How to Best Carry Concealed a Sub-Compact ‘Pocket Pistol’

 Guns 'n Ammo, Hand Guns, Self Defense  1 Response »
Aug 022011
 
Pocket Holsters for a Ruger LCR (l) and Seecamp (r)

Pocket Holsters for a Ruger LCR (l) and Seecamp (r)

(This is part three of a three part series on sub-compact pocket pistols.  Please also visit  ‘Choosing a Lightweight, Small, Concealable Sub-Compact or Pocket Pistol‘ and ‘Which Caliber to Choose for a Sub-Compact Pocket Pistol‘.)

There’s one main reason to choose a sub-compact small caliber pistol instead of a full size larger caliber pistol.  The ability to comfortably carry it in an ultra-concealed manner.  (A second possibility is using it as your backup gun if you are carrying two pistols with you.  And for a third reason, read on down to the section on the time/surprise advantage you can get with a pocket pistol.)

The rationale for the sub-compact is that it is better to have a less than ideal weapon conveniently on your person when you unexpectedly need it, than to have a full size optimized weapon – but not with you.  So in such cases, the ability to carry the sub-compact is of over-riding importance.

You can use all the regular methods of carry with a small pistol, of course.  Inside the waistband, ankle, shoulder, whatever.  But there’s one additional carry option that is probably your best choice, especially for men.  Where better to carry a ‘pocket pistol’ than in your pocket!

Yes, you should consider carrying a pocket pistol in your pocket.  You want to get a pocket ‘holster’ – this mainly acts to disguise the outline of the pistol, so that instead of looking like a pistol in your pocket, it looks like something flat and rectangular.

It also provides a bit of protection around the trigger, and by flattening out the barrel, lessens the stress on the bottom of your pocket.  You’ll still wear through pockets at an accelerated rate, but if you’re like me, and buy trousers at Walmart for $15 – $20 a pair, that’s no big deal, and it is probably cheaper/easier to simply buy more pairs of trousers than to repair pockets that you’ve worn through.

Pocket holsters usually have some sort of grip or anti-slip on them so that when you grab your pistol and pull it from your pocket, the holster (at least in theory, although not always in practice) stays behind.  But don’t worry about it; if the holster stays with the gun, you can shoot your first shot through it and it won’t make any difference at all.

Pocket holsters are not only very concealable, they are also better than any other type of holster for unobstrusively preparing to draw.  With most types of holsters, if a person reaches to put their hand on their weapon, it is 99% obvious – especially to a bad guy who is trying to decide if the person is a vulnerable target – what they are doing.  But what is suspicious or unusual about a person who has his hands in his pockets?  Nothing at all.

Indeed, you could even manage a draw in an extreme case if a mugger surprises you on the street and demands your wallet.  Hand over your wallet and drop it, then say ‘Oh, I’ve got a bill fold too’ or something like that, reach in your pocket while the bad guy is distracted, and either take out (or shoot through the pocket) your pistol.  (Note – it is seldom appropriate to shoot a mugger unless you’re convinced he/they are not going to simply let you go after taking your money.)  (Second note – this may work if the guy has a knife, I’m not sure I’d want to try it if he had a gun pointed directly at me!)

The Time and Tactical (Surprise) Advantage of a Pocket Pistol

Which leads to an unexpected benefit of pocket pistols that you can uniquely experience with them and no other type of carry weapon.

This is the ability to have your hand already wrapped around your pistol and ready to take it out of your pocket, a capability that gives you an extra margin of perhaps 0.5 – 1 second over the time it would take you to suddenly reach for your pistol, get a good firing grip, and then remove it from wherever it is being carried.  If you’ve a clutzy shoulder holster, or something with a retention/snap, or (perhaps worst of all) an ankle holster, your time advantage lengthens even more.

What can you do with even as small as ‘only’ 0.5 seconds of advantage?  Well, put it this way – in that same 0.5 seconds, the bad guy can get maybe 10 ft – 15 ft closer to you.  In that same 0.5 seconds, you can possibly fire two more rounds at him, and stop him sooner and further away.  In that same 0.5 seconds, you’ve seized the initiative and the other guy is now having to react to you and your control of the situation, rather than you having to react to him.

More likely, your time advantage is even more than 0.5 seconds – more like 1 second, giving you even more of an edge.

But be careful – ‘Wild West’ rules sort of apply even in this modern age – the other guy has to draw first, or, in modern parlance, has to become a real lethal threat.  You can’t shoot someone because you think they’re going to become a threat; you can only do so when they have become a real threat and when you have no other alternative (such as running away).

