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My take: Sometimes, when a woman gets involved with firearms and self defense, the guys around her will make jokes about it.
Most of the time, this is good-natured and nothing to worry about, but pay attention to the tone and context of these remarks. Sometimes they come from a guy who is not comfortable with your growing ability to protect yourself — and that’s always a red flag.
It seems to me that a lot of modern young women would rather tackle the impossible, sysiphean task of changing an entire society and how it thinks, than to picture themselves effectively fighting back and perhaps killing a man for “only” assaulting them in a violent and life-threatening way.
This means that they themselves, for all their talk about the awfulness of rape culture and the high value of women in a community, do not believe that their own lives are worth much after all.
“Bad stuff happens in predictable places, at predictable times. The targets are predictable and you can simply not be one of the targets. But to follow this advice is to cede a certain part of the world to the predators. To give them some control over our behavior. To ‘give up freedom’ as Lt. Bullard phrases it.
“… We do the same thing in self defense: ‘Avoid, escape, de-escalate, only in the gravest extreme do you use your skills.’ This attitude (and it is not just self-defense instructors, society as a whole condones this, which is why we teach it) makes it extremely safe to be a criminal. It should not be safe to be a criminal.”
It has been a handful of years since Rory Miller wrote the above paragraphs on his blog, and it still hits me where I live in a lot of ways. Lots to think about with this one.
First, the top layer: I think the idea Rory expressed in this post is good and true and right, and I’m glad he said it. It should not be safe to be a criminal.
Next, the underlayer, the one that itched me for a few days before I figured it out. Another self-defense writer has often written scornfully about anti-rape activists who say they “should be able to walk naked into a biker bar.” What struck me when I read Rory’s post was that the people who say these things are expressing exactly the same sentiment that Rory did in his post.
When people say such things, they mean they won’t turn the world over to the rapists, to the bullies, to the violent, to the predators. They’re going to have a Night Out Against Crime. They’re going to Raise Awareness or have a Slut Walk or Take Back the Night. They aren’t willing to simply give up their personal freedom or allow the bullies and predators and criminals to have power over their behavior. They’re going to claim their power and their own place in the world.
Unfortunately, without teeth and claws to back it up, this kind of thing often ends badly. Especially when it’s done solo, without the suport of a group, just as a part of living your life and not as part of a formal protest. But the place it starts is something we can embrace, I think.
There’s a bunch more there, but … I guess what’s struck me is, there’s some very powerful common ground here, if people could find their way free to use it.
The problem is, people often want to do these things (walk naked into biker bars, or solo jog through urban parks, or stumble through the night half drunk and all alone) without any negative outcomes — and without admitting even to themselves that a negative outcome is possible. They want the thing, but they want that thing to happen without any potential whatsoever for a painful consequence — either for themselves, or for the predators who attack innocent people. They want to Take Back the Night, but they are not willing to fight (and if necessary, kill) the ghoul who has made the night unsafe.
Not even to save their own lives.
As if the predator’s life really is ultimately of more value than the life of an innocent person. Or as if a violent criminal assailant could not really exist, and is really just a made-up monster that hides under a toddler’s bed, and can be defeated with an offering of milk and cookies.
How do you claim your power in the world, if you’re not willing to work from a position where you have power?
That activist walking naked into a biker bar, the one who “should be” able to walk anywhere she wants to go, completely unmolested. Shouldn’t she also be willing to be the change she wants to see in the world, and be prepared to defend herself with whatever degree of force is necessary and reasonable?
Just some common ground to explore. And the chasm down the middle of it.
“Don’t go stupid places, with stupid people, doing stupid things.” — John Farnam
Another thought, maybe not as closely related to the above but veering off to my own tangent.
A person’s power in the world comes from making their own choices. None of us will ever be free of the consequences of our own choices. Freedom does not, therefore, come from lack of consequences for the choices we make. That’s a pipe dream.
Freedom comes from being able to predict the consequences and corollaries of our choices. It comes from the decision to accept the cost of the choice we want to make, or to reject that cost and make a different choice. In a very real sense, knowledge is power — because it helps people choose between outcomes, and not just between courses of action.
For example, my husband and I deliberately chose to raise our kids ourselves, which meant living on only one salary when the children were young. I chose to marry him, knowing that his salary would never be large. We chose to buy a big country farmhouse, and we chose to have a bunch of kids. Did we choose to be poor? Nope — but being poor was an absolutely foreseeable, even unavoidable, consequence of the series of choices that we deliberately made.
