Carry two

If one is none, in the sense of mechanical failure, then why not carry two? Cops have often carried two guns where permitted, as back-ups to their primary duty rig. Which might have caused His Editorship (former two-gun carrier as a cop) to ask me: "Could you maybe even shoot two guns at once? I mean like, if you had to, or thought you had to?"

So I took two S&W Model 340 M&Ps and did some work with them. If you shoot 2" guns one or two at a time you had better plan on a lot of practice. I'll go on record again here: The five-shot 2" revolver requires a very competent shooter, or a death grip on the throat of your opponent, while you shoot 'em at muzzle-contact distance.

I also tried a pair of high cap autos, and they ran out of ammo eventually too--they just took longer. It wasn't pretty to actually shoot both guns at once. They go off just fine, and you sort of hit stuff if the range is close, along with sometimes hitting everything else that you shouldn't hit.

Fun as this may seem, let's not lose sight of the fact that you're not in a Brace Willis movie, and each round fired will have a lawyer attached to it. So this was done in fun to find out what happens, while always keeping in mind the legal accountability issue of filling the target and surrounding sky with lead. It also kept His Editorship happy.

In reality, it did just what I thought it would do--run two guns, regardless of capacity, out of ammunition at about the same time. So now I still needed to load, or have a third gun handy. Shooting at targets separated by some distance is pretty tough too, as I still haven't learned how to look in two directions at once.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I got decent results when using two guns on the same target at modest ranges, like the width of a car. I tried using a laser and it worked best using the laser on the left gun and indexing the right gun off of it. Two lasers would be complex as they would crisscross and might screw a simpleton like me up. You can sort of point the guns at the target based on range, but honestly, hits are probably based on years of accumulated skill--and then distance to the target. I also never cared much for pointing guns--and shooting. Bill Jordon was great at it, and I'm definitely not him. So, I like looking at the sights.

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