Who down wit' P.I.D.? Yeah, you know me!

Gorillafritz has an excellent post on the importance of positive target identification in averting tragic, and potentially fatal, mistakes:

"Let me start by saying that no one in this situation did anything wrong. The cop was trying to make sure a boy wasn’t going to kill himself. The homeowner was legally defending his residence from a suspicious intruder approaching the back door of his house. Some frazzled nerves, poor training, or a couple more pounds of pressure on either weapon’s trigger would have resulted in a tragic outcome.

How do we prevent situations like this from going bad?"

Go read the whole thing.

Your house is not a free-fire zone. Use a flashlight. If you don't have a flashlight... well, you're wrong ...but if you don't have a flashlight, turn on the lights. If the power's out, ask "Who's there?"

Don't just shoot at shapes and shadows.

"Like a monkey with a screwdriver..."

So, let's talk about knives. Once upon a time, I used to look at a tactical folder as though it were a weapon which, when one thinks about it, is sort of odd.

Unless you live in the rare jurisdiction that bans pepper spray and firearms but is hunky dory with you carrying some one-hand opening, locking folder with a big ol' meat-eating blade, it's hard to imagine the scenario where you're going to put it into use. 

I suppose you could theoretically pull it out and wave it around as some sort of deterrent? But there's a lot of fantasy stuff out there where people are imagining squaring off with some attacker in a scenario reminiscent of West Side Story meets a "Teach Yourself Escrima at Home" DVD from Paladin Press.

The one really legitimate use for a knife is to defend against a gun grab or otherwise force an attacker off you that has grabbed you by surprise from behind.

And frankly a folding knife clipped to your strong-side pocket just isn't all that hot for that use. For starters, it assumes that your strong side arm is free and doesn't have 180 pounds of assailant wrapped around it.

Further, even if you do get the knife out of the pocket and into your hand, there's still the problem of deploying the blade. Sure, there are thumb studs and Spyder holes and flippers and assisted openers and even straight-up automatic ones with pushbutton releases. The problem with all those is that you have to get one grip on the knife to get it out of your pocket, shift your grip on the knife to get your thumb or forefinger into place to deploy the blade, and then shift your grip again to get the knife positioned in your hand to go to work with it.

And you have to perform all that hand jive while rolling around with Sumdood who's trying to yank your arm out of the socket and conk your head on the pavement. Don't drop it!

About the only folders that mostly evade this handicap are ones with the Emerson Wave or a facsimile thereof, which mostly open reliably and automatically as they're being yanked out of the pocket. Mostly. Under ideal conditions I'd say I probably get it right about 95+% of the time. Rolling around with Sumdood is pretty far from ideal conditions, though.

Hence the popularity of the small centerline fixed-blade knife. Carried in whatever way makes it best accessible to either hand...behind the belt buckle, IWB, even in some circumstances as a neck knife...the idea is that it can be reached with either hand and yanked out ready to go, already in a stabbin' grip. The purpose of these small knives isn't to square up with some other knife guy like you're Jim Bowie on a sandbar, but to do like the guy in the white shirt is doing in the above photo: Make like a monkey with a screwdriver to get the other guy to let go of your gun and/or you.

The Shivworks store has a few really excellent offerings like the classic Push Dagger or the Clinch Pick. Those are outstanding, and probably the go-to choices, but if you're on a budget, the TDI knives from Ka-Bar work great and are available from BezosMart with free Prime delivery.

(Also, get yourself to ECQC.)

Tab Clearing...

• We "dial" and "hang up" phones, have web "pages", and "roll up" the windows in our cars.


• Russian hackers breach Verizon's PTT network.


• "Hey, buddy, do you have the time?" On distracting questions.

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Having, Collecting, Hoarding, Disposing

If you have a hobby that entails accumulating a lot of stuff, have you considered how best to dispose of it when you're gone? Your kids, or other next of kin, may not necessarily be interested in your cameras, guns, or cars.

Some things, like books or action figures or toy trains, are fairly easy to dispose of. Worst-case scenario you can haul the books to Half Price Books and the Beanie Babies to Goodwill.

