I tell you what, I wish that concealed carry was easier than it is. That’s kind of been that the mantra over the past decade it’s been driving towards the idea that, you know concealed carry “it’s great, it’s for everybody” and I think that is a load of crap. It’s a long ways from the truth, concealed carry is difficult and as a result it means that there are a whole lot of people that aren’t suited for concealed carry just because of the difficulty.
Concealed carry is like trying to figure out this giant puzzle and make it all work out so that you’re prepared for that short time but very important time when you need that firearm. And there are very few people that are willing to go through the difficulties, the discomfort, the frustration, the learning that’s required to be prepared for that time, which the fact is may never come for them. And that’s okay it doesn’t make them bad people it just makes them people that aren’t necessarily ready and willing to take the steps that are necessary to be prepared for that situation.
The fact is concealed carry isn’t easy, concealed carry isn’t always comfortable, concealed carry isn’t always convenient. Concealed carry can be very difficult, concealed carry can be downright uncomfortable at times and concealed carry can be incredibly inconvenient. Learning how to shoot is one of the perfect examples the gun that is right for you for concealed carry might not be the gun that’s right for you to learn to shoot with.
Plain and simple you may have wardrobe restrictions where you work or where it is that you spend time that keep you from carrying a gun that is easy to shoot, that that is enjoyable to shoot and as a result you get that gun that’s small semiautomatic maybe it’s a 9mm that has recoil that is downright difficult to handle for a new shooter in a small sized package.
That doesn’t mean that concealed carry is not for you, in fact some of the folks that are interested and willing to carry guns in situations where concealment is imperative those folks really need to carry a concealed handgun. They simply haven’t been taught or haven’t been shown the way to be able to make that work so they can be comfortable using that firearm and carrying the size gun that they need to carry.
And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about one of the challenges in concealed carry and the idea that the gun that is right for you to carry might not be the best gun for you to learn how to shoot. So stick with us, see if maybe this idea pertains to you or someone you care about.
Hey folks my name is Paul Carlson I’m the owner of Safety Solutions Academy and the host of the Safety Solutions Academy podcast. And I’m so glad that you’re here with me today to talk about how to deal with one of those challenging concealed carry situations, the idea of carrying that small handgun because you need to, not because you want to, not because you’re lazy, not because your six foot four and you thinks it’s a good idea to carry a GLOCK 43 because a well it would just be nice and comfortable to carry.
But there are lots of folks out there that carry a handgun in a situation where concealment is very challenging very difficult because of clothing constraints, because of work constraints because of the consequences of being made. They may be legally carrying the handgun but they might be breaking the rules of a place that holds some consequences over their head. Maybe their employer, maybe a place where they spend time, maybe the facility of a customer and they’re breaking those rules and if they get made well that can be a serious problem in their life. Yet at the same time they believe that they have a need to carry a concealed handgun.
So what is it that you do in that situation that’s what we’re going to talking about today. And again I do want to thank you for being here and joining us on the Safety Solutions Academy podcast. I’ve got to tell you, I have absolutely been enjoying brining out more and more podcast episodes, there have been a ton of them that have come out recently and they’re going to continue to come. What I encourage you folks to do is share these episodes on social media, share them with folks that may benefit, shoot of an email to somebody with a link to the show, get yourself subscribed to the podcast. All of those things help to spread the word about the Safety Solutions Academy podcast.
So as I mentioned in our little intro the idea has been in concealed carry to really try to accommodating to all people of all kinds…and concealed carry its right for you, its right for everybody. You know don’t forget your gun’s not supposed to be you know comfortable it’s supposed to be comforting. Oh no that’s baloney your gun should always be comfortable. You know there’s a fine line that we have to walk. Anyone that has carried a gun for a long period of time knows that at some point in time your gun becomes uncomfortable.
You know I just spent a week on vacation back and forth from the beach. I couldn’t carry the standard method that I carry. I cannot you know rock a swimsuit on the beach caring appendix position it just doesn’t work, you know throwing a ball around with the kids without a belt on and carrying a GLOCK 17 in my waistband it just doesn’t fly.