This time and surprise advantage is so great that it can win a battle for you.  When I’m carrying both a regular pistol in a regular rig and a pocket pistol in my pocket, if I feel threatened, I stick my hands in my pockets and look casual, calm, and unaware (hoping to de-escalate the situation rather than prematurely responding to what might not be a threat), while actually being the total opposite.  If it becomes necessary, I’ll use the time/surprise advantage of my pocket pistol to triage any threat that may eventuate, then switch to my main gun for the real work to finish the job.

This switching of pistols might be in the form of a ‘New York reload’ – ie, empty the pocket pistol’s magazine at the threat(s) then rather than reload it, draw the main gun for the rest of the job.  Or it could be, if attempting to control a situation that might not call for lethal force, rapidly presenting the pocket pistol, swapping it to my support hand, then presenting the main pistol with my firing hand and pocketing the smaller pistol at that point.  If a bad guy is surprised to see someone he thought to be a helpless victim suddenly present one pistol from nowhere, imagine his laundry bill when you then pull a second bigger pistol and point that at him authoritatively too!

So, here’s a key factor in choosing your pocket pistol.  You want it to be small enough to truly fit in your pocket.  You’ll discover that not all pockets are the same size – some trousers have deeper pockets than others, so choose an appropriate pair of trousers then test out guns complete with their appropriate pocket holsters before selecting the pistol you buy.

Worst case scenario, you might have to buy two or three pocket holsters if the gun store doesn’t have holsters available for you to try with their pistols.  But the pocket holsters are generally ambidextrous, and there are only a few sizes that between them fit almost all pocket pistols, and they’re not tremendously expensive, so it is a small and necessary investment in researching a pocket pistol.

In my case, my Seecamp fits in every pocket I have, even tailored suit trousers.  I consider my PPK too heavy, so rarely put it in a pocket, but will carry my Ruger LCR .38 SPL revolver (just under 16 ounces loaded with five rounds) and find it fits in many but not all casual trouser pockets but not in dress type trousers.

(This was part three of a three part series on sub-compact pocket pistols.  Please also visit  ‘Choosing a Lightweight, Small, Concealable Sub-Compact or Pocket Pistol‘ and ‘Which Caliber to Choose for a Sub-Compact Pocket Pistol‘.)

Choosing a Lightweight, Small, Concealable Sub-Compact or Pocket Pistol

 Ammo, Guns 'n Ammo, Hand Guns, Self Defense  2 Responses »
Aug 022011
 
LSW Seecamp and Walther PPK

A LWS Seecamp .32 ACP and Walther PPK .380 ACP

(This is part one of a three part series.  Please also visit ‘Which Caliber to Choose for a Sub-Compact Pocket Pistol‘ and  ‘How to Best Carry Concealed a Sub-Compact Pocket Pistol‘.)

At times it seems that little has changed in the last 100 years of firearm and pistol design.  Revolvers are much as they always have been.  The Colt .45 semi-auto has celebrated its 100 year anniversary this year.  But if you find yourself agreeing with this, you’re wrong.

There have been big changes in semi-auto design, and in new lightweight small sized guns.  There have also been new calibers (most notably the .40 S&W, introduced in 1990, and the 5.7×28, introduced in 1993) but these are outside the scope of this article.

Semi-autos now can hold a great deal more than the classic 7+1 round capacity of an M1911A1, and can also be a great deal smaller.  Sure, derringers have always been around, but they’ve never been much more than ultra-desperate ‘toy’ guns, and now there are plenty of what are sometimes termed ‘sub-compact’ or sometimes ‘pocket’ pistols.  Some use new plastic materials or aluminum to replace some of the heavy steel, giving them even lighter weight, and all are designed to be as small as possible to provide the ultimate in terms of convenient carry and ultra concealment.

The Evolution of Modern Pocket Pistols

Pocket pistols can be traced back to that titan of gun design, John Browning (designer of the Colt M1911 among many other weapons) and his 1905 and 1908 model semi-auto pistols chambered for the .25 Auto cartridge.  His pistol, then known as the Colt 1908 Vest Pocket Pistol, subsequently evolved into the Baby Browning, produced from 1931 onwards, and is still (more or less) in production today.

These pistols were small – the earlier was 4.5″ long, the Baby Browning 4.1″ long, but were medium rather than light weight (13 oz and 9.7 oz respectively), and carried six round magazines.  The .25 Auto cartridge is very underpowered (see part two of this article series which discusses calibers for pocket pistols) and so these pistols represented an uneasy compromise between concealability and fire power.

