Beretta Blog

There’s a great deal of debate when it comes to creating and training for a home defense plan. The decisions you make and the tools you select will come down to what you personally believe you’re trying to accomplish.

Do you believe the best plan is to silently “retreat, retreat, retreat” and hide in hopes either the authorities will arrive or the bad guys will leave on their own before they find your hiding spot? Or are you of the mind to aggressively confront and repel the intruders … shooting if necessary in the process? Or is it your goal to more passively repel them – scare them off – hopefully, without a shot being fired?

On some days – all too rare days – wingshooting seems so easy. It’s as easy as pointing your finger and thinking, “bang!” When that happens, it’s because the clays seem as big as trashcan lids or the pheasants seem to fly in slow motion.

While such days are the ultimate in shotgunning fun and the stuff of the best glory days’ memories, at some point I usually remember that glory never happens without paying for it!

At the conclusion of a particularly humbling round, sporting clays has been called a lot of things by a lot of people. Many of them are not suitable for a family website like this Beretta Blog. However, I vividly remember the two things I said after completing my first ever round of sporting clays in 1984.

The event was media day at the Minnesota Horse & Hunt Club. They had just finished installing their first sporting clays course, but not yet opened it to the public. Members of the press were invited to shoot the “new game” in hopes of providing some pre-grand opening publicity.

As I walked back to the clubhouse, the manager came up and asked, “So, what do you think?”

Heriberto Aceves is dead. The store owner was robbed back in his Bakersfield, CA store in late 2016 and the armed assailants brutally assaulted Aceves and his son. Aceves, though, put up a fight. He had a pistol behind the counter. Though the gun was loaded, the chamber was empty - in other words, "Israeli Carry." As Aceves struggled to rack the slide, his assailant shot him.

Hunting seasons are opening up across our country, and everyone is excited. Dogs shake with nervous excitement to get out of their kennels, and we hurry up to get back into the fields where we belong. There is no shortage of enthusiasm anywhere. You all know the drill, but it makes sense to do a quick refresh of some commonly missed safety practices.

Earlier this year, Arkansas became one of the first states in the country to issue what the state calls an “enhanced” concealed carry permit. The new regulations allow those with an enhanced endorsement to carry a concealed firearm many places that are off limits to those with the standard CHCL: public college campuses, churches, even bars. Are these new permits a step in the right direction for those of us who carry concealed?

The instructor of the course I attended to acquire my first Minnesota Permit to Carry was a goofball. The six-plus hours of classroom instruction were heavy on his tales of bounty hunting adventure and his personal political and religious views. They were vapidly light on meaningful content. Though this was nearly a decade ago, and I have attended much better “thinking man’s” carry training since, one piece of good advice from “GI Joe” still rings loud in my head:

“There is nothing worth killing for that isn’t worth dying for.”

Our weekly Wednesday night sporting clays league was a welcome respite from hectic days at the office. All of us on the team – the regulars, anyway – worked at the same mid-sized company. Though we focused on different departments, we were all under the thumb of the same “Man.” You know, “… working for The Man.”

Gun ownership continues to grow at record levels in the United States, and concealed carry permits are increasing right alongside gun sales, reaching record levels last year with no end in sight. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that the majority of people who go to the trouble and expense of getting a concealed carry permit don’t carry a pistol on a regular basis. When I went through my CCW class in Arizona many years ago, our instructor said that only a third of us would commit to carrying our guns on a regular basis. Based on my experience since then, I think he was optimistic.

Just after I graduated from college, I found out that a friend I’d known forever was carrying a revolver. Carrying might be too generous a term. It was in the glove compartment of his pickup truck, and he didn’t have a permit.