Author: KevinC

It’s no coincidence that Americans attitudes of guns changed for the better while Top Shot, Duck Dynasty and other gun-related shows were on the air. Those programs showed gun ownership as safe, fun and above all, normal.

Gun owners know how to fight and occasionally win political battles. Where we suck and are losing is fighting cultural battles, and no, putting on yet another country music show is NOT going to move the needle in our favor. We need to find allies to our cause, not create an echo chamber. The NRA is useful for keeping the faithful inline and celebrating gun culture, but because of the negative press it’s getting right now, it is a toxic brand outside of the world of gun owners.

There’s a few easy wins we can pick up here: The tagline of this blog is “Guns are the new Harley Davidson,” so reaching out to motorcycle riders and tying the freedom of the open road to the empowerment of safe gun ownership is an obvious win. Another quick win that seems obvious to me is using the trust icon of the military to promote competitive shooting to video game players, which would be a win-win for the military’s recruiting efforts and practical shooting.

Duh.

Or. I got 99 problems and I Mozambique’d every one of them.

As the LCP2 is chambered in .380, a round that is marginal for self-defensive purposes, shot placement and penetration are what is going to get the job done, not “stopping power”*, I spent this range session doing Failure To Stop drills with my LCP2 from three yards out to ten yards, and also did a few of the walkback drills I learned in ECQC, where the gun is extended out enough to get good hits on-target, but not so far out that your opponent can get ahold of it. Seven yards is about the maximum for me for headshots with this gun, but I can do center-mass all day long at 10 to 15 yards.

This is why we play the game… so we can find the limits of ourselves and our equipment.

Gun-wise, everything went the way it should… I placed all my hits either in the center-chest and ocular cavity, and the LCP2 chewed up and spit out 50 rounds of Winchester White Box and 50 rounds of Blazer Brass from Lucky Gunner with no trouble whatsoever, which makes a nice change from the last range session…. maybe something about that Magtech ammo just doesn’t sit well with this gun.

So, three-quarters of the way done, here’s where we stand:

Ruger LCP2 2000 Round Challenge Results

Rounds Fired
50 Rounds Blazer Brass .380 FMJ
50 Rounds Winchester .380 ACP

Total Rounds Fired: 1500
One possible failure to eject on round 116
Failures to eject: Rounds 400, 489, 974, 993, 1277, 1323, 1359
Failure to feed: Round 873

* Using “stopping power” to describe what pistol does is relatively equivalent to using “celibacy” to describe the antics of Kim Kardashian…

I wrote a brief overview of some of the more-common pocket holsters out there for Shooting Illustrated last year, and I was kinda surprised by what I was sent by the holster makers out there. Some of them were very good, and some of them, quite frankly, sucked.

I didn’t add it to the article, but I did a quick test of all ten holsters to see how effective they were at three things:

1. Retaining the gun in the holster.
2. Allowing me to grab the gun on the draw
3. Releasing the pistol from the holster when drawing the gun

I set up a two-part test to test the holsters I wrote about.

1. I put my unloaded pocket pistol (in this case, my Ruger LCP2) in the holster, and turned it upside down, applying as little pressure to the holster as possible. This tested the grippiness of the holster itself, and if the gun dropped out of the holster, it failed.
2. I placed the unloaded gun in the holster, put in the pocket of my cargo shorts, set up a target three yards away and set my shot timer for three seconds. I know from a previous test that this was more than enough time to draw the gun and get a shot off, so that determined the test criteria.
   I ran this test five times for each holster, and if the holster prevented me from drawing the gun in that amount of time, or worst still, came out of my pocket with the holster still attached to the gun on any one of the five draws, it failed.

