09:55 – It was 64.3F (18C) when I took Colin out around 0640 this morning, mostly cloudy and with a light misty drizzle. Barbara is gone all day today doing various things, and then gone most of the day tomorrow.
More email from Lisa overnight. She made a run yesterday and picked up 100 rounds of #00 buckshot for their 12-gauge shotgun and five bricks of .22LR ammo, which is all the place had in stock. As it turns out, they won’t need to join a gun club or shooting range. One of their neighbors has a 100-yard range set up on his property and had already offered them the use of it any time they liked. Her sons already did the basic gun safety course, and the four adults were already all competent on gun safety. She downloaded some standard targets from a web site and printed out a bunch of them. They plan to have their first practice shoot this weekend.
She bought the ammo at the same place they’d bought the .22 rifles for her sons. When she told the owner that she wanted six bricks of .22LR ammo, he commented that she must be planning to do a lot of shooting. She explained what she was doing, and he suggested she might want to buy some extra magazines for their rifles, which as it turns out are Ruger 10/22’s.
Lisa ended up buying three two-packs of Ruger BX-25 25-round magazines. Her thought was that if they were going to use those rifles for self-defense, it’d be a good idea to be able to reload them quickly. She hadn’t opened the packages yet, and asked if she’d made a mistake and should return them. She paid just over $100 total, which I told her was about as good a price as she could have gotten on-line.
I told her that, although a .22 wouldn’t be my first choice as a defensive rifle, it was certainly a reasonable choice in their circumstances. The .22 is anemic and certainly not known as a man-stopper, but on the other hand no one in his right mind wants to risk being shot with one.
With six of them, they now have three reasonably competent defensive weapons. Even if they decide later to add some AR-15’s or whatever, those 10/22’s will continue to be useful as defensive rifles for one of them who otherwise wouldn’t be armed.
And I suggested she continue to patronize that gun store. They’re treating her right.