Quote:
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Originally Posted by Onward Allusion
As long as the handler is not doing stupid things, the gun isn’t going to jump out of its holster and fire on its own.
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There's a whole world of stuff we could unpack from this post (good one, OA).
"As long as the handler is not doing stupid things..."
In this context,
stupid things would include carrying in bad gear. There are a
lot of people out there who use carry devices that don't hold the gun securely, or that might even allow trigger movement while the gun is inside the device. Unfortunately, it's not that easy to find really good gear. All of the off-the-shelf holster makers sell at least one or two true dogs that should never have seen the light of day. Some of them sell nothing
but dogs! But even the best have a few devices you can't really trust to hold the gun as securely as it must be held in everyday life.
What can happen when someone carries in a less-than-secure holster? Here are some examples:
Guns falling out of insecure holsters in public restrooms:
Man hurt when gun blasts toilet;
Man could be prosecuted for endangerment after dropping gun in restroom;
Woman hit by stray bullet while sitting on toilet. Note that all of these are just the ones where the gun fired and made the local paper.* I have literally dozens more in my files, all equally tragicomic. I have even more stories that I’ve heard personally from talking to people who dropped a gun that did not fire and that did not make the news. In every one of these cases, the problem was kicked off with bad gear that failed to hold the gun securely. When someone went to use the facilities -- which would be one example of an awareness shift that
always happens no matter how ninja you otherwise might be -- the holster tipped and the gun fell out. Oops.
So your carry gear can either help you stay safe, or it can contribute to dangerous situations.
What does this have to do with awareness while carrying?
Everything. If you carry in poor gear, it's radically unsafe to think about anything else while the gun is on your hip. If you have a flimsy belt and a floppy holster, you're an accident waiting to happen. Not only that, your poor level of concealment -- it's much harder to remain concealed with a flippy rig -- almost guarantees that you'll be thinking about nothing else other than keeping your gear out of sight during the day. That's not just mentally exhausting; it's
also a failure of awareness of a different sort.
What I'm getting at is, if your carry system holds the gun so insecurely that you can think about
nothing but the gun while you're carrying it, you're doing it wrong on an awareness level, too. You need to stay outward focused to stay safe.
pax
*Edited to add: In every case where I have some knowledge past the headlines, the gun didn't "go off" when it hit the ground. Rather, the owner grabbed for it and hit the trigger inadvertently. Modern handguns are almost universally drop safe.