Larger pistols appeared with larger calibers, and the development of high quality pistols by Seecamp – first in the same .25 Auto caliber in 1981, then subsequently in .32 ACP (from the mid 80’s to the present day) and .380 ACP (from 2000 to the present day) saw broader acceptance of the modern pocket pistol.  These Seecamp weapons, although produced in very small numbers, acted to validate the concept of ultra-compact pocket pistols as a bona fide modern day weapon variant.

Other manufacturers copied Seecamp to a greater or lesser extent, and then evolved into their own designs, and new lighter weight materials allowed for the pistols to be reduced in weight.

The next thing that massively increased the market interest and demand for ultra-concealable pistols was/is the wonderful restoration of concealed carry rights in most US states over the last couple of decades.  Nowadays the NSSF estimate there to be 6.3 million people with concealed weapon permits in the US, and that has unquestionably driven demand for small easily carried pistols.

Some Modern Sub-Compact Pistols to Consider

So, maybe you too are looking for a small ‘pocket pistol’ that you can literally carry in your pocket, or readily conceal elsewhere on your person?  Here’s a great summary of ten small pistols that might include the one that is exactly what you’re looking for.

I’m not nearly brave enough to wade into the depths of ‘which is the best gun’ because these days so many guns are so good that it boils down to a lot of personal preference.  It is analogous to arguing whether Ford or GM make the best car (or for that matter, Toyota and all the other companies too) when all you need is a car for your daily commute and local shopping runs.

But I can tell you (uh, oh, here I go….) that of the ten pistols detailed in this article, I own a .32 ACP caliber LWS/Seecamp.  However, many of the pistols in the review have come out since when I bought the Seecamp, and I can’t help but think that maybe one of the new tiny .380 (or even 9mm) pistols might give me a significant upgrade in power with only a minimal increase in size/weight.

On the other hand, I already have a couple of small .380 pistols (my favorite being a Walther PPK).

Size/Weight Issues and Tradeoffs – Walther PPK vs Modern Designs

It is interesting to compare the PPK size/weight with that of more modern pocket pistols.  The PPK – which amazingly dates back to 1931, and with little change over the 80 years since its introduction – is 6.15″ long overall, almost exactly an inch wide, and weighs 20.8 ounces with empty magazine, or 23.1 ounces when filled with seven rounds of .380 ammo.

The various modern  .380 pistols are shorter and narrower – ranging from 4.25″ long to 5.25″ long (so between almost one and two inches shorter); from 0.75″ to 0.91″ wide (saving you up to a quarter inch in this dimension), and their unloaded weights range from 8.3 oz up to 18.5 oz.  Many of these new pocket pistols are half the weight of the PPK – a much appreciated factor if you truly are carrying them in a pocket.

But smaller and lighter is not universally good.  The shorter the barrel, the more the muzzle flash and less the accuracy.  And the lighter the pistol, the greater the recoil.  Neither factor really matters when you’re at ‘point blank’ range and rapidly firing semi-blindly into the center of mass of a way-too-close attacker, but if for any reason you find yourself needing to make an aimed shot at more than say 10 ft, your ability to do so will massively reduce in line with the smaller and lighter the gun is you’re using.

My PPK is a lovely smooth shooter and can be operated single or double action, and with a great trigger feel to it (Interarms did a lovely port/polish/tune job on the pistol for me when I first purchased it as a much appreciated courtesy).  Sure, there’s recoil, but it is no worse than firing a full size 9mm, and its low profile fixed sights and general design is acceptably accurate (ie the gun is better than me) out to at least 21 feet, and as far as I’m concerned, most of the time if a bad guy is more than 21′ away, he’s less likely to be a deadly threat.

On the other hand, my less powerful double action only LWS has a long heavy trigger pull, nasty recoil and no sights (which sort of says it all in terms of accuracy expectations, doesn’t it!).

In choosing a pocket pistol, don’t necessarily fall into the trap of thinking that the lightest weapon is the best.  A few more ounces will make an appreciable difference in soaking up some extra recoil.

However, whatever size and weight you choose, by all means get one of these new generation pocket pistols.  They are lightweight, concealable, and generally inexpensive (sometimes little more than half the price of the $629 list on my PPK), but they are also nasty to shoot, with heavy triggers (being double action only), lots of recoil and little accuracy.

(This was part one of a three part series.  Please also visit ‘Which Caliber to Choose for a Sub-Compact Pocket Pistol‘ and  ‘How to Best Carry Concealed a Sub-Compact Pocket Pistol‘.)

