ranked by the severity of the emergency. Mine is ranked by how often the problem actually shows up in a man’s life. The rimfire is first because you will use it this week. Varmints in the garden, a possum in the coop, meat on the table, and here is the part I said we would come back to.

It is the only gun on this list you can afford to shoot enough to actually become good with. A man can put 500 rounds through a .22 for the price of a box or two of centerfire. Every skill that matters carries over. Sight alignment, trigger press, breathing, calling your shot, all of it. The shotgun is second because it covers the widest ground of any single gun made.

Birds, small game, deer where slugs are legal, and the house at night. The handgun is third because it is the only one you can have on you while you are doing something else. And because a handgun is a compromise weapon, the FBI’s own studies say so. You do not carry a handgun because it is powerful. You carry it because it is there.

The rifle is fourth because it is the answer to a day that God willing will never come to your lane. It is worth owning. It is not worth owning first. And the bolt gun is fifth because reach is the rarest need of all. Now the sixth thing, the one that is not a gun. It is the ammunition you send down range and the hours you spend sending it.

Look back at everything we covered tonight. Miami and North Hollywood turned on what the rounds did after they hit and on what the men behind them had been trained to do. Vietnam turned on the powder in the cartridge and on cleaning kits that never showed up. The FBI reversed 40 years of doctrine because bullets improved and because shooters shot better with less recoil.

Not one of those turned on which gun was in the rack. So hear me. A man with one shotgun and 5,000 rounds behind him is better armed than a man with a safe full of rifles and one box of shells he has never opened. The gun is the cheap part. The gun is the part you can buy in an afternoon. Everything that decides the outcome costs time.

Which means my practical counsel is this. Buy one, shoot it until it bores you, then buy the next. And whatever is in your hands, the rules do not bend. Every gun is always loaded. Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target and you have decided to fire.

Know your target and what lies beyond it because in a house at night what lies beyond it is a wall and past the wall is somebody you love. Lock them up. Not because the law says so, but because a curious child is a certainty and an intruder is a maybe. And know your law. I cannot give you yours.

It changes across state lines, across a provincial border, across an ocean. What you may own, what you may carry, how many rounds may sit in the magazine, when you may point a gun at a man and when you may not. All of it varies and I am a farmer and not a lawyer. Read your own statutes and sit down with an attorney in your own county before you rely on any of it.

The last thing and then I will let you go. If you ever do use one of these, the shooting is the short part. What comes after is investigators in your kitchen, a prosecutor deciding what to do with you, lawyers and years. Some men who were entirely in the right never sleep properly again. I do not say that to frighten you off owning a gun.

I say it because a man who has looked squarely at the whole cost is a safer man to have one than a man who has only imagined the first 3 seconds. I hope you never need any of the five. I expect you will use the first one by the end of the month. If this was worth your time, stay with me. There is more to say and I will say it plainly.

5 Guns EVERY American Should Own…

On the 28th of February, 1997, two men walked out of a bank in North Hollywood, California, wearing homemade body armor that covered them from the neck down. And for 44 minutes, they held off the Los Angeles Police Department in the middle of a residential street on live television. The officers who got there first had 9 mm pistols and .38 caliber revolvers.

They put rounds into those two men, and the rounds did nothing. So, some of those officers got in a car, drove to a gun shop a few blocks away called B&B Sales, and borrowed rifles off the rack in the middle of the fight. Roughly 1,100 rounds came out of the robbers’ guns. About a dozen officers were wounded. Bystanders were wounded.

And when it finally stopped, the only two men dead were the two who started it. Now, here is the part that matters to you and me. Millions of people watched that unfold from their living rooms. Police departments across this country changed what they carried because of it. And a great many ordinary men sat there watching the smoke and made a decision that day about what the first gun they ever bought was going to be.

I want to ask you whether that was the right lesson to take. Not whether the rifle is good. It is good. Whether a man who is not a police officer, a man with a house and a wife and children and a lane that comes in off the road, ought to start there. So, we are going to talk about five guns.