Knowing that would be the outcome, we freely accepted that consequence of a lower income when we made the choices. This wasn’t some evil outside power manipulating us. We were free to make other choices, ones that led to a normal life in a normal neighborhood with normal income and outgo levels.
What we weren’t free to do — what no one is ever free to do in this world — was to make choices that had no corollaries and no consequences whatsoever.
Everything leads to something.
Whether it’s a choice as casual and mundane as whether to shop for groceries after dark or on the weekend, or if it’s a larger and more apparently-significant choice such as whether to take that job in another state, every choice leads somewhere. And every one of them has certain foreseeable potential costs as well as foreseeable benefits.
Power comes from seeing where your choices will most likely lead, in enough time to make another choice if that’s what you’d rather do. Power comes from choosing the path you will tread, and from having the kind of knowledge that lets you see as far down that path as you humanly can. Power comes from freely accepting the corollaries — the work and pain and joys — that go with the choices you make.
Powerlessness, and ultimately slavery, comes from not looking ahead. It comes from not making choices at all, just listlessly letting circumstances direct your path. It comes from letting others tell you where to go and what to do … and it comes from rejecting the corollaries of the choices you really want, which means rejecting the choices too, which leads round and round in a vicious ugly circle, over and over again, until you’ve ended up somewhere you never intended to go.
To embrace your power in the world, and your power over your life, means looking at the likely consequences of your choices. And then choosing wisely.
Drive past rows of corn
All alike. No difference here.
Monoculture field.
Cloned plants together,
Sharing all weakness and strength,
Die when trouble hits.
In the training world,
Only one way can be good.
Others have no worth.
Cry “DERP!!” Loose the hounds!
Drive out infidels and fools.
Monoculture rules.
Is this good? Uh, no.
Throw stupid out, that’s good. But —
Is all difference, derp?
One is none, two one.
One thought is no thought at all.
Embrace difference.
Bunch of related stuff, putting here as a core dump.
Caution:
You may want to grab coffee before you dive into this one.
Per John Lott, as of 2017 there are 16.3 million concealed carry permit holders in the US.
According to Claude Werner’s best guesstimates as of a couple-three years ago, there are probably 15,000 class slots every year (this includes NRA’s PPOTH and everyone else he could think of on the defensive handgun side of the market, plus some generous padding). Just to be on the safe side, I would double Claude’s number to 30,000 class slots.
This means that if every person with a permit decided to take ONE class other than / over and above the state-required ccw permit-getting class, we’d still have people standing in line more than 500 years from now. My doubled estimate could be off by an order of magnitude and we’d still have people in line five decades from now.
To say that we have not even begun to tap the potential market for training is a severe understatement.
Keep in mind, most training slots are mostly filled by the same people, year after year. Training junkies like us, people who’ve taken multiple classes from multiple instructors. We all swap those same students around and compete for their training dollars.
And that’s my starting point: we in the training world are an Itsy Bitsy Tiny Little Blip on the radar for most people who own guns and carry them for self defense.
To most gun owners, the entire training industry barely even exists. That’s key.
To people who have not taken a class from a pro trainer, the state-required permit class itself is Advanced Training. This includes the craptastic ones that do nothing more than run people through online diploma mills or the live ones that require them to shoot a whopping ten untimed rounds at a piece of cardboard twice the size of Texas. No matter how contemptuously we might look at a program like that, for the vast majority of permit holders it’s still far more training than any of their gun-owning friends have bothered to get — or ever even heard of. That makes it, and them, Advanced.
How utterly arrogant are we, to say that our definition is the real one, when our version of ‘beginner’ doesn’t even start where most shooters have finished?
(“And what do you mean, someone has to be taught how to use a holster? Dude, it’s not rocket surgery. It’s a bucket that holds a gun. You put the gun in, you take the gun out. D’oh! How stupid do you think we are??”)
For these folks, a Beginning class is almost certainly measured by the standard of NRA Basic Pistol: hours of sitting in a classroom, learning to name the parts of a gun. That’s just a stupid waste of time, even for people to whom the names of the gun parts are a revelation. So how dare you offer us a Beginning class in your school of gun-fu! We are obviously — obviously! — beyond that! We’re not Beginners anymore. We’ve been shooting for years, you know.
