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| 92 Elite LTT in Dark Star Gear Orion holster with Dark Wing. |
"[I]n this day and age, leather is a sexual preference, not a valid holster material. Look, I get it. A custom made, tooled leather holster is classic. It’s pure sexiness (see? Sexual preference.). Even for CCW use, it’s suboptimal, for a hundred different reasons that people in the training community (you know, people that actually practice this shit…) have belabored. If you’re still wearing a leather holster, that’s fine, just acknowledge your fetish."...which is sure to trigger plenty of butthurt.
There are good leather holsters, but if you can buy it for fifty bucks or less at your local gun shop, it probably isn't one of them. And by "good", I mean that there's a whole slew of factors ranging from 'has a reinforced mouth and is rigid enough to not collapse when you're rolling around atop it' to 'is thick enough and well-enough stitched to get shoved down your trousers and sweated on for twelve hours a day for five or ten years without falling apart'.
There is, however, one area where I've seen some pretty clueful individuals looking into leather holsters again: AIWB holsters, and for a couple reasons.
One is comfort, in that the leather holster is generally more able to move with the body and naturally devoid of hard corners or projections. A well-designed kydex AIWB, especially with a wedge or pad or Melody's Dr. Scholl's solution will mitigate that, but it's there.
The other reasons have to do with retention. The most common failure mode Craig Douglas has seen for kydex is it just breaks during the tussle. The good ones generally don't, especially when worn by the sort of person who inspects their gear and replaces it when worn. And again, if it's under fifty bucks at the local gun shop, it's probably not one of the good ones.
The other part of retention is in how the holster retains the gun in the first place. Kydex holsters are popular because they're fast. The reason they're fast is that they rely on mechanical retention to keep the gun in the holster. You insert the gun until the holster *clicks* on the trigger guard. When you draw, you apply enough force to cause the holster to let go of the trigger guard and *pop*, that's it. The holster isn't holding the gun anymore. It's all or nothing.
A good, well-molded leather holster holds the gun via friction. (Insert the <$50 caveat here.) When you're rolling around on the ground hyperventilating inside a FIST helmet trying to keep dude from yanking your sims Glock out of the holster and flailing at him with a dull training blade in your other hand, any little bit of help you can get from the holster in ensuring the gun stays put is appreciated.
How important that is to you is, of course, totally predicated on what you consider the likelihood of that scenario.
While I would dearly love a baller J.R. Customs AIWB holster with, like, sharkskin trim for my Wilson because that's my fetish, I'm pretty secure in the idea that my daily Dark Star Gear kydex holster is up to the task.
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