Tab Clearing...

• Asked to write a blog post, an AI churns out glurge.


• John Hearne writes about Understanding Criminals and Their Motivations.


• Bobbi on troubleshooting a mysteriously malfunctioning door.

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Gray Man Fail

"There’s a saying that “all costumes fall apart at the shoes,” and it’s largely true. Next Halloween or costume party, give it a try for yourself: cowboys with Converse and pilgrims with Pumas. Footwear, sunglasses, watches, and other daily wear rarely changes on a whim. Fit can be very personal, and people tend to stick to what they like.

And even if you don’t know much about shoes, many out there do. Salespeople, in particular, are more class-conscious, using watches and shoes to determine if someone is a “good fit” (more or less likely to purchase a product). There are endless Facebook groups and forums that obsess over every aspect of personal items, taking the time to identify and psychoanalyze the choices of others in some form of fashion phrenology."

Those 5.11 ATACs match a Hawaiian shirt about as well as white sidewalls and Oakleys go with tie-dye, Joe Friday.

"Nobody knows I'm armed!"
Photo by Oleg Volk

"NO!" in a can...

I'd only recently found a good chart explaining the various "marks" used on pepper spray canisters. I knew that, for example, the one I'd carried in my pocket for so long was Sabre Red in a Mk.6 canister, and that POM Industries had recently expanded their line to include a Mk.3 canister, but what was the significance?

It looks like these dispenser sizes came from Defense Technology, one of the earliest companies selling OC. They have an explainer sheet in PDF form here.

The Mk.3, in the middle, is kinda chonky for pocket carry, and more at home on a duty belt (or maybe stashed by your front door). The one on the right is the Mk.6 size, which is about as big as you'd want to carry in a pants pocket, and only if your jeans aren't too snug. It takes a fairly roomy pocket.

On the left is the standard POM pocket/keychain sized unit, which sacrifices capacity for portability.

You'll note that Def-Tec's literature says that the Mk.6 is capable of "12-14 short bursts", while POM's advertising copy for its little pocket spritzer claims "up to 20+ half-second bursts". Yet the POM is a half-ounce canister while the Mk.6 has .68 ounces of payload. This is because in real life nobody gets a half-second spritz. It generally takes a good "One Mississippi" to paint a proper back-'n'-forth orange stripe across Sumdood's peepers.

I'll carry either the POM or the Sabre Red Mk.6. (And if you're ordering Mk.6 make sure it's not foam or gel, and that it doesn't have any goofy additives like CS, since the latter just makes decontam more of a pain without adding any benefits on the front end.)

We can make you better, faster, stronger...

"Who among us doesn’t want their blaster to shoot faster and more accurately?

There’s a whole industry of aftermarket parts to support this communal urge, but it’s important to understand the code phrases that pop up in the advertising for these aftermarket goodies: “No Gunsmithing Required” means that either some fitting will be required, or that the part is so undersize that it can be truly “Dropped In”—from clean across the room. “Some Fitting May Be Needed” translates to a gunsmith will be needed. “Gunsmith Fitting Recommended”—and bring money.

Fortunately, there are ways to improve the speed and accuracy of your pistol that require the addition of not one single part..."

Dress For Success

There's a great piece here by Erick Gelhaus on matching your gear in a class with the realities of your life and the aim of the class.

Erick, dressed for success.

In my journey through the firearms training universe, I've interacted with two broad groups. One was kinda centered around Tom Givens and the Rangemaster crew, as well as Craig Douglas and his Shivworks collective. There was a fairly strong emphasis on CCW-oriented skills. You'd find those folks at Pistol-Forum, the old TPI board, and the like.

The other largely orbited Pat Rogers, and they posted at Primary & Secondary, M4carbine, Arfcom, and was very .mil/LE-centric. Even the private citizens who showed up at these classes would have war belts and tactical gear, and things were very carbine-heavy. 

At one of the old Friends of Pat events, I remember mentioning to one of these dudes that I'd never attended a class where I didn't shoot my day-to-day carry gun from concealment. He thought I was joking.