On this scale, being a non-Beginner — an Intermediate shooter — might mean that a person knows how to make the gun go bang. It probably means they can hit the target more often than not, at least as long as the target is big enough, and as long as we define hitting it as ‘somewhere on paper.’ They can load the gun by themselves.
To us, whatever process they use to get rounds into the gun may look sloppy, slow and clumsy; to them, it’s just loading the gun and how else would you do it? They can load and fire the gun without any help, thanks.
Plus maybe they even know how to get the gun running again when it hiccups. (“First wait at least 30 seconds in case there’s a hang-fire, then tilt your head to one side as you bring the gun up toward your face so you can look in puzzlement at the side of the gun. Then look down the barrel, probably with your finger still on the trigger. Stare at the barrel for a few seconds, then sloooooooowly unload the gun and fiddle with it for ten minutes before you finally shrug and reload it…”).
No matter how ridiculous the process might seem to us, eventually they can fire the gun again so they do know how to clear a malfunction and thus – obviously! – don’t need an instructor to teach them how to do that.
So that’s Intermediate.
On this same scale, being Advanced means you got your concealed carry permit. It means you took The Class. (There’s really only one, you know — the one that allows you to get a permit. No other classes exist.)
Or — and here’s the Great Leap Forward — being Advanced is being invited to shoot on the Super Squad in USPSA or being the top shooter on a reality show.
There’s no level of Advanced between those two points on this scale. It either means you got your carry permit or that you’re a USPSA Grandmaster. Other than those extremes, everything else will be shades of Intermediate.
And for most, Intermediate was reached the day after they held a gun for the first time.
Had a talk awhile back with a group of women, all of whom had been shooting for less than five years and all of whom had recently received NRA instructor certifications. They were (justifiably) proud of those certs, because it had taken real effort and work for them to get them.
If I had said to that group of people that this cert – the one that they worked so hard for and which to them represented the be-all, end-all apex of all possible firearms achievement – was actually just a basic place to start and otherwise an incredibly low bar for anyone who thinks of themselves as an instructor, not only would I have been being a jerk, but they would have looked at me as if I were… Um.
The picture that springs to mind is of a glowing humanoid creature, dressed in spotless white robes, with beautiful white feathered wings fluttering behind her, with a halo on her head, saying, “So who’s this Jesus fellow you’re talking about? I’ve never heard of him…”
You can almost see the little “TILT!” sign popping up in the listeners’ eyeballs, like some old Warner Bros cartoon.
Even if they were able to set aside the social offensiveness of it, the actual message would not have gotten past the TILT sign.
Had a conversation with a group of skilled shooters awhile back. One of them proposed, “Maybe we shouldn’t say, ‘intermediate’ or ‘advanced’ but we should just define them by what we can do at each level. A beginner can load the gun and hit the target … so let’s make a list! What’s a beginning level of skill?”
The others looked at her and at each other, and … well. Here’s where we run immediately into Dunning Kruger [pdf]. Because did you ever play the game, in school or maybe in some touchy feelgood teambuilding seminar, where one person is given a complex picture to look at, and then must use words only (no gestures or facial expressions!) to tell another person what to draw in order to create the same picture? The other person is not allowed to ask questions, or to make any noise or even wiggle their eyebrows. They simply must draw whatever the other person tells them to draw. No eye contact allowed.
The problem with this set up quickly becomes hilariously obvious to the spectators, but — up until the big reveal — both participants think they are communicating clearly. The sender thinks they are explaining well and being very precise and providing good instructions, and the receiver thinks they are doing exactly what the sender is telling them to do. They are both right, and they are both absolutely wrong. And the resulting picture never looks much like the one the sender intended.
So when you and I set out to make a list, and we say, “A beginner should be able to load the gun by herself,” we both have a very specific picture in our heads of what that looks like. It does not involve the shooter fumbling around or doing stupid-clumsy things with it, like picking it up left handed off the bench to put the magazine in with the right hand, then awkwardly juggle-bumping it from one hand to the other, forgetting to rack the slide and never putting the safety on. And so on.
We also have a picture in our heads that definitely does not include the person pointing the muzzle at one of their own body parts. But how often have you worked with a “grew up around guns” shooter who had an obviously longstanding habit of doing exactly that — and didn’t even know they were doing it?