That makes concealed carry really inconvenient because you know I get up in the morning put my gun on and get ready to go to the beach and everything changes and then come back and get ready to go out for dinner and well now it changes again, that’s not easy to deal with. So we’re kidding ourselves and we’re kidding everybody else if we if we give folks the idea that concealed carry is easy, it’s not easy it’s difficult.
We’ll do more podcast episodes on the difficulties of concealed carry taking an honest look at them and how to try and mitigate those difficulties to some to some degree. But the fact is they never go away completely. And this idea of, you know whatever gun you carry that’s the gun that you should train with all the time.
I say that to my students a lot and in fact I did there a lot more of my students that should train with the gun that they carry but there’s a reason that they don’t. It’s because they probably don’t get enough practice and training in the first place. And the fact is the gun that a lot of my students are in situations where the need to carry small guns is probably not the right gun for them to be learning on. So we’re going to talk in specific about that and let’s go ahead and get right to it.
I think that it’s important to understand that your learning pistol might not be your carry pistol for a lot of different reasons. Now if you’re in a situation where you need to carry particularly small gun, small guns are more difficult to shoot, they’re more difficult to shoot quickly, more difficult to shoot precisely and as a result it might benefit you to have a second gun that you can train with.
So the first question that we need to be asking ourselves is are you a person that needs to have two guns a gun to learn with and a gun to carry? And the first thing that I’ll ask folks to do is really consider do you need to carry a tiny little micro pistol? Do you really need to carry that GLOCK 43, GLOCK 42 whatever the case might be or are you carrying that pistol simply because it’s easier to carry?
Larger pistols have a tremendous number of advantages over small pistols. First of all they’re more reliable, the angles that are involved in small pistols especially semiautomatics make them more difficult to be reliable over the vast range of circumstances that gun needs to perform in. Your full-size gun is almost always going to be more reliable than the small pistol. That’s a big part of efficiency so if you don’t need to carry that tiny little gun don’t carry that tiny little gun.
Second of all recoil management this is simple physics, a larger gun has more mass, more mass means less recoil being transferred to you the shooter. We call that felt recoil; it feels like the gun is easier to shoot. This means simply if there’s less recoil your sights going to return to target faster you pull the trigger and make follow-up shots more quickly because you’re able to manage that recoil more easily. Bigger guns are easier to shoot faster shooting quickly and getting hits you need to get were talking some of the keys of defensive shooting here.
So if you’re carrying a micro gun because it’s well just more comfortable, I’m not sure that makes a whole lot of sense. Now we really get into it when it comes to a trip to the range. If you need to carry that gun that tiny little gun okay I’ll concede that to you that must be what it is that you need to do. I hope you’re being honest with yourself, I’m just going to take that at face value.
The next question I have for you is, when you head to the range are you getting the hits that you need to get? Are you able to put rounds into the high center chest of a target out to 10 yards, 12 yards, 15 yards? Are you able to put hits into a 2 inch circle out to 7 yards or 10 yards reliably at a reasonably quick pace? Can you get those hits with that small gun? If the answer is yes to that, awesome, great, fabulous.
Next question is how much are you able to shoot in a session? If you were to head out to the range for half of a day could you comfortably shoot 250 rounds out of that itty bitty little micro handgun that you’re carrying or is that going to be oppressive? Is it going to cause discomfort trying to control the small gun, deal with the recoil, and manage the recoil? Is it going to cause physical pain?
Is it going to discourage you from training, even worse if you were spending that day out on the range shooting 500 rounds those hits you were able to make at 15 yards would you be able to make them at the end of the day? Would you put rounds in that two inch circle at 10 yards after shooting this gun for hours or would you be to the point where the recoil would have irritated you to the point, distracted you to the point, frustrated you to the point where now you’re not getting hits, now you’re getting misses?
