The Cornered Cat
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Break it in

A few days ago, we talked about how to check out a new holster. Today, let’s talk about how to break one in.

Those of you with Kydex holsters can skip this post. The procedure below applies strictly to leather holsters. Specifically, it applies to leather IWB and OWB holsters, as well as to ankle, shoulder, or crossdraw rigs. Regardless of where you carry it, if your holster is made out of stiff leather, you should find this information helpful to you.[1]

First, a brief word about holster fit. When it first arrives, a really excellent leather holster should be “too tight” for the firearm. That’s because leather naturally stretches a bit over time. If the holster is not snug—perhaps very snug—at first, it will soon become too loose to hold the gun securely. This means the best leather holsters always start off with a very tight fit. When the holster first arrives, you may struggle to get the gun into the holster. Once it’s in there, you may have a tough time getting it back out again. That’s better than okay! It’s downright ideal, because that initial snugness is what creates the best fit for the long haul.

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Rough listening

They’ve released the 911 call from the 12 year old girl who protected herself from a home intruder this week. I confess it made me tear up a little bit to listen to it. She sounded so scared and so … young.

Thank God she’s okay.

 

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Wait for backup

On another blog a few days ago, the writer said that he’d come home from work and found his front door open. He went inside and “cleared” his house—that is, he walked around the house, in the dark, with his gun drawn, looking for a bad guy. He did not find a bad guy, just the expected empty house. End of story.

Unfortunately, not all such stories have happy endings. Today, I read in the news about a man who came home from work and found his front door open. He armed himself and went inside to look for a bad guy. He found one, and now he’s dead. (Read the news here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-family-gary-man-shot-to-death-in-home-had-interrupted-burglary-20121020,0,3679823.story.)

I suppose some would say that’s a case of “don’t bring a lead pipe to a gunfight,” and that’s true. But the bigger lesson is, don’t go looking for someone who wants to kill you. Not by yourself, and not without extreme need.

If you are concerned enough to pull your gun out of its holster, you should be concerned enough to pull your phone out of your pocket and call for backup. Except in cases of extreme and immediate need, law enforcement officers won’t try to clear a house by themselves, without backup. Why should you?

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Soft IWB holsters and the tip test

Yesterday, I wrote that you should always check out a new holster by gently tipping it upside down a few inches above a padded surface (the “tip test”), to be sure the gun will stay inside even when the holster is upside down. This test applies to IWB and OWB holsters, including the ones that allegedly use your clothing for “retention.” Why? Because follow the links below—these things are what happens when you choose to use a dangerous, loosely-fitting gun bucket that does not securely hold the gun in place.

If your soft, inside the waistband holster cannot be trusted to hold the gun upside down when tipped over gently, you put yourself at risk for one of two equally dangerous possibilities whenever you use the facilities.

Guns falling out of insecure holsters in public restrooms:

Note that all of these are just the ones where the gun fired and made the local paper. I have literally dozens more in my files, all equally tragicomic. I have even more stories that I’ve heard personally from talking to people who dropped a gun that did not fire and that did not make the news.

Guns left behind by people who took their guns out of the holster:

So yes: if you have an IWB holster that does not hold the gun securely, it’s time to upgrade to one that does. Who wants to be the next headline? Not I!

Oh, as an aside? If you ever do drop a gun, let it fall. Never reach for a falling gun! That’s because modern, quality firearms cannot fire when they strike the ground, despite what the headlines above might imply. All except one of the above shots were almost certainly caused by someone reflexively reaching for the gun as it fell, and unintentionally grabbing the trigger. Let it fall!

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Check it out

When you get a new holster, it’s always tempting to just throw that puppy on your hip and start carrying your loaded firearm in it right away. Not so fast! There are a few things you should do first. In future posts, we’ll discuss how to break in a leather holster, and then we’ll follow up with a few basic dryfire tests you should do before you start using that holster “for real.” For today, let’s talk about how to check your newly-arrived holster for fit and safety.  Continue reading 

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Kids and guns

News story from today’s headlines: a 12-year-old girl was home alone when a stranger rang the doorbell. The stranger, a man who had been arrested last year for allegedly abducting a 17-year-old girl with mental challenges, then went around to the back of the house and kicked in the back door.