People don’t know, literally cannot know or step outside themselves long enough to see, that kind of thing. If they could, they wouldn’t need us. So asking them to self-assess in our absence is bound to end badly. (“Of course I know how to load a gun! What are you, stupid? I can shoot!”)
Even a good solid objective standard (five shots in a five-inch circle, at five yards, in five seconds or less) leaves room for all of that problem with definitions to happen anyway. It narrows the gap, sure. But it doesn’t fix it, because we only measure the result without actually seeing the process that got them there. Did they muzzle themselves at any point in the process? Keep the finger off the trigger except when actually shooting? Hold the gun in a dangerous way, with the thumb precariously behind the slide, and only escaped getting slide-bit by sheer dumb luck? They don’t know. And unless we are there watching while they shoot the objective test, neither do we. When we’re there in person, we can see. When we’re not, we can’t.
That’s the weakness of long distance communication without immediate feedback. We can’t see the process people use, only the recorded result.
Oooh, fun rabbit hole there. Does the process matter more than the result? Or does the result matter more than the process? (My answer may not be congruent with yours. Set it aside to discuss sometime!)
More.
All communication leaves the obvious unsaid. It has to. There’s not enough time in the universe to spell out every single one of the assumptions inherent in any given conversation. We take almost everything for granted, and communicate only in a very narrow band.
But what’s obvious to a generic me isn’t necessarily obvious to a generic you. For complex ideas (and especially those that may activate the monkey brain) we need a feedback loop to check if each individual part of the message is getting through, because sometimes it doesn’t. People bridge this gap in personal conversations all the time (or think they do), mostly by using and analyzing each other’s movement patterns, facial expressions, and vocal cues that don’t quite rise to the level of language. We set up a continuous feedback loop so we can check if the message has been sent and received — and we do it so fast and for the most part so subconsciously that we don’t even realize we’re doing it. (Well, except for the poor broken ones of us who have to do it consciously all the freaking time. That’s a deep hole too.)
So the complete communication process is a feedback loop, a spiral, where participants constantly send unspoken messages from one to the other and back again so fast and so continuously that we don’t usually realize how often we change our speech based on those messages. We’re constantly correcting misperceptions and reframing and adding additional information that we might have left unsaid if it weren’t for the microexpressions of doubt or confusion or disbelief that we didn’t consciously see but that we reacted to anyway.
Here’s the kicker — all of that feedback is completely missing in written communication. Nearly all of it is missing in pre-recorded video and audio formats. That is why we need an in-person class for a lot of this stuff.
There’s the book you write, and the book they read. They are not the same book.
(Heh. From when I was a small child, I have a vivid memory of my grandpa, shaking his fist at another driver and shouting, “Where’d you learn to drive? Correspondence school??!” — an elegant insult I finally understood about ten years later.)
So I’m doubtful of any attempt to quantify beginner, intermediate, advanced with a list or set up an objective qual that involves students self-assessing or self-reporting, in the absence of a qualified other who can look at them and report what’s actually happening. Because Dunning Kruger.
Discouragingly, with all those factors in mind, I’m not even sure we can make such a list. Failing to carefully define terms would result in a misfire, while striving to define them carefully enough would almost certainly drown out the signal.
Oh, and there’s more. All advanced shooting is simply the fundamentals: Alignment, trigger, follow through. That’s all good shooting is and all it ever has been. ‘Advanced’ to me really just means being able to execute the fundamentals in a wider variety of more challenging circumstances. That’s it and that’s all.
All of the finicky stuff we quibble about (how do we hold the gun? how should we stand? at what point does the finger go to the trigger during the drawstroke? what exact shape does the path of the gun look like, as it moves from holster to target?) — ALL of it is simply designed to help us execute those fundamentals in faster, safer, or more reliable ways. The fundamentals are the thing that matters, not all the window dressing that helps us achieve them.
And yet we get students who think they are advanced because they have had some particular experience, such as having gone through a shoot house or shot at a moving target or in low light or in competition. As if simply making the gun go bang is “advanced” (when even a monkey can do that much), as long as making the gun go bang happened within some specific venue.
