NOTE: USCCA Customer Engagement team members get a lot of questions, and they pass a good number of them along to Concealed Carry Magazine Senior Editor Ed Combs. If you have a question, you can either ask it below or email it to editor@usconcealedcarry.com. We, of course, cannot guarantee answers to all questions — Ed’s a pretty busy guy — but we’d love to help you out with whatever’s stumping you.
Jared Blohm
Managing Editor
Concealed Carry Magazine
What Is the Advantage of Shooting at the Center Mass of a Target When So Many People Are Now Using Personal Protection Plates?
Body armor’s been on the American self-defense landscape for decades. And yes, recent improvements in hard-armor technology have made them a lot lighter and more affordable. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
While it is certainly reasonable to train for what to do if you’re facing an armored attacker, the vast majority of violent criminals in this nation do not go about wearing plate carriers. You start to see body armor on criminals when you’re talking about coordinated armed robberies, especially when one criminal faction heads out to raid and rob a rival crew’s stash house. But for what most private citizens may be unfortunate enough to have to deal with, “what if he’s wearing a vest” is pretty far down on the list of worries.
If the rounds you’ve delivered to an attacker’s torso are ineffective for any reason, it’s time for what is called a “Failure Drill” — switching your point of aim from the center of mass to the head. Switching to the pelvic girdle is another good tactic, and often easier to hit than an attacker’s nose.
How Do I Appraise a Gun Collection I Inherit, Especially if I Don’t Know Anything About Guns?
This is always a tough one, though not nearly as tough as it used to be.
First and most importantly, if you really don’t know anything about guns, you need to find someone who does. Even if that’s just calling a gun shop and asking if you may very carefully bring in the guns you’ve just inherited so a competent professional can ensure they are unloaded and safe to handle. It is absolutely imperative no one gets shot who doesn’t need to get shot. Never, EVER put your finger near the trigger of a gun you do not intend to shoot. And never, EVER let the muzzle (the end of the barrel) point at a person. A quick review of the Rules for Safe Gun Handling is always in order as well.
Second, I encourage everyone who inherits guns to keep them within the family (if legal to do so.) Heading out to the range or the field is a wonderful way to “visit” a deceased loved one, and those who sell firearms are almost never able to buy them back again.
But on to assessment.
With all of the issues that can accompany settling an estate, if the collection in question is large, or if you are going to be hiring out the rest of the estate settlement anyway, you may want to allow an auction company to handle the liquidation. They’ll take a cut of everything, but they’ll also allow you to just forget about the process and then receive a check.
If we’re talking about no more than a few dozen guns, ask around with friends and family and try to locate trusted parties who know more about guns than you do. If there really isn’t anyone who can help you out, once you’re certain those guns are safe, it’s time to put on some coffee, wipe down the reading glasses (and maybe even a hand lens) and get to work figuring out just what exactly you’re dealing with.
There is no single place you can go to learn exactly, to a penny, how much a specific gun is worth. Gunmakers have complicated matters over the centuries by discontinuing models, updating models, re-introducing models and only manufacturing limited quantities of models. So unfortunately, a .45-caliber 1911 is not, across the board, a .45-caliber 1911 … and is rarely priced as just a plain old “.45-caliber 1911.”
What you can do is type any words and numbers you see on the barrel or side of the firearm into a search engine. This will most likely get you the model of firearm you’re dealing with. (The most common guns in the country are the most common for a reason.) Once you have that, run a few image searches on it and compare the gun you’re holding to what you find pictures of. Compare the markings and numbers. This will do almost all of the narrowing-down you’ll need to hit the final stop: GunBroker.com.
The beauty of GunBroker is that it’s as close as you can get to finding out what, exactly, a specific firearm in a specific condition is worth. If you run a search on what you’ve got, you can watch an auction for a similar firearm to see what it ends up going for. This is going to be a far more realistic number than anything a gun shop would tell you, since the more any gun sells for, the more GunBroker makes on its commission. A gun shop, on the other hand, has far higher overhead costs. They will likely offer somewhere in the neighborhood of no more than 40 to 60 percent of a firearm’s retail value. (Your mileage will, of course, vary.)
If you choose to sell the guns in question, you can sell them through GunBroker or to a local shop. Either way, you’ll be heading to a local FFL because it is illegal for you to sell someone a gun on the internet and then just mail it to his or her address. Any guns sold online will have to be transferred through federally licensed dealers.
When you stop in at your local FFL to work out the specifics, the dealer may offer you “right-now” money for the guns you’re looking to sell, and that’s a decision you’ll have to make. Last I knew GunBroker takes 6% of the first $250 and 3.5% of anything above that. So depending on the numbers you’ve seen from online auctions and what your local FFL offers you, it may be worth taking the lump sum, or it may be worth figuring out how much he or she is looking to charge for sending each firearm to its new owner.