See if you find yourself in that situation you’re learning has stopped. In fact what you’re doing at that point in time in shooting 250 rounds and getting misses that you used to be able to get your unlearning. You’re actually giving yourself bad habits; you’re building bad habits into your shooting. Our goal is not to unlearn our, goal is to learn.
If you find yourself in that kind of a situation, then you are shooting a gun that you shouldn’t be learning with. Now I’ll go back again, are you sure that’s the gun you want to carry? Are you sure you know there are great holster systems out there that can help you to conceal very large handguns in a lot of different circumstances and if that might work for you it might be a good choice. But if you find yourself in that situation where no, no, no, I need a great concealment system to conceal my hand gun and it also needs to be small but man just arduous to shoot now we’re talking about the perfect candidate for somebody that might want to have a separate gun for learning than their carry gun.
Now if these circumstances don’t apply to you, let’s say you’re carrying a GLOCK 26 and you show up to class with a GLOCK 34. You can shoot that 26 all day long it just isn’t as fun to shoot as the 34, because a 34 has got that great trigger, longer site radius, you know it makes my job easier as a shooter and your cheating quit it.
Again concealed carry is not easy if you depend on the GLOCK 26 train with your GLOCK 26. In the same token if you carry that GLOCK 43 and you could shoot it all day long, heck 500 rounds in a day thousand rounds in a weekend GLOCK 43 no problem if that’s you then don’t show up to class with a GLOCK 19 shoot that GLOCK 43 and get good with it if that’s what you need to carry or start carrying the GLOCK 19.
Do you see what I’m getting at here, don’t make excuses for fun. If you want to go to the range and shoot for fun that’s great but if you’re taking a defensive course, if you’re going out for defensive practice and you could be using that defensive tool but you choose not to, your just shortcutting it, you’re just cheating, don’t do that. So this really pertains to the person that is struggling with that micro gun and being able to shoot it consistently over time, all the time, yet that’s the gun they really need to carry.
So let’s go ahead and move on in that vein. So you’ve determined that you’re one of those people that needs to carry two guns, we need to make smart decisions when it comes to what those two guns are. We aren’t just to willy-nilly choose one gun that super comfortable and fun to shoot to train with and then carry some super small micro gun that’s really comfortable to carry. We actually need to put some thought into the attributes of those two handguns.
Now those two guns should have some common attributes. First of all both guns need to fit your hand. Fit is an important aspect of efficiency, you should have your finger able to be placed on the trigger so that you can manipulate the trigger appropriately. Defeat any safeties that are involved in that trigger and be able to manipulate that trigger quickly and easily without excess motion to the rest of the gun.
You should have your gun placed in the center of the web of your hand between your thumb and your index finger so you can mitigate the recoil of that firearm. It should be centered there in the in the middle of that web as opposed to driven off towards the thumb side and that’s both your guns. If you have to carry a small gun your small gun should fit that way and then if you need another gun to train with, to practice with, to learn with, then that should fit the same way as well. It’s not going to be identical should fit well.
You need to be able to manipulate the magazine release, the slide stop lever; preferably without having to move your hand that’s not always possible but it sure would be nice if you could do that. So both guns need to fit if you have to have a separate gun for carry and a separate gun for learning.
Both guns should have a similar action. What do I mean by that? Well if you’re going to carry a striker fired handgun then you’re learning gun, your training pistol should be a striker fired hand gun as well preferably same manufacturer. We find that guns from the same manufacturer especially when they’re from the same general line of guns have a tendency to behave much in the same way and that can be very helpful.
And I also think that both guns should have the same sights on the gun. When you’re learning to use those sights having that familiarity between a training pistol and a carry pistol can definitely be beneficial. So If you’re forced into a situation… if you meet that criteria that we kind of set forth in the beginning of the show I think it makes sense to make sure that those two guns, that learning pistol and that carrying pistol both fit well, both, have a similar action and both have a similar set of sights.
Okay so we’ve laid out some ground rules for the attributes of those handguns. If you find yourself in that situation where you are struggling shooting the gun that you’re going to carrying and need to improve, yet you can’t change the carry gun itself, the attribute of the gun you’re going to train with or the set of attributes of the gun you’re going to train with you need them to be similar with that concealed carry handgun it only makes sense.