Which five? And just as important, in what order you should buy them, because the order is where nearly every list on the internet goes wrong. I am not going to give you that order yet. I am going to lay out the candidates first, one at a time, and tell you what each one actually does. Not what the fellow behind the counter says it does.

And at the end, there is a sixth thing on this list that is not a gun at all. And in my judgment, it decides whether the other five were worth a dollar of the money you spent. Hold on to that. We cannot start at the end. Start with the smallest one because the smallest one is the one people laugh at. The .22 rimfire. The cartridge itself dates to 1887.

The .22 long rifle, older than the automobile, older than powered flight, and still by a wide margin the most produced cartridge on this earth. Billions of rounds a year, not millions, billions. The rifle most men mean when they say .22 is the Ruger 10/22, which came out in 1964 and has never once left production since.

Ruger says more than 10 million of them have been built. Only the Remington 870 and the Mossberg 500 are anywhere near that company. Here is the thing about that little rifle that most owners have never been told. It’s rotary magazine, the flush one, the one that does not hang down under the stock. That idea is not Ruger’s.

It goes back to the Mannlicher Schoenauer bolt action and Arthur Savage’s Model 99 lever gun. Bill Ruger borrowed it and used it for a good mechanical reason. A rimmed cartridge stacked in a straight column wants to hang up on itself, rim catching rim. Lay them in a wheel and each one sits in its own pocket and cannot touch the next.

The whole reason that rifle feeds as well as it does is a solution to a problem that was solved decades before it was born. Now I have to correct something you will hear because I have heard it my whole life and it is not true and it is not harmless. You will hear a man you can kill anything from a ground squirrel to a moose with a .22.

You cannot. Not lawfully. Nearly every state that regulates big game forbids rimfire for deer, let alone elk or moose, and it forbids it for a reason. And not decently, either. A .22 will absolutely kill an animal that size eventually, after that animal has run a very long way and suffered a very long time. That is not hunting.

That is a wounded animal in somebody else’s timber. If a man tells you that with a straight face, take everything else he says a good deal lighter. What that rifle really does is this. It kills the raccoon in the corn, and the possum in the hen house, and the groundhog whose hole will break a horse’s leg. It puts rabbit and squirrel on the table.

And it does the thing no other gun on this list can do, which we will come back to. Second candidate, the shotgun. And for our purposes, the pump gun, which for most Americans means a Mossberg 500 or a Remington 870. The 500 came out in 1961. Mossberg has built something on the order of 10 million of them. It has two extractors instead of one, which matters more than it sounds.

It has the safety on top of the tang, where your thumb already is, and where it works the same whether you shoot right-handed or left. And the barrel comes off with one knurled nut, which is why you can buy that gun as a combination. A short barrel for the house, a longer vent ribbed barrel with choke tubes for birds and for deer, where slugs are the law.

Let us talk about buckshot, because there is a myth here that has gotten people in serious trouble. A standard two and three quarter inch double aught load holds nine pellets, each about 33 hundredths of an inch across. Nine pellets, each one about the diameter of a small pistol ball, all leaving at once. And people hear that and conclude that a shotgun does not need to be aimed.

That you point it in the general direction and the room takes care of itself. That is wrong and the numbers say so. A rough working figure for an open bore is about an inch of spread for every yard of distance. Across an ordinary room, say 7 yards, that is a pattern you could cover with your fist.

You have to aim that gun exactly the way you aim a rifle. There is no magic spread doing your work for you. And the second half of that thought is heavier. Nine pellets go out. If eight strike and one does not, that one does not stop. It goes through the drywall and the next wall, and it does not care that your children are asleep on the other side of it. You own every pellet.

The law will treat every one of them as a decision you made. Third, the handgun. The one nearly everyone names is a Glock and the story behind it is stranger than the gun deserves. In the late 1970s, the Austrian army wanted a new service pistol. Gaston Glock was an Austrian manufacturer who made curtain rods, field knives, and entrenching tools.

