My mom wants a gun

[tluxtele]

I'm not sure where to put this... or if this even fits in with what this site is about... but I figured you guys might be the best ones to help me. I don't post a lot but I read often and respect you guys a lot.

I'm not going to go into all the details but I'll tell you the basics. My mom has reason to be afraid of a family member. This family member has gone as far as vandalizing her house and car. She now has a restraining order against him but is unsure of what he will do.

As I was talking to her (the same women who wouldn't let me have a toy gun when I was a kid) started talking about self-defence. I said, "if you were younger I'd tell you to get a gun" and she said, "I'm planning on getting one." She's actually serious. And if she is I want to be as much help to her as I can be. She's still raising my niece (16) and I want everyone to be safe.

My mom is a small woman (maybe 5 feet). She has a bit of arthritis and is 70 years old. I'm really at a loss as to know how to guide her. For one, I'm new to all this myself.

Do you guys have any advice for me/her? Where should I tell her to start? Training? Try out guys? She is still afraid of guns, but she's more afraid of this family member now. I don't want her to rush into anything. But I don't want to tell her to jump through so many hoops that she doesn't have a gun when she needs it.

If this doesn't belong her could you please guide to where I can ask this question. I really want to help my mom.

Thanks for your help in advance.

 

[Scrubber3]

My advice is to get a 38 revolver with the lightest trigger possible and still be safe. They are easy to use and will almost always work. There are light rounds designed for small women so as not to recoil so much.

Be sure she gets the proper training and is confident in her abilities. A conceal carry class would be great as most entail what the local laws are concerning self defense with a firearm.

 

[hso]

The question isn't that easy to answer without finding some other information.

Does she want it for the house?

Does she want it to carry all the time?

What experience does she have with any sort of firearm? Handgun? Rifle? Shotgun?

Does she actually believe that she can use it to prevent this person from harming her and does she understand that we're talking about deadly force and not some absurd fantasy of wounding the attacker?

What role will the 16 year old play in this?

 

[PonyKiller]

it's now a simple question with the children in the house. I will answer it as such, assuming its her and .her alone which as access to the fire arms through the eyes of someone who has a similarly sized wife.
Handgun. Taurus judge. Let her shoot several loads from bird to buck shot and .45LC
.38special in full sized service revolvers.
and lastly but absolutely not leastly
my personal favorite the bantam Mossberg shotguns in 12GA
nothing truely says be cool like a 5' tall woman wielding an 18" 6shot 12ga
load her up with a load or low recoil buckshot, or if it makes her feel better birdshot
than all buck shot of 12ga. at 18" and in from the barrel it's all lethal but if you've got a family member that's feeling a bit frisky, a 12ga and an angry woman is much more persuasive than a .38.

 

[herrwalther]

Sounds similar to a situation my new neighbors are in. Elderly woman who has reason to fear a family member. Never easy no matter how many times I see it.

It does not sound like she has much firearm experience, so simple will be the way to go. And I cannot think of something much simpler than a revolver in a halfway decent caliber. .38 special has some low recoil options available in the 90 grain weight which would probably be an ease on her arthritis. There are also some .22 Magnum loadings which have virtually no recoil at all but are still viable for self defense, just not as much as a .38. Unless she has experience with semi-autos, I would not recommend since they have more maintenance time and relatively harder to put into action, especially pulling pack a slide with arthritis.

 

[rondog]

Snubnose .38. Doesn't get much more simple, basic and reliable than that. And some training. PRO training.

IMO, a Judge is WAY too big and heavy for a 70 y.o. woman with arthritis, who's not familar with guns at all. Not to mention the recoil would scare her to death. Full sized .38 service revolver is also too big and heavy.

And a carry permit!

 

[Dlowe167]

For home defense & its a family member.Id go Taurus Public Defender,beanbag rounds

 

[230RN]

My advice is to get a 38 revolver with the lightest trigger possible and still be safe. They are easy to use and will almost always work. There are light rounds designed for small women so as not to recoil so much.

Seconded, with a concern about the 16yo minor girl in the house. Maybe they both should go through professional training just so the girl knows something about guns, too.

Terry

 

[mljdeckard]

I have to be completely honest here.

I don't have a lot of faith in the notion that someone who is seriously convinced that guns are bad can have one bad experience that puts them in fear, and they become a 'born-again gun person'. Especially as old as she is, I don't know how easy it will be to train out her old tendencies. There is a reason we say; "Mindset, skillset, toolset, in THAT order." We are wondering here if she has miraculously jumped into the mindset part. (And I for one am doubting it.) You're there, you know her better than we do, but think really, really hard. She can't fake this. Nothing good happens when someone has a gun, they are confronted with violence, and they have to decide at THAT moment how they are going to act.

I would keep it simple, sure, a .38 or .357, but not too small or light. I would look for one with a 4" barrel. I wouldn't recommend an auto, because someone her age might have some stiffness or arthritis, and have a hard time racking the slide. I also think a shotgun might be too much for her. (There are ways to train around this, but I'm not sure she will have the time or stamina for it.) And she needs to get to a range where she can crank through several boxes or bullets with it, and not be intimidated by it. And if she just doesn't get comfortable with it, reconsider. Seriously.

 

[Mp7]

A light double barrel shotgun might be an option, too.


That and the noted .38 revolver are easiest to operate.
And to understand. A device she does not grasp functionwise will
stay alien.
( And we know how bad old moms can be at understanding "new" things)


Also ... a .22LR or mag is still better than a club.