Hmmm. Pinging hard on that thought. Because — all advanced stuff always circles back to the fundamentals. But I think at the beginning of the process, we tend to think that being Advanced is not just being better at the same skills, but actually doing different skills, than the Beginners. Beginners stand on a “static square range” but Advanced people are allowed to move — so obviously, if I’ve ever moved while shooting, I’m advanced.
The question isn’t, in how many different circumstances can you make the gun go bang. It’s have you learned to reliably and consistently apply alignment, trigger, and follow through despite challenges and distractions, despite added variables or missing ones.
Thus even a beginner might be able to experience a shoot house, or do low light work, or have a fun experience where they shoot from a downed position. And to some extent, they probably should. But doing those things does not make them advanced shooters, and their fear or comfort level with the added activity has nothing to do with their actual skill level. Their actual skill level is measured in their ability to safely and reliably execute alignment, trigger, follow through in those venues.
It all starts with being able to perform the fundamentals in the first place. That’s the key. There are a lot of places where the emphasis is on the experience, not on the … um. The thing that makes the experience work or be meaningful.
To the extent that those other experiences don’t harm the process of learning the fundamentals, they’re good and beneficial. But those activities, too often, turn into distracting clutter that makes you think you’re further down the road than you actually are. (It’s hard to learn anything when you already know everything.) Sometimes having those experiences actually stops you from learning because you turn your attention from performing the fundamentals correctly into thinking about everything else except the fundamentals. Or because you think you’re finally past paying attention to the fundamentals, too good for that now, when nobody ever really is. 1
Once you do have a grasp of the fundamentals, then it’s not just reasonable but required for your personal development, that you should seek out as many different shooting experiences as possible. More circumstances and more challenging circumstances will help you here. That’s when the shoot houses and scenario training, movement and multiple targets and oddball positions and all the rest of it really come into play. Because once the fundamentals are there, we can finally enjoy just working with the gun.[*]
That’s when the gun games become much more meaningful and fun. Before you’ve learned the fundamentals, shooting practice performed during a competition are as likely as any other shooting experience to engrain bad habits rather than good ones. Even though supervised games do have the advantage of correcting bad and obvious safety errors, 2all by themselves they will not fix equally-bad and equally-obvious shooting errors. After the fundamentals are well in hand, those added experiences definitely improve your ability to execute them faster and more reliably in more challenging circumstances.
But before you can reliably apply fundamentals in challenging new circumstances, you have to be able to do them in the first place. And too many people entirely skip that step.
[*] Oh, here’s a fun little side trail. Of course you can enjoy fiddling around with the gun before you know anything about the fundamentals. This is more-or-less in the same way that a child might enjoy going to the skating rink before he can skate well. He enjoys wobbling around the rink while clutched fearfully onto the handrail, and feels a great sense of accomplishment when he’s made a single circuit all by himself.
But how much more enjoyable it is to whiz along with long and confident strides! To go fast enough to lift a breeze in your hair! To move smoothly with and through the crowd, unafraid of spills and able to watch the other skaters at the same time! To begin learning to spin and jump and do tricks!
All of these joys are out of reach from the beginner, who thinks he’s having fun (and he is) — but the limited and hesitant fun that he’s having is not to be compared to the more expansive fun being had by the skater who has the fundamentals under control.
Related, maybe. Had someone say to me in class, awhile back, that she was shooting poorly because we were shooting slow. “I shoot better fast!” — That was her reason for not slowing down when we were doing precision work, and also her excuse for doing very badly at it.
Well, okay, lady; show me that you can get highly precise one hole groups at your chosen speed, the same size as the other students are getting as they press the trigger in slow motion right now. But I’m willing to lay money on the table that if you learned to run a trigger better from the ground up, which includes having the humility to slow down and learn what I’m trying to show you in slow motion, you’d be shooting even better when you shoot fast than you can right now.
Sadly, we’re never going to know. Because you’re insulted that I’m asking you to do something that feels to you like a Beginner skill, shooting in slow motion, when you think you’re ready to do Advanced stuff like jumping out of a flaming helicopter with a knife between your teeth.
And here I don’t even have a helicopter, let alone one I’d be willing to set on fire.
Notes:
I have written before about the dangers and problems caused by people who don’t (yet) know what they are doing when they step up to teach. This goes ten-fold for people who step up to teach beginners without themselves having any real skill or understanding of the job.
Why?
