I thought I would go off on a little different trail tonight. I am not a weapons expert. I was in the Marines and I did fire a number of different weapons. However, I know very little about other weapons but I am learning. The first weapon I bought was a nine mm by Smith & Wesson called an Easy. That was good because at my age, I can definitely benefit from easy.

A lot can be said about the gun. It is easy in many ways, including racking, that is pulling he slide back. Wanting the gun for self-defense that is important. I don’t like walking around with a fully locked and loaded gun unless I expect danger. By waiting to have my weapon fully ready, it does give me just one more chance to reconsider. Also, it is very easy to put 8 rounds each in the magazines. It takes me roughly 20 seconds. I suppose if I were pushing it, I could do better. The followers has levers, so to speak that allow me to push them down and I virtually drop the bullets in.

However, there is no way to access the hammer. It is internal. When I bought the weapon, I thought little of it but found my self wanting to access the hammer a number of times. It was a little frustrating and I had to come up with work-arounds.

Also, I was surprised how heavy it is. Being as I carried a .45 around on my hip for a few years, I didn’t think much of it until I bought this one. The gun itself is not that bad, but when you add 8 rounds of 9 mm ammo, it really pulls at my belt and I start having a fear of walking out of my trousers.

So… I bought a .380 SDS Faith. A .380 is about half the defense of a 9 mm, but I suspect it will get the job done. Besides, I quite likely will never need it for anything other than poking holes in targets. The nice thing about the new gun is that the hammer is external. I’m not going to go through all the advantages of that but it sure is nice.

On the negative side, it is much more difficult to break down and reassemble, with the emphasis on reassemble. It is a good idea to break down a new gun, clean and oil it before firing it. Not exactly sure why, but it’s what the manufacturers say. Needless to say, the fist thing I did with it when I got home was to break it down and clean it. I must say, that part went well.

When assembling it, I couldn’t get the slide back on right. Worse yet, I couldn’t get it back off.

When things like that happened in the marines, I took it to the armorer. He was good at that stuff, really good. Me. Not so much.

I guess for close to two hours I wrestled with that little thing. I started wishing I bought a .45. They have external hammers and other that they are big and heavy, they are really good weapons. Not only that, I can break them down and put them back together in my sleep.

Well, I was just about to give up. I pulled back on the slide and accidentally let it slip from my finger and thumb. Next thing I knew, I had the gun body in my left hand and the slide was about two feet off to my right.

Might I mention, this gun has a very strong spring. Fortunately, I had figured out how I messed up and I had the gun back together in less than a minute.

Now let me tell you something about my M-14. I used to fill the magazines by pushing the bullets through what was called a charger. It took a few seconds to load a magazine with 20 rounds. I wonder if anyone has ever experimented with something like that for a handgun. It is about all I can do to load these little .380s. The mags hold 13. I can only put five in them. I guess they have strong springs too.