He had never designed a pistol in his life. He built one anyway, and in 1982 it won the trial and became the Austrian P80, what the rest of us call the Glock 17. The compact, the Glock 19, came along in 1988 and it has been the default American handgun ever since. But, the argument that actually matters about a handgun is not the brand.

It is the cartridge, and the federal government has argued with itself about it in public for 40 years. In 1989, the FBI’s firearms training unit published a study on handgun wounding factors. Yuri Patrick’s work at the Ballistic Research Facility at Quantico. Read it, and it will take the wind out of you. It says in plain language that most of what passes for common knowledge about ammunition is folklore.

It says the only reliable ways a handgun bullet stops a determined man are to break the central nervous system or to bleed him out, and that nothing else, no energy figure, no shock, no knockdown can be counted on. And it says the deciding factor is penetration. 12 in minimum through soft tissue, 18 preferred.

That report is a large part of why the Bureau spent the ’90s and 2000s chasing the 10 mm and then the .40 Smith & Wesson. And then, on the 6th of May, 2014, the FBI training division sent its law enforcement partners a summary explaining why it was going back to 9 mm. Their own reasoning included this. A surgeon or a medical examiner looking at a wound track cannot tell you whether it was made by a .

35 caliber bullet or a .45. The wounds do not sort themselves by caliber. What sorts them is where the bullet went and how deep. 40 years, the same agency, back where it started. Anybody who tells you the caliber argument is settled has not read either document. Fourth, the centerfire rifle. The AR pattern, the black rifle, the .556.

Eugene Stoner designed it at ArmaLite in the late 1950s. Colt bought the rights in 1959, and the story everybody knows is that it went to Vietnam and jammed and got men killed. That much is true. What almost nobody knows is why. And the why is the most useful thing in this entire video. By 1967, the failures were bad enough that the House of Representatives formed a special subcommittee under Congressman Richard Ichord to find out what had happened.

Their report came out that October, and it did not blame the rifle. Three things had gone wrong, and not one of them was Stoner’s design. In 1964, the military had approved a different propellant for the cartridge than the one the rifle was developed around, a ball powder instead of the original stick powder.

It ran the action faster and fouled it worse. Second, the chamber was not chrome lined, so it corroded in that climate, and a corroded chamber grips a fired case and the extractor tears through the rim instead of pulling it out. Third, and this is the one that ought to stay with you, the rifle had been sold to the troops as needing little cleaning.

So, cleaning kits were not issued in anything like the numbers required. Men were handed a rifle and no way to maintain it. The subcommittee’s language about the officials who let it happen was blunt enough that men lost careers over it. And soldiers wrote home describing dead Marines found beside rifles they had stripped down trying to clear.

The gun was not the failure. The ammunition it was fed and the upkeep it never got were the failure. Remember that. We are coming back to it. Now, I will say a word here about something I heard a man recommend once, which is that you and your friends pool a couple of thousand dollars, buy a crate of surplus rifles and a pile of ammunition and arm 10 men.

I want no part of that and I will not help anybody do it. I am not raising anything. I am not arming anybody. I have a wife, a house, stock in the barn and one lane coming in off the road and everything I own a gun for is inside that fence line. A man who is buying rifles by the crate for other men to carry has stopped thinking about his family and started thinking about something else entirely and I would ask him kindly to think again.

Which brings me to the fifth candidate, honestly this time. The bolt action. The Mosin-Nagant 91/30 gets named here constantly and it deserves respect. It was adopted by Russia in 1891. Its cartridge, the 7.62 by 54R rimmed, was adopted the same year and is still in front line service somewhere in the world today.

The longest serving military cartridge on Earth, better than 130 years old and still going. But I am not going to let you believe an outdated price. There was a stretch of years when those rifles came into this country by the shipping container and sold for less than a hundred dollars with a bayonet in the box.

That time is over, and it is not coming back. The surplus dried up, the crates emptied, and prices have multiplied several times over. If somebody tells you to arm a dozen men cheaply that way, he is quoting a market that no longer exists. What has not changed is the principle. A used bolt action in a common chambering with a modest scope on it and a hundred rounds through it will still reach farther and hit harder than anything else we have talked about for less money than any of them.