Out of the ten holsters I wrote about, only six passed this test. They were:

• The DeSantis Nemesis
• The Blue Force Gear ULTRAcomp
• The Galco Pocket Protector
• The Sticky Holster SM-2
• The Kramer Leather Pocket Gun Holster
• The Elite Survival Systems Elite Pocket Holster

The ones that failed this test and the reasons they failed were:

• The Crossbreed Pocket Holster (Couldn’t grab gun).
• Uncle Mike’s Inside The Pocket Holster (Didn’t retain gun).
• Blackhawk Tecgrip (Didn’t retain the gun AND came out with gun on the draw).
• Bianchi Pocket Piece (Came out with gun on the draw)

I’m almost willing to give the Bianchi holster a pass, because as a leather holster, it can mold itself into a shape that’s a little amiable to releasing the gun when needed. However, the Kramer Leather* holster released the gun when needed from the very start, so let’s leave the Bianchi on the “fail” list for now.

To demonstrate what makes a good pocket holster, let’s look at two of the holsters that didn’t make the cut.

The Crossbreed Pocket Holster is kydex/leather hybrid, just like almost everything that Crossbreed makes, and while that big leather backer completely disguises the shape of your gun in your pocket, it also makes it almost impossible to get a good grip on your pistol during the draw. Considering that the whole point of carrying a gun is knowing that you’ll have to use it at some (unfortunate) moment in your life and you’ll also need to use it rightthisverysecond, having a holster that by design doesn’t allow you draw quickly is not a good idea.

That Blackhawk! pocket holster… where to begin. First off, it’s way too deep: The muzzle of my LCP2 doesn’t come close to the bottom of the holster, and there’s no molding on it whatsoever, so there is no retention whatsoever. In addition to this, the only thing that’s keeping your gun in your pants pocket is the grippiness of the material on the outside of the holster, and if that doesn’t do it’s job, your holster is coming out of your pocket with the gun wrapped inside of it.

This has a negative effect on your draw speed.

What happens with this holster is that because it’s not fitted to your gun, your gun flops around in your pocket, and if you need to draw your gun it’s either someplace other than inside the holster, leading to longer draw times as you play a very, very dangerous game of pocket pool fishing around for your heater, or it comes out of your pocket along with the gun, leaving you pointing something at looks like a small coin purse at your assailant.

In short, a good pocket holster keeps your gun securely inside your pocket, allows you to get a good grip on your gun before the draw, and stays inside your pocket when you draw your gun. Anything less is unacceptable.

* HOLY COW do the Kramer and Bianchi holsters look good. It’s almost a shame to hide them away in a pocket.

I’m doing a little research on what’s out there as far as “how to” guides on carrying smaller guns, and all of them start off a variation of “Yes, I carry a pocket gun, but what I really like to carry is a Glock 19/1911/some other bigger gun.”

This is roughly equivalent to starting of a book on cooking hamburgers with “yes, I eat hamburgers, but what I really like to eat is reverse-seared dry-aged ribeye steaks.”

What does one have to do with the other? Yes, I like a good steak, but I like a good hamburger, too. If I want a burger, I buy a burger. If I want steak, I eat steak. I don’t apologize for eating a hamburger on a road trip, and I don’t apologize for liking to splurge on a good hunk o’ cow from time to time. Burgers have their time and place, so do steaks. You’d get p!ssed off if someone served you a Big Mac at a steak joint, and good luck trying to eat a porterhouse in your car.

Carry your pocket guns. Shoot them well. Learn what they can and can’t do. And don’t make apologies for what you carry.

Two interesting articles popped up on my radar over the weekend, both of which demand more than just a cursory link. First is the look at the full-spectrum tactics of the anti-gun left, over at Ace of Spaces.

The way spectrum of allies analysis works is: you categorize people and groups by where they stand in relation to you and your target on whatever issue you’re working on

Active opponents are against you, and fighting you.
Passive opponents are against you, but they’re not fighting you.
Neutrals are neither against or for you.
Passive allies are with you, but they’re not fighting for you.
Active allies are with you and are fighting for you.

The point of spectrum of allies analysis is figuring out who you can move one notch. Who can you move toward you? Who can you move away from your enemy? And how do you make sure you don’t push people away from you?

