Pistols are boring. My husband bought one last year and I just kind of rolled my eyes. Why get something so inaccurate? I'd rather have a rifle or a shotgun any day of the week if I ever felt the need to kill anything.
I know, I know, they are meant for close in work. Some people use them to shoot snakes- but since I have a live and let live policy for snakes, I really don't have a use for a pistol. He uses ours for target shooting- so it's a hand/eye coordination game for him.
When we were in college, he was on the university rifle team and went to competitions across the country, so target shooting is a long term off and on again hobby with him. Neither of us have any expectation or intention of ever using that pistol on a human being. It *could* happen, but it's just as likely to be a cast iron skillet to the back of the head for any intruder I can sneak up on.
Which, I do realize, would probably be lethal.
People on tv are always surviving blows to the head with hard objects, but a fractured skull isn't something you just bounce back up from.
Not that we are going to have any sneak thieves at our place... not with a 135 lb dog roaming the yard outside, alert for intruders. Not long ago on a weekend, we heard the dogs start barking outside, looked out the window and saw a sheriff's deputy patrol car backing out of our driveway like they'd wanted to come talk to us but thought better of it when they saw our big dog. He's a total sweetie, but his job is to bark and warn intruders off, and I guess it's working on people now, too.
As long as bad guys refrain from killing our dogs, we won't have any unauthorized intruders.