Thread: "Man bag" carry
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Old November 25, 2013, 10:50 AM   #48
pax
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Join Date: May 16, 2000
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Quote:
When I am on elevators or when I am forced to walk on stairways I place my arm inside the bag but not holding the gun. If attacked in an elevator or on a narrow stairway the gun is not withdrawn, it is fired right through the bag. Nothing is faster in that type of situation.
A few years back, some friends of mine helped me with some experiments that I later wrote up for SWAT magazine. We took purses out to the range – some purses with built in holsters, and some purses without built in holsters. We spent the day examining the features of various carry purses and other off body carry devices.

There were a half dozen of us, and all of us were experienced, competent shooters. Most of us worked as firearms instructors at the professional level through the Firearms Academy of Seattle.

One experiment we did involved shooting through the purse. First, everybody shot from the retention position, without a purse. Every single shooter there could easily stay within the A zone of the target and get very fast hits, very repeatably, very predictably. That established our goal. Then I gave everybody a purse, including myself. One by one, we shot through the purses at the same distance.

We were shocked at the results.

Several of the shooters could not hit cardboard at arms length distance when shooting through the purse. This was bad, very very bad – because of course, these bags had nothing in them at all. In real life, they would be other things inside the bag that could deflect a bullet when it was launched. This is in addition to the fact that shooting through the bag really requires you to carry a revolver rather them the more common semi auto. And in three cases, we had revolvers get jammed and refused to fire more than a single shot, because the exposed hammer got caught in the lining.

Let me add, too, that in another test, we discovered that a bag with an internal holster would allow you to get the gun completely out of the purse at exactly the same speed – or maybe even a little faster – than simply getting your gun out of the holster without getting it out of the purse. Of course it had to come out of the holster in order to get your finger on the trigger in the first place. We found that was very little difference in the speed between drawing it all the way versus drawing it partway. In other words, shooting through the purse was not going to save nearly as much time as one would envision. Getting your hand on the gun in advance and being prepared to draw, was where we found the most significant time savings.

It is more than likely that repeated practice shooting through a purse would enable somebody to become skilled enough at it to bet their life on it. But I know nobody, personally, who would be willing to buy and then destroy upwards of 200 purses in order to achieve that level of skill, or who would continue destroying say, 10 purses a month, for the rest of their lives, to maintain that skill.

Shooting through the bag is not part of my personal self-defense plans.

pax
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Kathy Jackson
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