Don’t Buy Your Spouse a Handgun
April 30th, 2019
2 minute read
The number of females choosing to carry concealed continues to rise. From 2013 to 2016, the number of female concealed carry permit holders jumped 62 percent in Washington State — and that’s just one state.
Many of those women, but certainly not all, are married to fellow gun owners. While we love our gun-loving husbands, especially when you’re excited to see us start carrying, we actually aren’t as big a fan of you surprising us with our first handgun to put on our hip — even if we appreciate the gesture.
Buying a Gun for Your Spouse
Before you bought your everyday carry handgun, you probably wanted to test it out, and women are no different. We want to see how it feels in our hand — is it comfortable to hold? Being proficient with our handgun means we’ll be shooting it a lot; if we don’t like how it feels in our hand, we aren’t going to want to shoot it.
I purchased a .380 handgun once about ten years ago, sight unseen, for the purpose of everyday carry. I read all the reviews, researched the model I wanted and ordered it. When it came, I eagerly took it out and tested it — only to realize I hated it. It didn’t fit my hand and I didn’t like the recoil. As a result, I found myself not training with it … and not carrying it every day. That was an expensive lesson.
What Handgun for My Wife?
The same happens when you try to buy a handgun for someone else. If your wife doesn’t like how it feels or shoots, she isn’t going to want to train with it and become proficient. That means she’ll be carrying a gun she isn’t intimately familiar and comfortable with — and that’s an unsafe situation. Worst case scenario, she may not want to carry it at all, defeating the entire purpose. Buying her the handgun you think she’ll like doesn’t mean you’ll get her the handgun she needs.
That doesn’t mean you can’t still get points for Best Present Ever, however. Take your wife to a range where they allow you to try out different guns. Let her hold them, shoot them, and see what she thinks. Everyone is different; she may love the size and feel of a Springfield Hellcat RDP, and she may want to go with something bigger, like an XD 9mm Service Model or even a full-size 1911 for concealed carry.
The point is to let her choose her weapon. After all, she’ll be entrusting her life to it. This will be the gun she will train with, carry everywhere, and possibly even use to defend herself with. You want her to love it — not just for how it looks, but for how well it works for her personally. If you want to buy your wife a handgun, let her choose the one you buy.
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Kit Perez
Kit Perez is a deception/intelligence analyst, author, and homesteader. Basics of Resistance: The Practical Freedomista, Book 1, her book co-written with Claire Wolfe, is available on Amazon. She lives in the mountains of western Montana where she raises dairy goats and Kune Kune pigs in a constant push toward total self-sufficiency. Kit also serves as an EMT on her local fire department.