 

[Deus Machina]

A smallish shotgun or a 4" .38 are the first recommendations to anyone unfamiliar for good reason.
Trouble handling recoil? 'Reduced recoil' buckshot or lighter .38 loads. Even target wadcutters, if need be. Maybe not super-bearstopper rounds, but .38 wadcutters still make a worrying wound track through gel.
If need be, I'd rather have a small, semi-automatic .22 rifle than a revolver she may have trouble holding. Compared to a handgun, a 10/22 makes it surprisingly easy to put rounds where they need to go.

 

[Pilot]

A 4 inch barrel revolver in .38 Spl/.357 mag using .38 Spl +p loads would be fine. Look at basic Smith & Wesson, and Ruger offerings. Since there is a teen around, I'd also get one of those small, bedside safes that opens quickly with a four digit code.

 

[Al Thompson]

"Which gun" is premature IMHO. As several have mentioned, checking her mindset is first, with a frank discussion about the use of a firearm for defensive purposes.

Second, she's going to need training.

At the end of the day, worry about the tool.

 

[HexHead]

S&W Model 10 with low recoil loads. 4" police trade-ins. I think there was a thread on here a couple of days ago where they were like $229-259.

ETA: They were $299 and here's the thread...

http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=723296

 

[HexHead]

Since there is a teen around, I'd also get one of those small, bedside safes that opens quickly with a four digit code.

Since there is a teen around, I'd teach her how to safely handle the gun as well. She might need to defend grandma.

Teaching a teen gun safety is a far better alternative than locking it up and keeping them afraid of guns.

 

[Kleanbore]

Al nailed it.

 

[beatledog7]

I cannot recommend any firearm to a person who is afraid of guns.

 

[Hanzo581]

I'm going to have to suggest a taser and/or pepper spray in this instance.

 

[Eldraque]

.22 revolver


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2

 

[Carl N. Brown]

I was taken shooting and schooled on safe gun handling and ethical hunting by my dad when I was six. By sixteen I had my own rifle was was hunting with my uncle.

That's how folks like me got introduced to the "gun culture"; growing up with most relatives with rifle or shotgun in cabinet, over mantelpiece, behind farmhouse door, pistol in the nightstand. So the Zero Tolerance people want to break the cycle of gun nuttery by pushing the age limit to touch a gun to eighteen for long guns and twenty-one for rifles.

Then somebody gets in a clear and present threat situation and with zero acquaintance with guns, needs gun (like my late mother-in-law when she was living alone on a dead end road). I think it takes growing up steeped in responsible gun use to safely handle guns, and taking up a gun as weapon with no experience out of fear requires some training. Plus, the four hours class on self defense law in handgun permit class taught me that everything you have heard about self defense in the media (and barbershop, etc.) is BS.

Oh, added: I would recommend .357 Ruger Security Six revolver, with a good .38 Special defense load. And familiarity with self defense laws of your jurisdiction: and I mean case law as the satutes are applied in court (reading the statutes as written is never the whole story).

 

[MedWheeler]

I don't have a lot of faith in the notion that someone who is seriously convinced that guns are bad can have one bad experience that puts them in fear, and they become a 'born-again gun person'.

Arming oneself does not make one a "gun person" anymore than having a car makes one a "car person."

I cannot recommend any firearm to a person who is afraid of guns.

For all we know, guys, she was afraid of guns forty years ago, and lost that over more decades than some of us have been alive. She's 70 now; I think it's been a while since the OP was a kid.

She stated that she developed the plan to get one before the OP brought it up. I wouldn't write off her arming herself just yet. As Al and others have pointed out, more mindset-checking is in order, not a quick attempt to talk her out of it.

 

[akv3g4n]

As others have said, make sure that she has the correct mindset and gets training first.

Then, I would look at one of the Taurus .380 revolvers. Apparently, quite a few recoil sensitive older women in my father in laws retirement community have them and love them.

 

[bannockburn]

I would agree with Hanzo581 and first look into non-lethal options before considering going first to a firearm as her primary personal defensive strategy.

 

[Fred Fuller]

I'd start by pointing her (and/or your niece!) to http://www.corneredcat.com/ and let her/them start doing some homework. Deliberately carry on conversations with them and see if their thoughts are developing in any particular direction.

Meanwhile consider other defensive options. No doubt there is a knife block or knife drawer in the kitchen, for instance. My wife worked with one of the oldest firearms self-defense instructional programs in the state of NC for women - the Ladies' Handgun Clinic - while she was living in Raleigh. Last I knew Sir Walter Gun Club was still running their evolution of the program - http://www.sirwaltergunclub.com/data/WOT_Flyer.pdf. My wife often suggested alternate weapons for defense at home for women who were unsure about their ability to use firearms in self defense.

Take a look at http://randy.whynacht.ca/archives/10297. On the small table is what appears to be the base unit for a mobile alarm device (Lifeline, etc). You might consider that as an additional option as well as some of the other things that have been and will be suggested here. And of course, there are the alternate defensive weapons stacked in the corner in that picture as well. And the attitude of the lady in that post is one to emulate IMHO...

IMHO discussing defensive weapons is something that should come after the discussion of 'hardening' the home against intrusion is completed and the work of hardening is under way. Improved door locks, window locks, motion activated exterior lighting, alarm systems, clearing or cutting back vegetation which offers concealment, all that stuff. Security come in layers, and a safe room with defensive weapons should be at the inside of several other layers of security - not the first layer.

 

[loose noose]

Your 70 year old Mom needs training first of all before she even considers getting a firearm, such as Al stated here earlier. With her arthritus, and the fact that she never has even shot a firearm in the past would definitely dictate training, and hopefully try shooting a variety of firearms prior to deciding on which gun for home defense. Further the 16 year old niece should also go along with the Mom when the training starts. The sooner the better.