I ran into one of my permit-to-carry students at a New Year's Eve party this weekend. As we caught up, the topic turned to guns (of course). I asked him how much shooting he'd been doing.
“Not as much as I'd like to.” he admitted. “In fact, I don't think I've fired more than 100 rounds through my gun since I bought it.”
Sadly, 100 rounds is a generous amount of use for a pistol. According to a statistic attributed to an executive for Colt Firearms, the average pistol is fired just 7 times over its lifetime.
How do we define “average”? Remembering high school math, we take the total number of rounds fired, and divide it by the number of handguns.
Nobody's sure how many handguns there are in the USA. In 2009 a survey extrapolated there were 57,000,000 people in the US who owned “at least one” handgun.
People like me screw those numbers up; I own way more than one handgun, and most of the people I know own at least two. In addition to that, we shoot a little more than average. My M&P, purchased in 2008, has more than 5000 rounds through it.
The point here is that there are an awful lot of people out there who own guns and aren't shooting them. And that's a perplexing shame.
And scary as this means they are probably not proficient at shooting that pistol and if they ever needed to use it for self defense it could be a bad situation.
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