One morning recently, I woke up to an email from a suicidal woman looking for help buying a gun. I'm sharing this publicly for two reasons:
1. Us gun people do actually care about people and don't want them to commit suicide by any means; and,
2. If this is some sort of weird thing to embarrass us, it's not gonna work.
Here is the email I received:

I should be needless to say, but I've contacted the authorities. Luckily, her email address came back to some Google results, including a phone number, which I was then able to Google to find some professional listings with addresses, so the police in each city were notified. I hope they are able to contact her and get her the help she needs. I was prepared to try and human engineer at least a city and state from her if this failed, but this info seems solid enough to turn it over to the police. Godspeed.

And yeah, prohibited person laws do seem to help.

Once upon a time I thought full-size handguns were the way to go for "duty" carry. You know, law enforcement, open carry in the woods, home defense, and end-of-the-world. Longer sight radius, better grip, more capacity in say a Glock 17. Heck, when I started buying my own guns I was still under the impression of my agency's Sig P226s.

Well as it turns out full-size guns aren't great concealed (or open) carry pieces. They're big, heavy, and the long grip likes to bang into stuff. You sit funny in cars. That's why police cars have "special" seats from the factory in some cases (not sure what's so special about them). That grip length is unnecessary.

There's a reason that special forces gravitate towards the compact Glock 19 and why it's so popular with detectives and concealed carriers. Even a lot of uniformed cops carry them. The grip length is just short enough not to be obtrusive when sitting but long enough to get a proper grip.

Now we're seeing even thinner guns that grip better than the chonky Glock grip, like the Sig P365 or Glock 48 (half a G19). The short grip lengths of the original P365 or the Glock 26/43 aren't ideal for shooting, so we see people really enjoy the longer grip modules that create a kinda inverted L shape.

It's interesting to see how taste has evolved regarding form in guns and how that bigger isn't always better. All of this change and innovation has been driven by concealed carry—the civilian market—whereas before it was all about cops, soldiers, and competition shooters. Nice to live in the time we do.

Review wise, I'm enjoying carrying and shooting the P365 in lieu of the thicker G26 (width is another factor I didn't touch on much here). More practical data when the weather warms up.

All the problems I've been having with my Glock 44 all of a sudden? Resolved by cleaning the chamber and using different ammo. This Magtech stuff disappointed me. Very weak, evidently enough to where it's struggling to cycle the slides and I got a few light "pops" that made me think I had squib loads for a second. Changed over to a variety of other ammo and the gun ran as fine as it has.

The curse of high IQ; you start with the hard problems before going to the easy, most likely ones because where's the fun in that? On the other hand, I won't need to change a spring in this gun for years now probably and when I do, I have spares.  I compared it against my G19 and the skills carry over even with the higher recoil. For what was a short-term testing & evaluation gun, this thing is kicking ass.

So I think my "cheap" ammo will now be Aguila because I've had good luck with that. I'll finish off the 4500 rounds of Magtech I have in a revolver or something. The Federal Punch is a pretty impressive cartridge for a .22 out of a pistol. Loud and accurate. I wouldn't use a .22 for self-defense, but this super high velocity cartridge lives up to the marketing; it's a competitor for CCI's best stuff (though maybe not in price).