Because teaching beginners is the most dangerous and difficult task any shooting instructor ever faces. And yet we tend to look down on people who teach such classes. Even instructors sometimes look down on themselves for not teaching ‘real’ classes.
This lack of respect for the job of teaching beginners comes out in a lot of different (and sometimes horrible) ways.
We see it whenever we see someone rush to teach “tactical” classes when they themselves do not have either the experience, the training, or the background to teach such classes. They’re eager to teach tactical-type material because teaching that type of class feels somehow more real and more valuable than teaching the basics to beginners.
We see also see this lack of respect for the job when we hear a mediocre shooter (who also has a teaching credential) making excuses for not improving their own shooting skills. Or for not working to grow by learning from others. Or for not taking any shooting classes as a regular student. It’s all explained and excused by that lovely phrase, “Well, after all, I’m only teaching beginners.”
As if keeping a group of naive shooters safe is a trivial and meaningless task. Or as if laying the foundation for how a person will handle and think about guns for the rest of their lives doesn’t matter that much.
No respect.
But the job is worth respecting. And so are the people who do it well.
Beginners bring all sorts of challenges into class that people who teach more-experienced shooters just don’t have to deal with. Pour an adult beverage for any one of the big names in this industry and ask them about beginner classes … then sit back and listen while they tell you how thankful they are that they don’t teach raw beginners anymore.
What does an instructor who works with beginners need to know?
A little bit of everything: a huge collection of factoids about guns and holsters and ammo and other gear, of course. Range etiquette and emergency protocols, ditto. 1 The current local, state, and federal laws that govern firearms ownership and use. This includes the laws that govern deadly force and all lesser levels of force. How to cope with a wide variety of physical and emotional challenges, including many that will never show up in more advanced levels of class. How to give an engaging short speech that holds the students’ interest. What to do with a clumsy student or with person who has severe arthritis or with a married couple when one of them really really really does not want to be there. They need to be able to competently handle a wide variety of firearms and they must be able to teach someone to easily rack a slide and lock it open.
They must be able to soothe the fearful, put the fear of John Moses Browning into the unsafe, and calm the overly excited.
People who work with beginners also need to have impeccable range safety skills, of course. This means not just being able to see when students are at risk from a wandering muzzle or a wayward finger, but also being able to model near-perfect gunhandling habits at all times. They need to have eyes in the back of their heads because newcomers get into more trouble, more quickly, than most people would ever believe. They need to be quick on their feet, gentle in their demeanor and utterly unyielding on matters of safety. They need to be able to see the future…
See the future? Yup. Just that. When you have responsibility to watch over a group of new shooters on the range, it becomes your job to notice when one of them is about to point the muzzle at someone else (or at themselves), and to magically be standing right next to that person to stop it from happening … before it does. To do this, you learn to read body language and pay attention to all sorts of cues that most people never notice. You learn to see the future, at least a little, and it’s a superpower.
All that, and more. It’s a tough job.
And it deserves a lot more respect than it usually gets.
Notes:
When confronted with a potentially dangerous situation or a person whose behavior causes concern, self-defense experts often suggest that you should “trust your gut.” But what does this advice mean, really? How can we realistically apply it?
Lots more to say about this, but here are two factors to keep in mind.
Personal dynamics: when you get that ‘ping’ – that feeling on the back of your neck that signals danger – don’t ever try to argue yourself out of that feeling. Act on it. Analyze the cause and then remove its source.
Group dynamics: trust your friends’ guts, too. Never try to talk someone else out of their ping. When someone you care about says, “That guy makes me nervous,” our human tendency is to offer reassurance. We don’t like our friends feeling uneasy, so we try to soothe the feeling away and ease their discomfort.
There’s nothing wrong or bad with wanting your friends to feel comfortable, but here again, it is both safer and more kind to remove the source of the discomfort than it is to explain why they shouldn’t feel that way.
Don’t reassure – solve.
The question seemed fairly simple:
“What is the best conceal carry for anywhere on your body? … Also, where can I find holsters for any part of body?”
The answer isn’t what you think.
First off, I get it, I really do. Flexibility is good! Being tied down is hard! Boo for lack of choices! Yay for more choices!
That’s one reason so many of us find it hard to ‘pack light’ for a weekend trip.
