Starting with the most important, a concealed-carry holster needs to safely hold a handgun in such a way that it cannot be inadvertently fired when in the holster. An object that won’t do this is not a holster as far as I’m concerned. It might be a very nice, tooled-leather gun-holder thingie you put on your belt, but a holster it ain’t.Talking with Darryl Bolke over the intervening years has definitely softened my stance on that.
“But, Tam,” you say, “A lot of classic revolver holsters back in the day had cutaway trigger guards! For speed!” I think we can safely say we did a lot of things in those days that weren’t very safe in retrospect, like chain-smoke while pregnant or dump raw sewage in rivers. Let’s not do those things anymore.
A properly-fitted quality leather holster will be snug enough around the cylinder that it is phenomenally unlikely that the cylinder can be turned while the gun is holstered. After all, what's the first thing you do if you're grappling with a dude holding a revolver? Right. You grab the cylinder to tie the gun up.
This does not change the fact that I have seen quite a few poorly-fitted leather or nylon gun-holding belt pouches with exposed triggers that do not hold the cylinder that snugly and I have, in fact, pulled the trigger to demonstrate that fact for their owners.
While I think that as a general rule of thumb, "cover that trigger guard" is a safe principle if you prefer erring on the side of caution, if you're smart enough to tell the difference between a well-fitted wheelgun holster and a substandard sausage sack, get down with your bad self. If it's fitted well enough that there's visible boning for the cylinder, you're almost certainly good to go.
We live and we learn and we adjust our opinions to reflect the things that we learn.
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| Smith & Wesson Model 57 in PWL pancake. |
