A Letter From Mr. Charles Welhausen

An Email Letter From Charles Welhausen of Texas To Lenn Kristal, President, Precision Small Arms, Inc. Dated April 25, 2014  

Lenn,

I’m guessing that it is not so easy selling the Baby Browning pistol to Americans these days. There is this knee-jerk reaction to “pocket pistols” started somewhere by some unknown pseudo-self-proclaimed gun expert (likely some “Bubba” in some mosquito infested swamp) that posits that anything less than .45 ACP is essentially useless. I have read countless posts on gun boards (and I don’t frequent gun boards very much) that start off with someone asking innocently and genuinely what people think of some “small” caliber gun - and the piling on begins! The inevitable response quickly surfaces: “I guess if that’s all you have - but it is not much better than throwing rocks and sticks.” Really? I invite these self proclaimed "experts" to let me empty my PSA 25 into them at point blank range. Or how about into an ear or an eye? I want a carry gun that I can actually carry. I’m not a small guy: 6’1”, 250 lbs. I have tried carrying .45s, .40s, .380's, 9 mm. I can’t get comfortable with any of these. They are always in the way, always an obstruction. I want something I can slip into my pocket. To read the gun boards, one would think that everyone should anticipate military assaults – or maybe the ATF at Waco – where he with the most firepower prevails. Not to get Freudian, but, I think a lot of this "bigger is always better" nonsense is some outgrowth of “my dick is bigger than your dick”.  I’m sort of wondering if the guys with the smallest dicks have the biggest guns. If no one has done a study on this they should! Even here in Texas, where the law places value on the right to defend oneself, the law still says that you should use the least amount of force necessary to accomplish the result, i.e., the least amount of force necessary to stop the aggression. I don’t know that whipping out your .45 and pumping the alleged perp full of holes is always the correct response in every situation. A well known gun dealer in Dallas told me that he was an ER physician for 25 years. He said “I saw lots of gunshot victims shot by .22s and .25s and .32s. I didn’t see many people who had been shot with .45s.” Those people shot by small caliber guns were all in the morgue! I once had to personally go out to face a home intruder who had shot my housemate. I just wanted to stop him, not blow his head away. (I didn’t know that he had already done that and that his brain was lying on the floor of my den.) And that guy was using a small caliber gun.  That’s not the only situation I’ve been in where I needed a gun. I want something unobtrusive. I want something that I can slip into my pocket. I don’t want to have to carry a wheelbarrow with me when I go to the John to accommodate the cannon I carry. I have a friend – a 66 yr old – ex-special forces guy in Vietnam. After Vietnam, he worked as a mercenary. Somewhere in between he was a CIA contract guy. (He never said so explicitly but, it was there between the lines.) What does he carry? A .22 caliber hand gun. Now arguably he doesn’t need a gun at all but the fact is that IF he does need a gun, he relies on a .22. Now I’m not a student of gun history but, I do know that it was not that long ago when .32 was the standard police issue model. It seems that maybe women are the natural customers for “pocket guns”. They are not so reluctant anymore to defend themselves or to use force to defend themselves. They don’t care whether their dick is bigger than someone else’s. They want something small that they can handle and slip into their purse, or pocket, or bra, or panties - or wherever they stash their guns! I don’t know. But, I hope this “nothing smaller than a .45 caliber” mindset passes back into wherever it came from. That’s a lot of firepower! I will tell you this: I recently corresponded with a guy on Gunbroker who had a PSP for sale. He had lots of guns for sale. He had given his sons all of the guns they wanted and he was selling the rest. He had quite an arsenal offered for sale. He told me that the PSP (your 1980's-1990's investment cast model made in Charlottesville, Virginia) had more people watching it and more interest than the others combined. So, my guess is that – secretly – lots of people really do want a new machined billet PSA. We just need to make it okay for them to have a PSA so that they have psychological defense against their buddies who say “my gun is bigger than your gun.” I’ll do my part. I’ll whip out my PSA and show it to everyone who wants to look at it. Ha ha!

Best of luck to you,

CW