I don't own a "classtume" and, of the sixty-some classes I've taken, only four even involved using a carbine. (And the first one, Carbine & Pistol with Louis Awerbuck, I was using the back pocket on my jeans as a mag pouch. I joked that if I wanted to be really authentic in the class, I'd have taken it in pyjamas and a bathrobe, since that's almost certainly how I'd be dressed should I ever have to use a carbine for realsies).

In shoothouse classes, armor is a necessity. If you're LE or .mil. it might make sense to take a class in rifle plates. But if you're just the typical private citizen and you're taking ten carbine classes to every pistol one, and that one pistol class is run with a Safariland SLS on a war belt instead of your daily IWB rig, you're probably not allocating your training budget in the most efficient way possible.

Not that there's anything wrong with that! It's a free country and you can take all the entertrainment classes you want, but at least be honest with yourself about what it is.

Not my actual pyjamas.

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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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When You Need a Backup Gun.

Most cops of my acquaintance are pretty religious devotees of carrying a backup gun. An IMPD officer who I've known for years and have trained with in the past is alive today because he carries a backup gun and has trained to proficiency in its deployment and use.

For the average normie private citizen CCW toter? I mean, if you can carry one and train with it, great. It's probably best practice, I guess.

Personally I haven't habitually carried a BUG since... whenever I stopped wearing "shoot me first" vests with any degree of regularity, so probably back in 2007 or 2008.

Mostly.

There's one circumstance where I do carry a second gun pretty religiously, but I don't know that you could rightly call it a backup gun in those cases, and that's when I'm out and about in the dead of a Hoosier winter. I'm not tough enough to roam around in sub-freezing weather with my coat unzipped, and that makes accessing a blaster carried at the waistline, whether inside or outside the waistband, strong-side or appendix, a little hard to get at in a hurry.

Greg Ellifritz wrote about this recently:

"A friend once asked me for some winter coat carry advice. He normally carried a 9mm Glock 19 inside the waistband. Living in Minnesota, he found access to his Glock to be rather difficult when the gun was covered up by his heavy winter coat. My friend wanted to supplement his Glock with a smaller pistol carried in his outside coat pocket for quicker access in cold temperatures. Which pistol would be the best choice?

That’s a good question. Before I moved to Texas, I braved Ohio’s winters regularly carrying a revolver in an outside coat pocket. When the snow accumulated enough to cover up my ankle gun if I stepped in a snow drift, I carried my police backup gun in my outer coat pocket. "

Go and read Greg's piece.

I largely agree with his take, although I'm not as concerned with being able to fire the gun from inside the coat pocket. What I am concerned with, however, is being able to access the firearm while seated, especially in my car with the seatbelt fastened. While that's not actually as hard to do under an unbuttoned overshirt in summer as some people seem to think it is because they've never tried nor practiced it, it is in fact well-nigh impossible under a zipped up winter coat.

For that reason I select winter coats with a specific kind of upper chest pockets, the kind with vertical zippered openings along the centerline.

The photo above has the revolver hiked up and hanging out of the pocket just so you can see it, but normally you can't. It works without any shuffling of the garment when sitting on the driver's side (in the picture I'm in the passenger seat of Shootin' Buddy's Tacoma). Best of all, it can be accessed easily with the strong side hand, somewhat akin to a tanker-type holster, but it can also be drawn cavalry-style with the support hand if necessary. It's no coincidence that this is where the BUG pocket is on a 5.11-type vest.

That's the same Smith & Wesson 432PD with CTC LaserGrips in a cheapo Uncle Mike's pocket holster to keep it correctly oriented in the pocket that I've used for this job nearly twenty years. There are more rugged holsters out there, but I think this is only my second or third, and it's about due for replacement. If you wanna be all Vimes' Boots about it, there might be a sixty dollar leather holster that'll go twenty years without replacement, or you can buy a fifteen buck nylon one every seven years.

The downside to this in the winter is that you can't use the coat check unless you have a way of discreetly slipping the holstered blaster out of your pocket and into a purse or bag or whatever, so you gotta be that goober who drags your coat with you everywhere.

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Practicality...

