Just because By Massad Ayoob

I generally recommend that people buy guns the way they'd buy power tools, or automobiles, or homes. Assess your needs, analyze your budget, correlate it all with your ability to utilize the thing you're buying, and you'll probably be happy with your purchase and get a lot of productive use out of it.
It's the logical thing. Unfortunately, we humans are not always creatures of logic. Sometimes, we are creatures of emotion, and anyone who has dealt with emotion-driven arguments that are without logic — oh, most of the "gun control" arguments, for example — know the downside of that. But emotion isn't always a bad thing.

A gift from someone who loves her, engraved and fitted with ivory grips, this S&W Chief Special Airweight .38 is worn on special occasions by a Backwoods Home reader...just because.

Consider the emotion of "sentiment." Anything can go bad on you, but sentiment is less likely to do that than most other emotions, so long as it is leavened with logic.

I'm sitting here writing this in Connecticut at the moment, up to my hips in sentiment mixed with logic, applied to the gun. It's the last week of a month-long training tour teaching firearms and deadly force, a tour that has taken me through multiple states which have "assault weapons bans" which limit magazine capacity. Some of those states have a ten-round cap, and one, New York, allows no more than seven rounds to be in a ten-round magazine unless one is on a shooting range. Since I'm legal to carry under the Law Enforcement Officer Safety Act of 2004, but bound by local laws as they would apply to private citizens, those limits apply to me.

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