Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #253...

Hotel room nightstand shot from TacCon: Taurus 856 T.O.R.O. with a Holosun 507k in a PHLster City Special, six rounds of Hornady Critical Defense 110gr +P in an eight round Tuff Strip, my trusty POM spicy treats dispenser, 500 lumen Surefire EDCL1-T, and a waved Spyderco Dragonfly.

Click the links to steal this look!

(Do I think the Hornady 110gr +P Critical Defense is the bestest load for the .38? Probably not, but it's easy to get the dot sighted in with, and reloads are speedy with those pointy bullets. Its performance is certainly adequate, especially if you're not particularly worried about needing to defeat vehicular barriers.)

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The Best Car Holster!

I’ve come up with* this really badass car holster that attaches to your belt. That way if you have to un-ass your ride in a hurry, the gun comes with you automatically. Even better, it saves you money because you can use it as your restaurant holster and your mall holster, too!

Steal this look!

* I mean, technically PHLster came up with the holster. They're just missing the marketing gold mine of branding it as a "car holster", because the low-information toter sure seems to want a car holster really bad judging by the garbage emails that clog my spam filter.

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Stopping Gun Grabbers

How to stop gun grabbers? (The literal kind, I mean.)

Did you ever wonder what was meant by "Level I" and "Level III" and other ratings for security holsters? There's a good article series underway (Part One and Part Two are already up on the web) explaining the history of the term and how it's applied by Safariland, the successor firm to the Rogers Holster company who originated it, as well as other holster makers who have latched onto it as a marketing device.

If you're gonna walk around advertising you have a blaster, you might want to be able to hang on to it.

Gen3 Glock 37 in a Safariland ALS Level I retention holster.

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Packing the Dot

One of the things I wrote about regarding the optics-ready Taurus 856 TORO when it came out was that the idea of a small-to-medium CCW revolver with a miniature red dot sight was so novel that nobody had really figured out how to holster it yet.

The first holster I tried was a prototype from Dark Star Gear, who basically took their classic Apollo compact revolver holster and cut away a slit to clear the optic. I've used the regular Apollo plenty in the past and it's a great holster for small wheelguns.

Problems arose from the optic-ready prototype, though. It worked fine for carry in the appendix position, well forward of the hip (and the flatter your tummy, the better it worked) but if you tried to carry anywhere over on the strong side, your belt would apply torque directly to the optic. Further, once you drew the revolver, you belt would collapse the area where the optic sat and make reholstering a tricky proposition.

The solution, as my friends at PHLster discovered, was to add a little garage for the optic...

I've been carrying this setup strong side at 3 o'clock for several weeks now. It's comfortable, your belt doesn't foul the optic, and reholstering is a breeze since if basically acts like a funnel for the muzzle.

For the best in comfort and concealment, it's even available assembled on an Enigma Express rig from PHLster, ready to put on and go.

I need to get this setup into a class and really put it through the wringer, but after almost a month of carry and a fair bit of dry practice, I haven't had an issue with it yet.

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Holster Fail

You know what's like fingernails on a chalkboard to me? When someone takes one of those spring-clip IWB holsters and uses it as an OWB holster on the wrong hip. Like, a right-handed holster will have the spring clip on the right-hand (outboard) side of the holster, so that the holster is inside the waistband and the clip goes on the outside. But some goobers look at these and assume the clip is to allow it to be clipped outside the waistband on the other hip.

Only slightly less wrong are the people who take a clip-on IWB rig like that and stuff it between the waistband and the belt like the gent in this photo is demonstrating...

WRONG!

The belt is barely supporting the holster there, and the whole thing is going to flop around like a freshly-caught trout at any pace more vigorous than a brisk walk.

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Never Deal in Absolutes

So, the latest weekend knowledge dump from Greg Ellifritz linked a column about holsters that I wrote for Shooting Illustrated some five years ago. In that column I made an absolute statement with which I no longer agree, or at least not entirely.

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.

“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.

Talking with Darryl Bolke over the intervening years has definitely softened my stance on that. 

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.

Smith & Wesson Model 57 in PWL pancake.

Retro Kydex

I mentioned that this past weekend I was using a Raven Concealment Systems Phantom holster set up for IWB use with my Glock 37.

The Phantom is made by old-fashioned kydex bending and has long been replaced in the RCS catalog by the more mass-production-friendly injection molded Eidolon and Perun holsters.

They're doing a batch of old-school Phantoms by pre-order only this summer, though, and for a first, you'll be able to get a Phantom for the Colt Python or Smith & Wesson L-frame. I don't think that's been possible since the old days where the RCS guys would set up at the Indy 1500 and bend kydex to order.

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Seven reasons you shouldn't buy a PHLster Enigma

Frank, informative, and classy.