I'm sitting here looking for an adjustment tool to spin the screw on a Holosun 507k (which is a great CCW optic, don't get me wrong), and it's making me pine for the raw utility of the entire range of Trijicon MRDS sights... the RMR, SRO, RCR, and even the RMRcc ...which have elevation and windage screws designed so you can use the cartridge rim of a 9mm or 5.56 round to turn them in a pinch.

The original RMR was designed to be mounted atop the ACOGs being used by guys at FOB Beyond The Pillars Of Hercules, and all subsequent MRDS optics from Trijicon carry those genes.

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Juice Worth the Squeeze?

Compensators on carry pistols...true expansion chamber comps, not weedy little ports EDM'ed into the barrel...have a few downsides and only one really practical upside. 

I mean, yes, they reduce split times, but raw split times hardly matter in a private citizen's defensive handgun usage, where each and every bullet fired is a use of force for which the firer will be held accountable.

What it does do is reduce muzzle flip to the point that, with proper technique, the dot will remain in the window during recoil.

It also complicates takedown and reassembly, vents gasses upward when shot from retention, and can be noisier for the shooter in some environments.

Most importantly, it makes the gun more ammo sensitive. Comped guns will often struggle to run with el cheapo 115gr ball ammunition, which frequently has barely enough energy to cycle a regular pistol.

Just a thing to be aware of if you decide to run a comped gun.

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For Real Every Day?

FN 509 Compact MRD w/ Trijicon SRO & Streamlight TLR-7 in a Henry Holsters Spark. Also the most adorable Apple Watch charging stand ever.

As a freelance writer who works from home (save the occasional retail job in a gun store) and who can therefore dress like a tactical hobo, carrying every day isn't hard for me. For the last twenty years, I've pretty much carried everywhere that didn't involve walking through a metal detector.

Not everyone can do that. Some people work in places where it would be a firing offense to tote, and some even work in places where it's flat out illegal.

What do?

The guys at Tactical Tangents had a good discussion on the topic.

"If you’re a habitual firearms toter, how do you carry to and from places where you can’t carry? Do you? What if it’s someplace where there’s no provision for securing it at your destination? Whether going to and from the neighborhood BJJ gym or visiting a military base, this can be a real dilemma for the carrier. In this episode, Jim and Mike take a hard look at solutions.

One of our favorite topics at Tactical Tangents is realistic risk management, and this applies in the personal world as well as the operational one. While “EDC” has turned into a marketing term for everything from watches to para cord bracelets, what do you really carry every day. Listen to this episode for a deep dive into the topic. Remember, millions of people go unstrapped yet remain unclapped every day."

Selection and Deselection

If you haven't read Gorillafritz's excellent piece on spotting a potential assailant via behavioral cues (aka "pre-assault indicators"), you should fix that.

I highly recommend it.

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Misplaced Priorities

The place you are most likely to die in America is your own home, and it's almost certainly not going to be in a gun battle with a team of ninja hit men like some sort of Dollar Tree John Wick.

"When it comes to preventable death, car accidents account for only a little over 20 percent of them — a whopping 70 percent of deaths actually occur inside the home. Per the CDC and the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC), the top five causes inside the home are poisoning, falls, suffocation, drowning, and fires."

If you have a pre-staged home-defense long gun but don't have a carbon monoxide detector, you are quite simply not living in the real world.

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QotD: Rubber Gun Edition...

Claude dispenses wisdom:

"Anyone who considers themselves a serious student of the Art should have an inert pistol of some sort. You can use it to practice things you can’t safely do with a real pistol. A SIRT gun is an ideal tool for this but not everyone is willing to spring that kind of cash. For less than the cost of a box of ammo, you can get a training aid that can be used in many different ways."

I agree wholeheartedly.

I would go further and suggest an inert duplicate of your actual carry gun that allows you to use your carry holster is a sound investment.

College bound?

The normal send-off stuff for college kids is a laptop or other study-oriented gear, but maybe when you're packing the kiddo off to a campus where they might be out and about after dark, you could also gift them another practical item: A keychain-sized light.