The frightened girl did several things right. She did not open the front door to a stranger. When she saw that a stranger was trying to get in even though she hadn’t answered the doorbell, she retreated to another part of the house and called her mom. At her mom’s direction, she armed herself with her family’s .40-caliber Glock, barricaded herself in a closet, and called 911.

As the intruder broke into the room where the little girl was hiding, she fired the gun and hit him. He ran off, and the authorities arrived a few moments later—just ahead of her mom, who drove home as fast as she reasonably could.

Read the original story here: http://www.kxii.com/home/headlines/Twelve-year-old-Bryan-Co-girl-shoots-home-intruder–174678431.html

Why am I telling you this? Partly it’s because I want you to understand that kids grow up. We talk about “kids and guns” as if all children are toddlers, and as if every child remains irresponsible and untrustworthy until some magic date on the calendar, and as if there were a stark, sharp line between childhood and adulthood. But none of these things are true. Babies are a wonderful way to start people! But people don’t stay babies. They become toddlers, preschoolers, primary and elementary schoolkids, and eventually young adults. At every step along this journey, they become more capable of handling responsibility… if their parents take the time and make the effort to help that happen. It does not happen all at once on their 18th or 21st birthday. It happens gradually, as they grow and learn.  Continue reading 

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Marketing

A few days ago, A Girl and Her Gun posted this as her status on Facebook:

Got a request to post about a site(I have received several recently, some are good). It’s a gun range and the tagline is fun and safety. Big long section on attention to detail and saefty. The site has a host of half naked chicks ALL with their guns in the air and ALL with fingers on the trigger. Anyone want to guess what my answer was??

Like AGirl, I don’t care a bit how a woman chooses to make her living, as long as it’s legal and harms no one else. However, I agree with her that the image of women handling firearms dangerously or carelessly isn’t one I want to promote and it sure isn’t one I want to encourage. That’s something I’ve worked against for more than ten years now, after all. The old joke about how guys won’t even notice the firearm in the picture—let alone what the woman’s trigger finger is doing—just doesn’t cut it for me. I wouldn’t want to be associated with any company that pictures dangerous behavior in their ads.

But there’s something else I wanted to say about this. Two things, really. First, I’m a capitalist and a believer in both free speech and a free market. When marketing offends or simply fails to reach its intended audience, the audience should simply walk away. And for the most part, we do. I don’t have a problem with this at all. It’s the way things should work in a free society.

My second point relates directly to my first: I avoid buying guns or gun-related products from companies that use near-naked, “sex sells” marketing because such ads make it clear that the company does not want my business, or the business of any other woman. Oh, they’re happy enough to sell stuff to us, if we’re willing to buy it from them. But they aren’t after our business. Marketing efforts like this just show that the company marketing managers don’t believe women are part of the gun-buying public, and that they don’t care whether we buy from them or not. If they did want our dollars, they would tone down the pure sex sale, and go instead for an approach that could appeal to all of us.

When a company isn’t after our business, why should we give it to them?

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Standing on your own two feet

I’ve never been comfortable in high heels. My childhood nickname was “Grace,” perhaps because I fell down the stairs at least twice a week. My mom once commented that I was the only woman she ever met who could fall off a pair of tennis shoes. While nursing my own sprained ankles, I always admired my older sister; she could wear spikes so tall they made me trip just looking at them.

A few years ago, I decided it was time to learn how to wear really high heels. Other women wear them, after all. It can’t be that hard, can it? So I went out and bought myself the most adorable pair of fancy dress heels you’ve ever seen. I wanted to wear them to a special event we had planned. Tippy-toes high heels, too. Not the almost-one-inch platforms I’d finally mastered in my thirties, but real high heels. Like the grownups wear. I can do this, I told myself. It’s a learnable skill.  Continue reading 

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