Active allies: engage them.
Passive allies: make them active.
Neutrals: inform or educate them to make them passive allies.
Passive opponents: make them move to neutral by worrying their position may cost them — BUT CAREFULLY, so they don’t become active opponents.

Quite frankly, gun owners suck at this sort of thing. We’re pretty good at identifying allies and opponents in the political arena, but our attempts to do this in the culture war is limited to Colion Noir and a concert at the NRA Convention and that’s about it.

This has to change. We need to learn how to win a culture war, not  just win an election

Secondly is this article by a self-confessed left wing gun nut (courtesy of David Yamane), which lays out the difference between gun owners and the gun control crowd clearer than anyone else I’ve seen before.

“Folks in the anti-gun camp tend to believe, with Martin Luther King Jr., that, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice’. The other camp sees history as cyclical, with no real long-term trajectory. We take it as self-evident that there is nothing new under the sun; human nature doesn’t change; and humans keep re-learning the same painful lessons as species. Ultimately, then, the private ownership of weapons of war is an issue that pits each side against its own hopes for the future. The anti-gun crowd finds itself arguing for the unassailable tactical superiority of the present neoliberal order, and the pro-gun crowd finds itself making the awful case that horrific deaths in the present are necessary to prevent a dystopian future that it fervently hopes will never come to pass.”

I have two sons. I want them to live a world that’s better than the one I lived in, but I also want them to live confident, secure lives. The neoliberal blue state model is collapsing, and one thing that always happens when cultures are in transition is that law and order breaks down, and people need to defend what’s near and dear to them by themselves, rather than wait for the .gov’s cavalry to arrive. It happened to the farmers in Gaul when Rome collapsed, it happened to the farmers in Bulgaria when the Holy Roman Empire collapsed, and it will happen here very soon as we find alternatives to our current progressive taxation/entitlement system of government.

And make no mistake: Progressivism is on it’s way out. But just because an animal is mortally wounded doesn’t mean it’s any less dangerous.

In response to the horror in Parkland, Florida is looking to allow public school teachers to carry a defensive firearm inside the classroom.

Good.

What’s not so good are the training requirements. I understand that a lot of this is political cover so that a bill of some form can be passed in the legislature, and that the trust icon of law enforcement training is a powerful talisman of faith, but 132 hours of training, just so you can carry a gun inside school grounds like you can outside of school grounds?

From SB 7026: Public Safety.

(5) TRAINING AND INSTRUCTION.—All training must be conducted by Criminal Justice Standards Training Commission (CJSTC)-certified instructors.
(a) Required instruction must include 132 total hours of comprehensive firearm safety and proficiency training in the following topics:
1. Firearms: 80-hour block of instruction. The firearms instruction must be based on the CJSTC Law Enforcement Academy training model and must be enhanced to include 10 percent to 20 percent more rounds fired by each program participant beyond the minimum average of approximately 1,000 training rounds associated with academy training. Program participants mustachieve an 85 percent pass rate on the firearms training.
2. Firearms precision pistol: 16-hour block of instruction.
3. Firearms discretionary shooting: 4-hour block of instruction using state-of-the-art simulator exercises.
4. Active shooter or assailant: 8-hour block of instruction.
5. Defensive tactics: 4-hour block of instruction.
6. Legal or high liability: 20-hour block of instruction.
(b) Program participants may complete an optional, 16-hour precision pistol course as additional training.
(c) Ongoing and annual proficiency retraining must be conducted by the sheriff, as specified in the agreement.

Also, they’re bypassing the civilian training market and making it a money-maker for the Sheriff’s department. Not the most optimal of outcomes, but if it gets rid of the silliness of “gun free zones”, I’m ok with this. Florida led the wave of “Shall Issue” CCW permits back in the early 90’s, and if this creates a demand for a dispersed response to all kinds of dispersed threats, not just active shooters, this is a good thing indeed.

