Having grown up around numerous firearms (most every member of my extended family is a gun owner), it was never really a question of if I would purchase my own gun, but when. Even though I had obtained a concealed carry permit in my early twenties, I didn’t bother purchasing a gun until I was 26 and worked in an extremely dangerous part of town. After doing a bit of research, I decided I wanted something with more capacity, stopping power, and safety than the .38 caliber revolvers most of my family carried. But I didn’t want to break the bank buying one. Beating the rush by exactly ten days, I walked into a local gun store and paid just over $400 for a brand-new Smith & Wesson Model 410 pistol on September 1, 2001.
