I’m not a gun nut by any sense of the word. I’m also not a gun enthusiast. I’m just a girl who likes to go out and shoot on occasion. Nothing too out of the ordinary, at least not where I’m from. But I’ve never had my own firearm. I never really thought of myself as the gun-owning type. But being married to Andy means being a gun-owner because he owns guns and this is a community property state. As I’ve said before, though, Andy’s XD 40 is just a little too much for me. So it was high time I picked something up that was a little more my style. And since I just graduated from college, what better excuse to buy one than to call it my graduation present.

After looking around and doing a little research, I decided fairly quickly what I wanted: a Walther PPK. For those of you who don’t know guns, think of the tiny gun James Bond tends to use. That’s a PPK. Unfortunately, after nearly an hour of calling all the gun shops in San Diego, Andy had to break the bad news that there wasn’t one to be had in all of San Diego. Apparently, there was a safety recall on the PPKs that were manufactured here in the States. The sliver of good news, though, was that there was a gun show in Costa Mesa. I swear it had to have been my lucky day because we drove the 90 minutes up there and weren’t in the doors 15 minutes when we found one. Even better, it was manufactured in Germany and therefore not under the safety recall.

I’d love to say minutes later it was in my hand and we were out the door, however it didn’t quite work out that way. Andy said we should shop around as that one was priced a little high. So we searched. Took us over an hour to walk through the entire show only to realize it was the only PPK there and we should’ve snapped it up while we could. Again, would love to say we grabbed it and were our way home with it minutes later, but alas it was not meant to be. Apparently, California has a 10-day waiting period for handguns and while I am fully supportive of that law, I also really wanted to bring it home with me. Instead, I left empty-handed but for a sheet of paper stating a pick-up time and that we did indeed own it.

So we waited. Ten days. Ten long days. Including a weekend when we could’ve been having fun shooting it but instead just waited. Because that’s what you do during a waiting period. Ok, so I’m exaggerating. It didn’t actually seem like that long. We finally picked it up 10 days later and the real wait began. The wait for time to shoot it. Luckily, that was only a three day wait. And so the other day, 13 days after buying myself a shiny new plaything, I finally got to actually play with it. Charles also brought his shotgun along, so we had some photo fun.

To see the rest of our photos from the day (as well as from our previous visit to the range) click here.