Heidi Yewman
Heidi Yewman, board member of the Brady Anti-Firearms Campaign and an activist who organizes anti-gun demonstrations in her home state of Washington, recently had a bright idea.
My hands are shaking; my adrenaline is surging.
No, it’s not from the latte I just inhaled or because this is the first time in two years I’ve been in a Starbucks since declaring a boycott on its open-carry gun policy.
What’s got me jittery this morning is the 9mm Glock that’s holstered on my hip. Me, lead gun policy protester at the 2010 Starbuck’s shareholder meeting. Me, a board member of the Brady Campaign. Me, the author of a book about the impact of gun violence, Beyond the Bullet.
Yes, I bought a handgun and will carry it everywhere I go over the next 30 days. I have four rules: Carry it with me at all times, follow the laws of my state, only do what is minimally required for permits, licensing, purchasing and carrying, and finally be prepared to use it for protecting myself at home or in public.
Why? Following the Newtown massacre in December, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, told the country, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.†I wondered what would it be like to be that good guy with a gun? What would it be like to get that gun, live with that gun, be out and about with that gun. Finally, what happens when you don’t want that gun any more?
I decided to find out.
It would be fitting, plot-wise, if Heidi happened to find herself armed and present at a crime scene and drew that Glock, made a citizen’s arrest, then converted completely and was found thereafter shooting caribou weekends with Sarah Palin and serving as the local NRA firearms safety instructor. But I suspect it won’t happen.
For one thing, it is not apparent that, despite all the tumescence and pumping adrenaline, she has ever actually loaded that Glock.
Gun-dealer Tony deserves a good swift kick in the slats for selling a really-safety-less Glock, the handgun of choice for people who need to shoot themselves in the leg, to a person totally unfamiliar with automatic pistols, firearms generally, and gun safety, who is a chick to boot.
Glocks have their virtues. They are cheap, reliable, low maintenance, and easy to shoot, but they are a terrible choice for someone like Heidi as a first gun. She would have been a lot better off with a J-Frame Smith & Wesson .38 Special Revolver. Autos are too complicated, too difficult for novices like Heidi to understand, and too easy to make mistakes handling. Especially Glocks, which are autos pretending to be revolvers with a pretend safety on the trigger. Besides, Glocks are black, made of industrial synthetic material, and are ugly. Heidi’s first gun ought to have had some actual beauty of line and design, so that it might have at least some small chance of insinuating its way into her affections.
Of course, it is not only the clueless Tony, but Heidi herself is to blame if something goes wrong. Americans have a right to keep and bear arms, but anyone who is going to do so also has a personal responsibility to seek advice and instruction so as to choose the right weapon and to know how to handle it safely. Simply going out, buying the first gun some yoyo offers you, and then driving down the street needing to ask a cop to show you how to take out the magazine and investigate whether your gun is loaded doesn’t cut it. I will grant that the scene of the pistol-packing and trembling-with-adrenaline hoplophobe approaching an on-duty cop and trying to explain that she is armed and clueless is damned funny though. Heidi probably never even realized that with the wrong cop or if that Glock had really been loaded the result could have been her own arrest.
She never mentions any of this, but Washington state requires a permit for concealed carry, and the same permit is required to have a loaded handgun in your car.
Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.
Dallas
Remind me to stay 1000 yards away from this loon.
The only thing more dangerous than a bad guy with a gun; is an idiot with a gun.
She is approaching it like a lab experiment without life or death consequences.
Like all liberal pukes, she thinks this can work out like a thought experiment on ‘Converging Cultures or some crap.
If she is ever faced with a real gun toting bad guy, she will point the gun at arms length with ‘hands shaking and adrenaline surging’ and demand that Mr. Bad guy goes home.
“Lady it’s a gun! You better file the front sight off so it wont hurt so bad when Mr. Bad Guy shoves it up your A**!”
Thomas
The defining characteristic of Liberals is they Will particular ends without being willing to pay for the means necessary to reach those end. She wants the end of knowing what it’s like to pack a gun as a part of one’s life, but she is going to do so without paying for the means of training and, more importantly, the proper mind set, which is not even on her mental map. So, having emotionally primed herself, and having established a paper thin cover story of having reached out to the other side for understanding, she will find exactly what she is looking for. In this case, she will conclude, in the editorial pages of the NYT no doubt, that guns are simply a security blanket for the insecure, bitter, dead-enders who hate diversity. Thus are Progressives failures turned into validations.
Kip
Yes, she’s acting like a child. Yes, she is irresponsible for not seeking out adequate training. But you are wrong for dogging the gunstore owner for selling her a Glock.
It’s true that Glocks do not have a manual safety. Suggesting a J-frame over a Glock for that reason is ridiculous, because J-frames don’t have a safety either. Furthermore, the mere presence of a manual safety does not automatically make the shooter a safe shooter.
And the idea that an automatic pistol is too complex for a novice female shooter to manage is preposterous, and downright sexist. Pistols are not complicated machines. Even if (worst case) no formal instruction is sought, Glock instruction manuals do an excellent job of explaining how to load/unload/clean/breakdown the weapon. Granted, she is not an intelligent woman, but if she can drive a car to Starbucks, she has the mental capacity to operate an automatic pistol.
A Glock chambered in 9mm Luger is an excellent choice for a female. They are lightweight, have low recoil, an easy to manage manual of arms, reload quickly, and have twice the ammunition capacity of a .38 revolver. The .38 kicks more, is tougher to reload, and is harder to shoot.
A .38 is a good choice if you need a small, easy to conceal gun. She’s carrying openly, and also uses it as a house gun. Tony knows what he’s talking about. You don’t.
Really? She should have purchased a pistol based on how subjectively pretty it is?
Side note, Glocks actually have three passive safeties: the trigger safety, an internal striker block safety, and a striker that isn’t fully cocked until it is prepped by by the trigger press.
Keep your boogerhooks off the bangswitch until you are ready to shoot, and the gun will not fire. I promise.
GoneWithTheWind
Reminds me of the “Supersize Me” movie in that it was a foregone conclusion what they were going to try to prove/justify. Hype everything that agrees with your preconclusion and hide everything that does not.
alanstorm
Ironically, if she ends up not shooting herself or another, it proves the assertion of gun owners that it’s not the weapon, it’s the person holding it.
She does appear to be a moron, though, doesn’t she? She whines about how easy it is to get a weapon, not realizing that she’s gone through at least one background check, which would presumably have stopped her if she was a criminal.
She reminds me of Obama – utterly unwilling to acknowledge the responsibility she’s taken on.
Paul
“Reasoned Discourse” seems to have broken out on that site. I left a fairly critical comment that was moderated into nowhere, and I have read responses others say they have posted that are also absent. I guess if we don’t support her brave struggle to prove a preordained point we don’t make the cut.
cactusjack
So based on her theory, I ‘m going to go buy a violin and carry it around for a month–then write an article telling everyone what it’s like to be a musician. A gun is like any other tool–if you don’t know how to use it properly, you have no business fooling with it until you learn how.
Bob Bacon
So I wonder what happened. Did she just get her jollies, then sell the gun for “recreational drugs”, or did she actually learn something from this exercise?
Please Leave a Comment!