Other items, like firearms or motor vehicles, may have additional legal entanglements. It's worth thinking about how to mitigated the hassles that'll cause your family ahead of time.

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Tab Clearing...

• "These aren't my pants."


• Looking at your old photos.


• The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was A Major Driver of The Loss of The Play-Based Childhood

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Tab Clearing...

• A look at the retro-styled Heritage Roscoe, to tide you over until the next issue of RECOIL: Concealment hits newsstands this month with my feature-length review.


• The Day the US Conquered the British Empire: June 6th, 1944


• Tightening Your Accuracy and Performance Standards

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Hey, look!

So, the Spyderco is a better knife than the Victorinox—if all you need to do is cut stuff with a knife. The Climber, on the other hand, does knife stuff pretty OK, as well as being able to do a reasonable job with a lot of other chores, too.

Of course, the Victorinox is only doing a “reasonable” job with all those screwdriver or bottle-opening chores. People who need a tool that can do really good work with the knife blade as well as handling all kinds of normie tool chores will usually pick a multi-tool like a Leatherman MUT or Gerber Center-Drive. Sure, they’re big and bulky, but they can do both knife and tool stuff really well.

By now, probably half the readers are glancing at the top of this column and wondering if “HANDGUNS” is some new spelling of “POCKET KNIVES” with which they had previously been unfamiliar. Gentle reader, I have a point! (And not simply the one on the knife.)

Carry guns come in all kinds of flavors.Probably the statistically most common ones these days are one of three kinds: teeny little micro-.380 ACP semi-automatics of the Ruger LCP variety, small-frame snub-nose revolvers or itty-bitty micro 9 mm pistols like the Kahr PM9 or Glock G43. These handguns are like the Spyderco Delica. They only do one thing—serve as a defensive CCW piece against would-be human assailants at fairly close distances—very well.

Some pistols are multitools, others are single-purpose...

Tab Clearing...

• It's funny 'cause it's true.


• The "My Bad $20".


• The Gun Culture 2.0 blog turned twelve, which is a lot in blog years.

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Tab Clearing...

• In a time-honored Russian tradition, the FSB is likely going to work over the ISIS arrestees with rubber truncheons until they admit to being Ukrainian.


• The Fraud of the Century: How a carbon credit scam in France made millions.


• Avoid doing the monkey dance.

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A Jog Around the Blogs

• In and of itself, "outsider" isn't much of a job qualification.


• You wanna know a secret?


• You know the advice of the great warrior philosopher, Chef, is "Never get out of the boat", but it's also important to not let just any ol' body into the boat.

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...until it is.

So on the Bookface the other day, several of the self-identified "Old Timers" got ahold of the phrase "It's bullet placement" as though it were some ideal rebuttal to everything from the importance of projectile design to the necessity of fast and accurate shooting.

I really hate the way that aphorisms replace thinking when it comes to personal protection. It's like the term "combat mindset". I've heard dudes at the local range talking about how they'll be fine should they ever have to yank out a handgun because they have some special mindset, when I know for a fact that they couldn't hit a barn from the inside with the door closed if you gave them all day to do it because I've seen them shoot. 

Just saying "it's bullet placement" doesn't actually, you know, place the bullet.

Further, using statements like "it's bullet placement" when used to pooh-pooh thoughtfulness in ammunition selection completely ignores the fact that bullet placement is three-dimensional. To take it to the reductio ad absurdum, it doesn't do you any good to place a bullet right in the dude's snotbox if it only penetrates a half inch.

John Hearne explaining that bullet placement is three dimensional

Marty Hayes, a well-known retired firearms trainer, mentioned that he had hosted the famous Jim Cirillo, victor of numerous gunfights, and that Cirillo's mantra was "use of cover and shot placement". That is true, as far as it goes! Yet in Cirillo's own book, Guns, Bullets, and Gunfights, he spent twenty-five pages... roughly a quarter of the book ...nerding out over bullet design and the various projectiles he'd helped develop to reduce the likelihood of round-nosed lead and FMJ bullets skidding off the curved bone structure of ribs and skulls.