And while we are on the subject of things men repeat without checking, the suppressor. A suppressor is not illegal in this country the way people assume, but it is regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934. That means a federal application, fingerprints, a two hundred dollar tax stamp, and a wait measured in months.

It also means some states forbid them outright, regardless of what the federal government says. And it does not make a rifle silent. It takes a report that would injure your hearing and turns it into a report that is merely loud. That is genuinely worth having, mostly so a man does not go deaf and can hear his own children in the field.

But if the reason a fellow wants one is so that nobody can hear what he is shooting or when, I would tell him plainly that he has just described poaching, and he should examine that thought before he spends the money. One more minute and I will give you the order. I know you have been ranking these yourself since about the second one, and I would guess you have me starting where every list starts.

Hold that guess a little longer. The order itself is not the interesting part. The reason behind it is. All right, here it is. The five, first to last. The .22 rimfire, the shotgun, the handgun, the centerfire rifle, and the bolt gun. Now, watch what that order is built on. It is not built on how bad the worst day could be.

Every list you have ever read is built on that, and that is exactly why they all start with the rifle. Those lists are ranked by the severity of the emergency. Mine is ranked by how often the problem actually shows up in a man’s life. The rimfire is first because you will use it this week. Varmints in the garden, a possum in the coop, meat on the table, and here is the part I said we would come back to.

It is the only gun on this list you can afford to shoot enough to actually become good with. A man can put 500 rounds through a .22 for the price of a box or two of centerfire. Every skill that matters carries over. Sight alignment, trigger press, breathing, calling your shot, all of it. The shotgun is second because it covers the widest ground of any single gun made.

Birds, small game, deer where slugs are legal, and the house at night. The handgun is third because it is the only one you can have on you while you are doing something else. And because a handgun is a compromise weapon, the FBI’s own studies say so. You do not carry a handgun because it is powerful. You carry it because it is there.

The rifle is fourth because it is the answer to a day that God willing will never come to your lane. It is worth owning. It is not worth owning first. And the bolt gun is fifth because reach is the rarest need of all. Now the sixth thing, the one that is not a gun. It is the ammunition you send down range and the hours you spend sending it.

Look back at everything we covered tonight. Miami and North Hollywood turned on what the rounds did after they hit and on what the men behind them had been trained to do. Vietnam turned on the powder in the cartridge and on cleaning kits that never showed up. The FBI reversed 40 years of doctrine because bullets improved and because shooters shot better with less recoil.

Not one of those turned on which gun was in the rack. So hear me. A man with one shotgun and 5,000 rounds behind him is better armed than a man with a safe full of rifles and one box of shells he has never opened. The gun is the cheap part. The gun is the part you can buy in an afternoon. Everything that decides the outcome costs time.

Which means my practical counsel is this. Buy one, shoot it until it bores you, then buy the next. And whatever is in your hands, the rules do not bend. Every gun is always loaded. Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target and you have decided to fire.

Know your target and what lies beyond it because in a house at night what lies beyond it is a wall and past the wall is somebody you love. Lock them up. Not because the law says so, but because a curious child is a certainty and an intruder is a maybe. And know your law. I cannot give you yours.

It changes across state lines, across a provincial border, across an ocean. What you may own, what you may carry, how many rounds may sit in the magazine, when you may point a gun at a man and when you may not. All of it varies and I am a farmer and not a lawyer. Read your own statutes and sit down with an attorney in your own county before you rely on any of it.

The last thing and then I will let you go. If you ever do use one of these, the shooting is the short part. What comes after is investigators in your kitchen, a prosecutor deciding what to do with you, lawyers and years. Some men who were entirely in the right never sleep properly again. I do not say that to frighten you off owning a gun.

I say it because a man who has looked squarely at the whole cost is a safer man to have one than a man who has only imagined the first 3 seconds. I hope you never need any of the five. I expect you will use the first one by the end of the month. If this was worth your time, stay with me. There is more to say and I will say it plainly.