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Classic Carry

Thank you so much to the friend who hooked me up with a classic Milt Sparks Summer Special for my Smith & Wesson 3913's.

A classic pistol in a classic holster. Makes me want to put on some Wayfarers and maybe shop for an ankle rig for my Model 37.

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Size Matters, Except When It Doesn't

Taurus's older Model 85 small-frame .38 Special revolver was a five-shooter almost exactly the same size as Smith & Wesson's J-frame family, enough so that they fit the same holster.

Despite the protestations of some Taurus fanboys that the new 856 is the same size as the 85, just with an extra charge hole somehow magicked into the cylinder, it ain't. It's a bigger gun.

Here's a Taurus 327, built on the same frame as the 856, side-by-side with a Smith & Wesson 432PD. Both are .32-caliber six-shooters, albeit the Taurus is chambered for .327 Federal Magnum while the Smif is a .32 H&R Mag.

With warm .32 H&R Mag, like the 100gr LSWC from Ventura Munitions, the Airweight Smith is right on the edge of the dreaded "brisk-but-manageable" territory, which is old-school gunwriterspeak for "each shot felt like getting smacked in the palm with a tee ball bat". I tend to favor Federal 95gr LSWC ammo for carry for that reason. No, it doesn't expand, but it's got a nice flat meplat and sharp shoulder and it has yoinks of penetration.

On the other hand, being all steel and therefore a bit heavier, plus having just a teeny bit more grip, the Taurus 327 is plenty controllable with any .32 Mag load you put in it. With .327 Fed, on the other hand, it takes a lot more work for me to keep the muzzle from pointing skyward between shots.

While the Smith is light and small enough to be a coat pocket gun, that's not a role I'd ask of the Taurus.

On the other hand, in a tuckable AIWB belt holster like the Dark Star Gear Apollo, they're essentially the same size...

As an aside, I really wish they hadn't discontinued those compact hard plastic original gangsta J-frame Lasergrips. The closest these days are the LG-105s, which have the same abbreviated "boot grip" contour and smooth plastic construction that won't stick to your shirt like soft rubber does, but I think the placement of the second finger was better for me on the originals.

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Magnum Monday

A lot has changed since I bought this Smith & Wesson 629-1 over twenty years ago.

For starters, at the time four hundred and fifty clams seemed like a crazy lot of money for a used Smith revolver. These days an early Lew Horton snub like this one will bring multiples of that tariff...three or four times that sticker, maybe more if it's a pristine safe queen, which this one obviously isn't anymore. I've put honest holster wear on it in that time.

Back then, if you wanted to carry reloads, you were limited to pretty much the HKS 29-M speedloader. In those days, speed strips for anything other than .38/.357 were pretty much unknown. Not anymore, though; now you can get them for the .44 also.

Nowadays I'm more likely to carry the QuickStrips with just the outboard pairs of rounds filled and the center two holes empty. Both Claude Werner and Grant Cunningham have me pretty well convinced that the ability to rapidly and positively load a pair of rounds is of more practical value than having every last hole in the strip filled with a cartridge.

The holster was bought about the same time as the revolver. It's an ancient Comp-Tac. I haven't carried it a ton over the years, but it's seen several months of actual day-to-day use, all told, over the last couple decades.

You'll notice it's set up for IWB carry at about the 3:30-4:00 position, just behind the point of the strong-side hip. It's set up to ride high, with the bulk of that big N-frame cylinder riding above the belt line. The forward rake assists access and an easier draw, and the length of the holster that extends below the belt line helps keep things stable. I've used it with an assortment of three- and four-inch N-frames over the years.

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Officer-Involved Shooting

The last Officer-Involved Shooting of 2022 for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department was a real mess.

Granny on the near northeast side of Indy wakes up to a strange car parked and idling in her driveway at four in the morning on New Year's Eve. She calls the po-po to report it.

The police show up and find a guy sleeping in the driver's seat with a Glock in his lap. The car has Florida plates, and they confirm with Granny that she doesn't have any kin in Florida who might be paying her a surprise visit.

Plan A was to snatch the car door open and grab the Glock off the sleeper's lap before waking him up and sorting out what was going on, but the doors on the car were locked. So the officers fell back to Plan B, which was to tap on the window and tell the guy to put his hands up.

It was at that point that things went rodeo and the situation wound up with all three officers shooting at the dude...who of course turned out to be the homeowner's grandson in a rental car.

"Detectives were able to confirm the man woke up and was moving around in the car prior to any shots being fired. The man looked toward the officers and moved his arm toward the officers, but IMPD said it is not clear if the gun was in his hand. And, detectives say there's no indication that the man fired any rounds.

IMPD officers provided medical aid to the man until medics arrived and took him to Methodist Hospital, where he's reported to be in stable condition. IMPD clarified that the man was not arrested, no officers or uninvolved citizens were injured during this incident and detectives say there's no ongoing threat to the community."

