I bought my first handgun in NYC when I was 18, for personal defense. I bought it from a cabbie who sold handguns to 2 of my 3 roommates. We were going to school in NYC and daily walked from Spanish Harlem to Harlem to go to school. At nights, the streets and corners in the 70s and 80s (70th, 71st, etc.) were rife with Mulatto gangs and it was a bad area. They had finished filming West Side Story, and the construction pits for the Lincoln Towers were still used for rival gang warfare, as they were in the opening scenes of the movie.
The gangs, pimps, drug dealers (only had heroin then, not all the other stuff you hear about today) and whores ruled the streets in Spanish Harlem in the mid-60s and it was rough. I saw my first prostitute slashed by a knife for not working hard enough, saw my first cop shot by a drug dealer and then saw him shot down by four other cops, I regularly saw stabbings and slashings, and when I worked in Roosevelt Hospital's emergency room on weekends I would see as much carnage as I saw in Vietnam.
It was a good buy and it was worth it. Mikey.