And I don't mean some dinky little coin cell powered 10-lumen thing meant to aid in finding keyholes in bad light, but a usefully bright thing like a Streamlight Pocket Mate or a Surefire Sidekick.

They don't look "tactical", they don't need to be stuck in a pocket every day (and therefore often forgotten and left behind in the dorm room), and they have usefully bright high beams in the ~300 lumen range as well as lower settings for just navigating dimly lit areas without throwing a searchlight beam around. Plus they're USB rechargeable, so kiddo doesn't need to keep them in batteries.

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QotD: Best Defense Edition...

From Grant Cunningham:

"Inevitability (“you ARE going to be in a gunfight tomorrow”) carries the implicit assumption that there is absolutely nothing you can do to avoid it. There may be cases where that’s true, but for the most part not being a horses’ ass, avoiding “the stupids”, learning to swallow your pride, and not allowing yourself to be distracted in unsecured spaces will eliminate a surprisingly large percentage of gunfight scenarios."

You can't lose a fight you're not in.

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Measuring Accuracy

"I don’t mean to decry other outlets, whether print or digital, but some of them seem to have pretty handwave-y standards for accuracy testing. You’ll see reports ranging from incredibly vague descriptions of a pistol being very accurate using naught but adjectival words and nary a number in sight, to mentions of a group size at a certain distance without much reference to whether this was obtained from a rest or by a shooter standing on their own hind legs or what have you.

Here at Shooting Illustrated, we have a standardized protocol that hopes to be more informative than that. Ideally, each handgun tested will be tested with three different loads—preferably of three different projectile weights and types, if possible—from three different manufacturers. We’ll provide chronograph data, and each of the three loads will be fired for five, five-shot groups and that information will be passed on to you, the reader."

Absent a mechanical rest, the largest variability in a pistol's accuracy is the torque on the trigger nut. When I was working at Coal Creek Armory we had a part timer who was a law school student by day, with a side hobby that included a list of junior and collegiate level bullseye titles as long as your arm. 

He got sent out on the range frequently with customer guns that were supposedly inaccurate, only to bring the target back to the customer and pronounce that there was nothing wrong with the pistol's accuracy...

Tactical Buzzwording and Practical Pistols

A reader of Greg Ellifritz's wrote to him to inquire whether he should use the P365 he actually carries or the larger P320 he uses as a bedside gun in an upcoming class. The instructor had recommended using the P320.

Fundamentals: On a square range.

Of note was how he described the class: "[A] two day Defensive Pistol 1 Course where we will be firing at least 500rds per day."

Like the class instructor, Greg recommended going with the larger pistol.

"In a weekend shooting class that involves firing more than 500 rounds a day, you will get incredibly fatigued. You will get blisters on your hands. You will be sore from the recoil (even from a 9mm). Shooting 500 rounds in a day while actually concentrating on learning new skills is a demanding endeavor both mentally and physically. Recognize that most gun owners will never fire 500 rounds out of a single handgun in the course of an average lifespan."

While instructors will often hang a label like "tactical" or "defensive" off a class like this for marketing purposes, the fact of the matter is that a good quality 500-rd/day class is generally going to be a pure shooting mechanics class because there won't be time for anything else. The closest thing you might get to tactics is if the instructor encourages a sidestep on the draw.

To put this in perspective, compare the round counts for some classic classes. A forty hour MAG-40 class is spread over four to five days, and twenty of those hours will be in live fire, with a round count of approximately five hundred rounds, total. A classic Gunsite 250 is five days of training, some of it in shoot houses and other moving, "tactical" type situations, and the round count for the whole week is about a thousand rounds.

Tactics: In a shoot house.

By comparison, I've taken two-day mechanics-focused classes with trainers like Todd Green, Ernest Langdon, and Scott Jedlinski that burned up that much ammo in a weekend. Part of it is that every drill needs to be repeated as many times as there are shooters in a relay, so that the instructor can give each student direct observation and coaching feedback. 

Some of those gunhandling skills are going to port over to pretty much any pistol you use, and for those that don't, there are instructors who teach classes specifically geared toward smaller pistols and/or working from deep concealment. The round counts and the pace of those classes will also be adjusted accordingly, to allow you to, e.g., tuck your shirt back in over your PHLster Enigma between drills or properly re-holster a pocket-carried J-frame.