Another principle that you need to start to get comfortable with is the idea that that training gun, if you need it, is a steppingstone. The goal would be for you to transition from that gun being your training gun to being your home defense gun and your concealed carry training handgun would be the gun that you’re going to carry. This is a gun for learning; it’s not going to be the gun that you’re going to use all the time for training.
When you get to the point where you’ve learned with it it’s time to transition away from it. A lot of learning for folks that are new to firearms especially comes with comfort. It comes with the idea of becoming comfortable with the tool that you’re going to use. Recoil is a big issue for a lot of folks. They have a difficult time dealing with the recoil of small pistols and being able to fire that pistol comfortably, reliably with the precision that’s required and at a speed that’s realistic for self-defense.
So it makes sense to do some learning on a gun that allows you to do those things and then begin to transition to that concealed carry handgun but again you must understand that this pistol for learning should never be anything more than a steppingstone. So let’s say you’re going to spend….three days is what you’ve budgeted for defensive training courses out on the range with professional instruction over the course of the year. You need to think about how you’re going to transition to that smaller pistol over the course of those three days.
Let’s say that those three days are spread apart into a one-day course and then later on in the year a two day course. If I were uncomfortable with my concealed carry firearm that might be a good way to go about it. Spend a day on the range with that training gun really getting familiar with the operation of firearms, with dealing with recoil, with reloading the pistol, with using the sights, with pressing the trigger and get comfortable with those things conceptually without the distraction of the severe recoil of the tiny pistol.
Then as you head into the second training course, now of course you’ve spent a bunch of time practicing in between right, because you’re serious about this. You’re not one of those people that’s you know, making up excuses so they can just do what they want to do. So you spent time practicing in between. Those practice sessions start out primarily with that training gun and then you work in a magazine with your practice gun and then primarily training gun and then two or three magazines with that concealed carry pistol. And then primarily with training gun and you know 50 or 100 rounds with that concealed carry handgun.
By the time you get to that second two day course, now you’re really ready to spend some time with that concealed carry handgun. Maybe that’s even going to be your primary gun that’s the gun that you’re going to use for the majority of the course. You’ve built up your tolerance to the recoil, you’ve built up the muscles in your hands in your arms to be able to manage the recoil, to be able to press the trigger, to be able to do all those things and you’ve got the training gun there as that back up to that gun. That gun to go to when you start to get worn out, when you start to get tired, when you start to get recoil sensitive. When you find yourself making those mistakes you can transition back to that training pistol so that you don’t habituate those mistakes which would be exactly the opposite of what it is that you want.
And that’s how it is that I would approach that training gun. Eventually that gun isn’t going to come to the range with you as often as it used to. And those practice sessions maybe you’re not going to bring it all, that one-day training course, not even a consideration. And after going through this process for a period of time you’re going to be perfectly comfortable training with that concealed carry handgun. Which means you have the confidence you need to use to be ready to use that handgun in self-defense should you need to.
And remember that’s what this is all about. We’re not going through this process so that we’re more comfortable with training. No we’re going through this process that you have the skills that you need to be able to perform with the gun it is that you need to be caring because of your extenuating circumstances.
Now we’ve covered all lot of different ideas here. What I think is important to do before we sign off for the day is to go back and do a little bit of review. First of all, know and understand that concealed carry is not easy. It probably is never going to be easy, it’s not going to be convenient, and it’s not going to be super comfortable. We want to make it as easy as we can, we want to make it as comfortable as we can, and we want to make it as convenient as we can.
I’m all for that but I also don’t want to spend a lot of time making excuses so that I can make it easier than it should be. Easier to the point where maybe I’m making myself much less effective than I should need to be. I’m not a person that carries a small pistol I don’t need to carry a small pistol. I also am self-employed, work for myself in a firearms related company, can dress however I want whenever I want, go wherever I want whenever I want.