Hopefully they'll release body camera footage. In general, I'm a lot more sympathetic to an OIS in a situation like this when the gun is sitting right there in dude's lap rather than a vague "furtive movement" but this definitely warrants a pretty thorough investigation.

This is why I like keeping my gun someplace where it's not going to make everybody all panicky and jumpy.

Remember the two maxims of dealing with the police:

1. Confused cops are arrest-y cops, and


2. Scared cops are shoot-y cops.

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This is why we can't have nice things.

The caption to this photo in an online gun article reads "This rig from Crossfire Holsters is stable, secure and readily accessible", when you can look at it and plainly see it's neither of the first two things.

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Things I knew that ain't so...

Working in a gun store, I got to hear a lot of truisms that got blindly repeated, from both sides of the counter. I repeated them myself, often, blindly assuming these things to be true because everybody just knew they were. It was common knowledge!

A lot of it didn't hold up to practical observation, though. Shotguns and pistol caliber carbines do shoot through residential walls, oftentimes a lot of them. Revolvers can malfunction. Et cetera.

One was the utility of a little pocket gun, often an NAA Mini or a derringer, whose owner would refer to it as a "get off me" gun, with the implication that if they were ever caught in a physical scuffle, they could use it to shoot their assailant off of them.

While pocket carry can be useful, especially by allowing one to unassumingly have a hand already on a firearm before a potential attacker realizes it, the idea of pulling it out of a pocket in mid-scuffle is based more on hope than good planning.

One of these was actually designed with in-fight weapon access in mind.

A similar myth surrounds ankle carry. While it is useful and offers many benefits, such as an easy draw when seated and one which can be done relatively unobtrusively under a desk or table, the idea that it's going to be useful for retrieving a weapon in a grounded scuffle seems to be more optimistic myth than fact, as Cecil demonstrates.

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In theory, theory is the same as practice...

Aesop writes to defend the drop-leg holster:

Sit in a car, a delivery van, or a semi rig cab, and show me your IWB or appendix-carry draw, against, say, a robber or carjacker.With your seatbelts on (in observance of the law, natch), and maybe wearing a jacket, just to make it interesting for you.

Okay...



Here's me from strong side under an open-front cover garment...

Well, actually there I was more concerned with getting the muzzle off me then drawing. Because the answer to the problem isn't always "Hey! Quick! Go for the gun!" But even with my seatbelt fastened, my draw from seated isn't terribly slower than standing, and the only difference is I lean forward a little.

We won't even talk about where that IWB is digging into you all shift...

Oh, please, Aesop! I've driven on I don't know how many all-day-long cross-country roadtrips with a strong-side IWB holster. IND-to-ATL, IND-to-MSY, IND-to-OKC, IND-to-ABQ, IND-to-FOE, and that's just in the last couple years, and not counting shorter ones to TN or OH... Make sure you don't buy crappy belts and holsters and that they fit properly.

...or where your appendix carry muzzle is pointed, sitting in a vehicle seat.

If you're carrying AIWB correctly, it should be pointing at the seat. If it's pointing at anything else, you need to fix yourself.

Then he pimps the supposed virtue of the low-rise thigh rig for driving:

Now, sit in a car seat, same conditions, and tell me where your hand falls on your upper leg:
unless you've got gorilla-length arms (which you'd need to get to any ankle rig), that'd be right where this holster sits. Handy. Readily available. Not pointed at your junk.
Five stars.

Uh-huh, Aesop, that is indeed where your hand naturally falls.

Now mime moving your hand backward from the holster like you're trying to draw the pistol. What happens to your elbow? Hits the seat before the muzzle is even clear, doesn't it?

Can you see why dudes who were issued dropleg Safarilands would use vest mounted holsters for mounted patrols?

I don't know how much you carry there in California, vehicularly or not, but you're saying a lot of things that sound really good in theory...until you pressure test this stuff in practice.

Dumb Holster #1

Why is your ankle holster connected to your belt?

Your leather-working skills may be aces and the craftsmanship might be superb, but your holster idea is dumber than an acre of fungus, dude.

I was in a conversation elsewhere regarding holsters that caused me to actually go looking for this image, or one like it, on the internet. On purpose.



Drop holsters are some of the most frequently misunderstood and poorly configured holsters out there. Basically, unless you're wearing a plate carrier or LBV or something that interferes with a normal belt mount, you should probably leave the drop-legs to Hollywood space pirates and B&W cowboys.

If you find yourself needing to wear a real one for one of the above reasons, here's how to look like you know what you're doing:

Tricks of the Trade

My friend Jon Hauptman of PHLster holsters put together a short chalk talk explaining the design features of better-quality holsters and how they aid in reducing printing and adding comfort to IWB/AIWB carry.
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