Resist the urge to think about this stuff like it came out of a Chinese fortune cookie, that there's one magic concept, such as "combat mindset", "bullet placement", a "fast draw", or whatever, that's going to save the day.

No single aspect of this stuff is important by itself... until it is.

I love .44 Special... unless it's a 165gr FTX hollow point that only penetrates 8" or so.

"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.)

A Jog Around the Blogs...

• Tailfins and Dagmars


• Match safes


• Your house... and property ...is not a free-fire zone.

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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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Odds, Stakes, and Realistic Threats

From an article by David Merrill about using NFA items for home defense:

"Unless you’re involved with the illicit narcotics trade and living in a trap house, or your place is home to an underground gambling ring, the number-one threat won’t be armed men breaking in raid-style, but instead theft — people breaking in when you aren’t home and burgling your stuff. When we talk about home-defense firearms, there’s a balance to be struck; you want the firearm to stay safe from tiny hands and sticky fingers while still being easy to access."

From a piece by Greg Ellifritz on threat assessment:

"Have you ever considered the difference between being in a dangerous situation and being in one where you have limited response options?

I think a lot of us in the gun/self-protection world get those feelings confused."

That post linked above is one that a lot of the "rawr I'll never go anyplace where I can't carry a gun rawr" crowd need to read and heed. As Melody Lauer put it, “Don’t let your desire to protect your life keep you from living a life worth protecting.”

Remember: Millions of people go unstrapped yet remain unclapped every day. The gun is just a tool, and one with a very limited and specific use case, at that. If you need it, odds are good you've probably already made some mistakes. If I had to choose between perfect, omniscient situational awareness or perfect, turboninja pistol skills, I'd choose the former every time and just nope on out of situations where I'd need the latter.

A Jog Around the Blogs

• Surveillance Detection Principles: "Follow-Home" robberies are a thing. Do you know how to tell if you are being followed and what to do if you are?


• Jim Grey is trying his hand at bite-size five minute podcasts every Wednesday this year.


• Revolvers are just Awesome.

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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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A Jog Around the Blogs...

• Gorillafritz has thoughts on flashlight usage. (Departments issuing weapon-mounted lights without adequately training officers in how to use them are a blight upon the land. I've heard horror stories of officers directing traffic with their WML. It's only a matter of time before I hear about one using their TLR-1 to check for horizontal gaze nystagmus.)


• Bobbi finds ominous rumblings on the international scene.


• Pragmatic pondering on the problems of pocket poppers.

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I have been kilt onna streets yet again.

 

A couple of common taters objected to my post about speed strips, because there are several speedloaders which are much faster.

I replied:

"In general, with a revolver carried for personal defense (as with any handgun carried for personal defense) you're going to solve the problem with the ammunition in the weapon or you aren't going to solve the problem.

Reloads, whether for a Glock 34 or a J-frame, are mostly woobies, as well as a way to save you the embarrassment of having to hand a half-empty gun to responding officers.

If you're playing some game where you're reloading revolvers on the clock, a speedloader is definitely the way to go. But the fastest ones, like the SL, are useless for CCW because of the ease with which they will disgorge their contents. The only speedloader that holds its rounds sturdily enough that I'd recommend it for carry is the old HKS, which is only marginally faster than strips.

Plus speedloaders are bulky AF to carry, and most people won't bother.

But you do you."

(True Story: I had an HKS CA-44 loaded with five .44 Spl 200gr Silvertips rolling around loose in the bottom of a purse for close to a decade without dropping a round.)

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When things go rodeo...

Bodycam footage of the IMPD officer successfully deploying his backup gun and shooting the dude who'd just snatched his service weapon and shot him in the leg with it is available online now.

The fight goes to the ground and the officer has to access and deploy his BUG with his support hand while on his back and entangled in a melee. It's times like that when having made a bunch of deposits in the training bank pays off, because that's a heck of a big withdrawal.

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