I don’t have a lot of restrictions that are placed upon me. I can carry whatever gun I need to. I choose to carry a full-size gun. I would encourage you to do the same if you can but I also accept that there are folks out there that can’t. I know that small guns are hard to shoot, they’re lower capacity, and they’re less efficient. So I would encourage everyone to carry the largest defensive handgun that they can reasonably carry safely, securely, concealed, the level of they’re comfortable with in the environment they need to carry.
So don’t wimp out and just carry a little gun because it’s easy, that may not be to your advantage when you really need that gun. But if you need to carry that small gun you’ve got to know how to shoot that small gun you’ve got to be comfortable with it. In fact I would say you need to be confident with it. You need to believe that that is the gun that is going to solve the problem that you need to solve. And how do you believe that? You believe it by gaining the ability that you actually make it so.
This isn’t some magical trick it’s about hard work if you can comfortably shoot that little gun now great. Do that, go out and train with that gun. But if you find yourself unable to do so you’ve got a have a way to get comfortable and maybe a similar but larger gun is the way to do that. And then you ease yourself off of that training pistol back into your little concealed carry gun as your standard gun. Of course taking gun let me say that a little better for you, the gun you would actually go and take a two-day handgun course with. That should be your goal.
So folks I hope that these ideas have been helpful for you. Micro guns have become incredibly popular unfortunately the majority of the people that are carrying them are carrying them out of convenience not because it’s the right gun for them. And this is gotten in the way of folks that it is the right gun for in getting the kind of instruction and training and advice that they really need.
My hope, my goal, my job, my duty, my calling maybe even to be here to try and give you that real advice that’s going to be beneficial for you. So advice number one, if you’re carrying that little gun because it’s just easier for you you’re cheating yourself so stop it. It if you need to carry that gun but you’re not carrying it because it’s hard to shoot, you’re not comfortable you’re not confident. Get comfortable and confident and maybe a larger gun is the way to do that.
If you have questions like this, I mean this is the kind of stuff that we deal with point-blank you know instructor to student right on the range, when we teach concealed carry classes with Safety Solutions Academy and even more in depth in our critical defensive handgun courses. I’d certainly love to have any of you folks out, any of our Safety Solutions Academy podcast listeners out to our courses.
If you live near Northeast Ohio great come on out, train with us if you don’t understand we have an amazing facility where we host our courses and it is well worth travelling to wherever it is or from wherever it is that you’re from to come and train with Safety Solutions Academy. Probably wouldn’t choose to do it in February but we’d love to have you out. You can find out more about our concealed carry courses and our critical defensive handgun courses on the website just head to safetysolutionsacademy.com/CDH that’ll take you to critical defense of courses and if you wanted Ohio concealed carry well there’s that information right up on the top menu bar as well.
Concealed carry is always about making the right concessions trying to sort out what it is that’s i the right thing to do and it’s just becoming increasingly difficult to do so. More and more equipments available, more and more information is available but unfortunately a lot of that information skips over what’s really important.
Hopefully today’s episode has brought to light some issues that you can resolve in your concealed carry. Maybe it’s that you’re carrying a little tiny gun you don’t need to. Maybe it’s that you need to carry that gun but you’re not training with it because it’s not fun to do so. Whatever the case might be I hope I was helpful and I am so pleased that you spent some time with me today.
If you have questions or comments or feedback send me an email [email protected] Maybe you have topics for future shows, I’d love to hear from you I would also very much appreciate it if you could leave a review for the Safety Solutions Academy podcast. I’m not asking for a glowing review, I’m not asking for a five star rating, I’m asking for honest feedback, what is it that you value about the show share that with me, share that with other folks with a review and a rating.
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Again thank you so much for tuning in. Consider are you carrying the right size gun are you comfortable shooting it. Maybe having a two gun system would be worthwhile for you; maybe learning on that larger pistol might help you out. If that’s the case get it done, if not that’s okay two but get out there, get yourself some training. When you do make sure you keep it simple please stay safe and as always have a great day.