wife's ccw choice

[thedudeabides]

Ask your woman.

My wife went through no less than 20 CCW options (thankfully I managed to rent most of them).

Find a good range where you can rent and she can shoot. And don't tell her what she wants/needs.

[Bezoar]

you have half the battle taken care of. she has the permitk, wants to carry in real life. and she has access to a gun that she gets the warm fuzzies from when she shoots it and has it in her hand.

Be a smart man and understand.

She is going to carry the keltec. you now carry that armscor

[redhologram]

http://corneredcat.com Great website as someone has already mentioned. I also have the book within arms reach at the moment.
Not sure of a good link to give you to bring you up to date with modern times and thinking, however.
I only carry and shoot semi's. Personal preference. I actually shot a revolver for the first time a couple of weeks ago when shooting with some friends at their range. A friend of a friend saw my 1911 and wanted to shoot it and offered to let me shoot their SW .357 revolver. So we traded for a few. It just didn't give me the same exhilaration. He was in love with mine, however. The trigger work that's been done to mine just makes you almost cry it's so sweet. That being said, about 3 other revolver guys had to come try my 1911 out after that.

Revolvers / Semi - complete personal preference. One isn't better than the other as long as you know how to use it and it will do the job that is needed. My revolver friends tease me about my love of semi's while I dish it right back to them over their "nasty" little revolvers. All in good fun, of course.

My main cc guns are the P238 and EMP 9mm. Had the P938 but ditched it for the EMP. (classic example of personal preference)

Let your wife handled a variety when you get the chance. She will figure out what works best not only for handling but also for her body shape when cc'ing and how she dresses, and still not impeding her ability to get to her weapon in the least amount of time and not being encumbered by things in her way. It's vastly different with females than with males. It took me a while to settle on what worked best for me all the way around.

Good luck!

[TailGator]

Women are just as capable of learning the operations of handguns as men. Stance, grip, trigger control are the same regardless of how your undies are shaped. You will do her the most good if you sit down and talk over the relative merits of revolvers and pistols, and do at least as much listening as talking while you do.

[rodfac]

Pretty good advise there, Tailgator, 'specially the listen part. My wife has spent a good deal of shooting time with her Glock (a 9mm at first, but a .40 now), a Smith 637, and now a Smith Bodyguard .380. There are over 20 hand guns down in the safe, and she's shot them all at one time or another, but carries the 637 90% of the time.

Her reasons differ with the day...wardrobe, where she's going, weight of the piece on her belt or in her purse, hell, probably her hair style....but she carries...and probably 90% of the time now...and that's the important part.

She does it to satisfy my need to keep her protected, to satisfy her piece of mind, and to protect our grandchildren, 'cause without her around, they'd be grandmotherless; this last point, is one that I made to her not long ago, it seems to have hit home.

Best Regards Rod

[pax]

Over the past ten years, I've worked with literally thousands of women as they learned to shoot at a professional firearms training school. To this day, I have literally never met a healthy adult woman who could not be taught how to rack the slide on a semi-auto with less than an hour on the range -- and 99.99999% of those took less than 5 minutes to learn the simple, strength enhancing technique that makes racking the slide an easy no-effort thing. Racking the slide is almost entirely a matter of technique, not strength.

In contrast to this, I have met dozens of women who did not have the hand strength to reliably pull the trigger on a double action revolver for more than a few rounds. This does not matter for self-defense, of course -- unless it does! -- but it makes regular practice nearly impossible. The tricks you can use to make pulling the trigger less difficult for someone with low hand strength nearly all require you to do something contra-indicated in a self defense situation, such as cocking the hammer (decidedly slower, more finicky when the incident is over and your hands are shaking) or using two fingers on the trigger (you may not have two hands available to use). You can adjust where your hand rides on the gun to increase your leverage, but that has limited effects. You can mechanically lighten the trigger pull weight, but that often comes at the expense of the gun's reliability. And that's about it for technique adjustments available to the revolver. What this means is that pulling the DA trigger is almost entirely a matter of hand strength, with very few reliable technique tricks that make the job easier.

Not only so, but many women discover that the super small lightweight revolvers often recommended specifically for women are among the most difficult and least comfortable guns to shoot. Slightly larger guns tend to be much more comfortable for most shooters, which means shooters who start on a slightly larger gun will more likely get the practice they need in order to build reliable self-defense skills.

Related to this, whenever you take a revolver and compare it to a semi-auto within a similar size and weight class, you'll find that the semi-auto almost invariably provides less perceived recoil to strike with the same energy effect on target; that's because the motion of the slide does absorb some of the rearward energy as the shot fires. That absorbed energy gives the shooter a slightly more comfortable experience -- again making it easier and more likely that the shooter will practice enough with the defense gun.

With these factors in mind, my experience has been that it's much more difficult to teach a new shooter to shoot well with a revolver than it is to teach a new shooter to easily and reliably run a semi-auto. There are specific skill sets unique to each type of weapon, but the challenges with a semi-auto nearly all fall within the "easy to fix with the right technique" category, while those with the revolver seem to be endemic to the weapon.

Also, this needs to be repeated for truth!

Women are just as capable of learning the operations of handguns as men. Stance, grip, trigger control are the same regardless of how your undies are shaped. You will do her the most good if you sit down and talk over the relative merits of revolvers and pistols, and do at least as much listening as talking while you do.

If your preference for teaching with a specific weapon type is built around low expectations for your student -- "It's okay, honey, you won't have to learn anything..." -- that's probably not going to lead to good results in the long run. You will get your best results going in with the expectation that of course this healthy adult person will be able to learn anything about the gun that she wants to learn!

FWIW.

pax

Edited to add: If she prefers a revolver and can easily run it, that's a different kettle of fish. I'm talking here specifically about the idea that everyone must learn on a revolver first -- or that revolvers are ideal specifically for women. It's the one-size-fits-all approach I'm against, not so much against either of the main choices. With caveats, the motivation provided by using the gun a new shooter wants to learn how to shoot often trumps any specific positive or negative factors of the weapon itself.

[STW]

Whenever I see these types of questions I use my wife as an example.
She has five handguns.
Single-six .22
M&P9 9mm
M&P22 .22
SP101 .357
Bersa .380

She shoots and enjoys them all.
The Bersa's home is in her carry purse. Everything else lives in the safe.