Interactive: Force on force against an opposing will.

Relatedly, Dave Spaulding has a good piece in G&A where he breaks down the different types of training. He arranges them in a hierarchy, but you could easily look at them as a three-legged stool. 

"Over time, I’ve come to look at firearms training as a three-tiered pyramid I call the Hierarchy of Combative Firearms Training. The tiers are: 1) Essentials (I prefer this term to “fundamentals”); 2) Combative Aspects; and 3) Interactive Aspects. You must properly train and anchor skills through each level before you attempt the next. For example, would you take a counter-terror driving course before you take basic driver’s training? Of course not. Along these same lines, you should not try to fight with a pistol until you’ve learned how to shoot and manipulate it. Some think they are one in the same but that is not the case. If you throw a punch before you’ve learned how to make a fist, your punch won’t be effective and will likely result in injury and failure."

Tab Clearing...

• David Yamane has some photos from his visit to the Brownells mothership store, which is like Willy Wonka's factory but for gun stuff.


• The Real Dr. House has an excellent long-form exploration on "concealment" vs. concealment, which is necessary for whom, and how to take that into consideration.


• MattG ruminates on politicians using performative outrage to manipulate their constituency.

Grabbers vs. Groomers

There's a great new episode of the Tactical Tangents podcast up, and it's on a topic that's near and dear to my heart:

"The statistical fact of the matter is that most victimization comes from people who look like us and are already in our social circles. That’s extra true about sex crimes, and super extra true about sex crimes against children. Tune in as we discuss teaching ourselves, loved ones, and especially our kids about understanding social norms, establishing boundaries, and the importance of informing someone in authority."

You should definitely take the time to listen to this one.

On their show, Mike and Jim often talk about "tactical fantasies", and I find that one of the most pernicious of those fantasies is a hardware-oriented one that could be described as the "I'll just..." fantasy.

Worried about sexual assault on yourself or a loved one? "I'll just [get/give them] a [gun/pepper spray] and when that bad man jumps out of the [bushes/windowless white van]...POW!"

But that's not how the majority of those crimes occur. The baddies in these cases spend time gaining trust and eroding boundaries until they get what they want. Are you gonna shoot Uncle Fred? Pepper spray your supervisor at work?

Learn the signs. Draw boundaries. Inform someone who can help.

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No Virtue In Suffering

Mas Ayoob writing on handguns for people dealing with age-related infirmities:

"Arthritis hits different folks to different degrees. A lot of my friends who are past 60 have gone from .45 to 9mm, at least in part because it simply beats up their hands and wrists less in extended shooting sessions. A student who trained with me many years ago returned to take a refresher a few months ago. In his mid-80s now, he was struggling to work the slide of his Colt Commander, and could no longer reload it with the lightning speed he had 20 years ago. Cumulative nerve damage and arthritis had taken their toll. Some lighter loads and 10-round Wilson magazines helped, but I tried to steer him toward one of his polymer 9mms with double stack magazines, or his Browning Hi-Power.

The older shooter with impaired hand strength and dexterity doesn’t have to work a slide with a revolver, but some arthritic fingers find it harder to run a double action trigger than in their younger days. Hips and lower backs start getting precarious as time erodes us, too, and heavier guns go from “less comfortable” to “uncomfortable” to “downright painful.”"

I know people whose hands and wrists are tore up from a lifetime of high-volume handgun shooting. Don't take my word for it, listen to the words of Pat Rogers from his well-known article on switching from .45 ACP 1911s to the M&P9, "Putting Down the Man Gun":

"There were two reasons why I decided to make a change. First was the fact that as I moved along in years, shooting .45 ammo became painful. Years of shooting as well as accumulated injuries had left me with tendonitis in both elbows and arthritis in my hands."

Coincidentally, Pat made that choice about the same time I made that exact same switch. I'd like to think that I probably extended my useful pistol-shooting shelf life by years that way.

Pat is not impressed.