Me, standing over the suitcase: “Well, I don’t know what the weather will be like that morning, and what if I don’t feel like wearing blue that day? Okay, so I’ll add the green shirt, just in case that’s what I feel like wearing, hmmm, gotta have an undershirt for that one, here we go, oh it needs a scarf too — but what if I want to wear a skirt instead of pants? Better put the skirt in, plus the other pair of shoes, and you know what, I really like the tan shirt with that skirt too so have to add that…”
… and pretty soon I discover I’ve packed six pairs of shoes, and the suitcase weighs 73 pounds, and I’m wondering why my makeup bag doesn’t fit. I want to be prepared for everything that might possibly happen, including the remote but seems-reasonable-in-the-moment possibility that I will suddenly feel the urge to don a skirt I honestly haven’t worn since 2014.
So. Holsters. Holsters are like shoes.
If you’re looking for one holster that will fit every possible clothing choice you might make for the rest of your life, remember that holsters are like shoes. You would not hope to find one pair of shoes that would work with every outfit you will ever wear. You would use a different strategy entirely, and for good reason.
So before going too far down the single-holster-forever road, I would recommend you think about the 80/20 principle. That is the rule of thumb that says that 80% of the value usually comes from 20% of the thing. Think about your closet and the clothes in it. If your closet is ten feet long, the chances are that most of the time, the clothes you wear will come from just two feet of that space. The rest of the space is taken up by special events clothes and clothes that you don’t wear as often.
What does this have to do with holsters? Everything!
When looking for that first holster, we’re often tempted to search for one that will work for absolutely every conceivable situation — just like I too often do when overpacking a suitcase. I want to be prepared for every possible eventuality!
But that’s not the most efficient or smartest way to do this thing.
Here’s a better plan:
Instead of trying to find one holster that will work for 100% of your clothing including outfits you don’t even own right now, do this. Look for one holster that will work for the 20% of the clothing that you wear most often. Make sure that one works very, very well, and that you can use it for the outfits you wear most often and feel most comfortable in.
Then carry, every time you can and every place you can.
As you get more comfortable with concealed carry through daily experience, you will find that the ‘limited’ holster you chose will actually get you through a lot more situations than you really thought it would at first. You will also become more realistic about the marginal and alternative options you’ll be looking at to fill in when you’re wearing specialty clothing.
Some of those alternative options will look a lot less attractive after you’ve experienced comfortable and secure carry with a good holster, while others will look more attractive once you’ve experienced the challenges built into carrying the gun on a regular basis. In either case, you’ll have a much more realistic way of looking at things after you have some carry experience under your belt.
Keep an eye on the 80/20 principle as you choose your first holster. Look for something that will work with the clothes you wear most often, and then carry your gun whenever you can in those clothes. As situations come up where you’re struggling to wear the gun because you’re wearing different clothes than the ones you wear most often, you can take note of what you actually need in order to make those clothes work for concealed carry. And then you can fill in those holes with other purchases, as and when you need them.
Remember that holsters are a lot like shoes. It is much easier to find a practical pair of every day shoes than it is to find a single pair of shoes that will work for every outfit in your closet! (Do they even make such a thing?) Specialty shoes go for specialty outfits. You don’t expect your everyday shoes to work with your fanciest clothes, and you know your fanciest shoes aren’t practical for everyday wear. Holsters are the same. It is much easier to find a practical every day holster than it is to find a holster that will work for every outfit in your closet. But you can — and should — fill in with specialty products for special occasions once you have the daily footwear problem solved.
Be sure that every holster or carry option you choose:
1) Holds the gun securely. By securely, I mean that the gun will not slip out if the holster is tipped upside down and shaken gently. This makes it possible to use the bathroom without significant risk of the gun falling out and landing on the floor.
2) Protects the trigger completely. It is not enough for the trigger to simply be covered – although that is also necessary. What you need is the trigger to be covered by something that will actually protect it from any movement as long as the gun is inside the holster. Usually this means a stiff sided holster, and if you go with a soft sided holster you will need to put something rigid over the trigger guard area. Also note that the entire trigger area must be covered.
3) Allows quick and reliable access to the gun. A lot of times people wonder why this is on the list, because isn’t it a given? Sadly, no. A lot of people never think of this one at all. They only think about how comfortable and concealed the holster is, and they forget that the whole reason they are carrying the holster is so that they can get to the gun quickly when they need it.
Stay safe.
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