A quick roundup of interesting stuff on the web, some of it written by me, some not.

Just how effective are tourniquets in a mass shooter situation?

Pistol, rifle or shotgun for home defense?

“Confidence is contagious.”

Getting serious about having fun at the range means you’ll have more fun at the range. Duh.

Massad Ayoob on using short-barreled pistols for personal defense at longer distances. Speaking as someone who has passed both Mas’s shooting test and the FBI Pistol Qualification Test (at the Instructor level, no less…) with the 3.1 inch barrel on an S&W Shield, shorter guns can be VERY effective at longer ranges…

We are in uncharted territory here: Fake media aside, the tide IS turning on guns, but the recent ginned-up outrage over the slaughter in Parkland (and the shameless use of children to push gun control) has knocked us back a bit.

We don’t know how to win the war on guns, and I’m not sure we CAN know how to win, because the whole purpose of Gun Culture 2.0 is to prepare for something really bad happening to us.

We have a defensive mindset instilled in us from our first CCW class. We think in terms of protecting what is our most dear to us. No wonder, then, that we think of gun politics in defensive terms.

How do we flip that into a message of hope?

We are, quite literally looking to evangelize people and change their way of living. Speaking in terms of saving souls, yes, it’s good that people “come to Jesus” to prevent something bad (namely, hell) from happening to them, but any pastor will tell you that sort of conversion has little effect in changing someone’s life over the long term. The change sticks when the convert sees the positive aspects that come from their conversion experience.

Can we talk about that and still show people that just owning a gun isn’t enough, that they also need training and more practice? Gun Culture 1.0 did exactly that with things like the Boone and Crockett Club and modern conservationism, and that helped create <Sam Elliot Voice> a storied tradition of hunting, passed on from generation to generation </Sam Elliot Voice> and a positive view of hunting that has lasted for decades.

Is there a Gun Culture 2.0 version of such things? Can that even exist?

Claude’s comments on Ballistic Radio this month hit me really hard. The firearms training industry is in a Catch-22 right now: People flock to trainers who flaunt their high-level military creds because such people have trust icons galore, and at the same time, having a firearms background that is pretty much all M4, all the time is bloody useless for we armed citizens.

This is one of the areas where a background in executive protection can come in handy. While how they protect people may vary from how we armed citizens protect our loved ones, the people who stand around with radio headsets know how to remain discreet while heavily armed, and they have a long history of problem-solving with command tone, soft hands and if necessary, a pistol.

Which sounds pretty much identical to what we normies need to know. We need to think more like Frank Horrigan, and less like Gunny Highway.

Or are we? Some curated tweets from last week’s CNN show trial town hall about the Parkland murders. What was supposed to be a rally for gun control might turn out to motivate gun owners like very few things have before…

I would note that Guy Benson is a terrific advocate for conservative causes, but he is NOT a gun guy, and his response is something I am seeing again and again from folks on the right who are not into guns.

That clip of the audience cheering for a semi auto ban will motivate gun owners like nothing we’ve seen since 1994. If the NRA doesn’t use it in every ad they run in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio and maybe Pennsylvania, they deserve to lose. We are talking SEMIAUTOS here, not “assault weapons” or scary AR-15’s. Things like the 10/22’s you use to plink cans and the Remington 1100 you use to blast geese from the sky would be covered by this ban.

Think that’ll motivate hunters to get out and vote?

And just how are we used to have a “conversation about guns” with someone who makes stuff up as they go along? It’d be like having a “conversation about football” with someone who insists on calling the ball a puck and swears that football is played in a rink.

Once you not only otherize your political opponents but also claim everything they do or say is actually violence, of COURSE you have to respond with actual violence. What choice do you have but to use violence against “violence”?

We are witnessing what happens when an entire generation (or more) has grown up with a Disneyland state of mind, and now they’re throwing the mother of all hissy fits.

And finally this, from the inestimable Frank J. Fleming.