How to Double Your Odds of Surviving – and Winning – a Gun Fight

 Self Defense  No Responses »
Aug 012011
 
A real photo of Bonnie and Clyde

You don't have to be Bonnie and Clyde, but your partner should be gun totin' too

So there you are – the chips are down, you’re faced with two or three bad guys, and you’ve no alternative but to resort to deadly force to save yourself (and any loved ones with you).  Wouldn’t you be desperately keen to double your odds of not only surviving but also of winning the gun fight that is about to erupt?

Best of all, what would you say if I told you this strategy would cost you nothing?  No extra training on your part, no extra skills or equipment.  Sounds too good to be true?  Not at all, read on.

Many of us are married or in some other way in a committed relationship with another adult (how’s that for political correctness!), and in an appreciable number of cases, our partners are less likely to be competently carrying a weapon with them than we are, ourselves.  And therein lies the answer.  If you can persuade your partner to competently carry, too; then when things go bad, you’ve got yourself a partner, and the bad guys suddenly find themselves not with easy prey but with two determined citizens, fighting back with effective appropriate deadly force.

Who better to answer your partner’s questions and worries such as ‘I don’t like/hate/am scared by guns’, ‘I could never accurately shoot a gun’, ‘I could never bring myself to kill another person’ and ‘I’m worried the gun would be taken from me and used against me’ than you.  Most of all, point out that if they don’t/won’t use a gun in an hour of extreme need, not only are they voluntarily sacrificing their own life in favor of that of a low life, but they are also sacrificing your life, too.  Can you say to them ‘Okay, so maybe you’re willing to let a bad guy rape and murder you, but please would you shoot at him to protect me and my life?’

And how about any children or other dependents – your partner is making a decision that can have negative (or positive) consequences for them, too.  We all have people reliant on us and our continued well-being, and we have an obligation not only selfishly for our own sake, but for the sake of these other people too, to protect ourselves (and to protect them too if they’re with us when the brown stuff hits the fan).

I started off by saying that having your partner armed would double your odds of surviving/winning.  But an effectively armed partner probably increases your chances by an even greater factor.  Just like two tellers at the bank can more than halve the average wait time for people in line, so too can having an armed partner more than halve the risks you face.

Don’t get me wrong.  You might still get shot at, and you might even still get hit.  But that too displays a reason why two people are more than twice as good as one.  If you are by yourself, and something goes wrong – maybe a gun malfunction, maybe you’re hit, maybe you run out of ammo, maybe you’re blindsided by another attacker while you’re too fixated on the first one, or something/anything else, then your chances of survival have just plummeted down to close to zero.  There are no time-outs when the bad guys are trying to kill you.  But if you’ve an active partner, they’re still in the fight.  They can finish the fight, and then help you resolve your problem, whether it be as trivial as a failed gun, or as life threatening as a gunshot wound.  Lastly, you’ve also got a witness who can confirm your side of the story when the police arrive.

You are willing to use lawful lethal force to defend you and your partner if it ever becomes necessary.  Your partner should have a similar degree of commitment to you, to his/herself, and to the two of you (and any children you have).

Now remember this is all about having a competent partner at your side.  Just giving them a gun isn’t enough.  They need to get comfortable and familiar with it, and to develop the resolve and knowledge as to when they can and when they should not resort to it.

A great approach to getting them up to speed with firearms is to take them to a Front Sight Four Day Defensive Handgun course.  Maybe add some incentive by scheduling a couple of days in Vegas at the end of your training time at Front Sight’s school in Pahrump.  The gun skills and confidence they acquire and the associated lectures about tactics, strategy, and use of force will change their world view, and will give you an excellent partner at your side, should bad things ever happen to you.

This might save their life in the future, it might save your life, it might save someone else’s life.  Either which way, it is one of the best things you can do for both of you.  It also will help strengthen the everyday bond between you – ‘the family that shoots together, stays together’.

How Many Rounds to Carry with Your Concealed Weapon?

 Ammo, Guns 'n Ammo, Hand Guns, Self Defense  2 Responses »
Aug 012011
 
Ruger LCR, Bianchi Speed Strip and 5 Star Speed Loader

15 rounds for this LCR - but with two reloads, it is too slow

(This is the second post on an important topic – please also see our earlier post here – How Much Ammo Do You Carry?)

In our earlier post on how much ammo you should carry with you (which you really should read first) we suggest you should have at least one spare magazine and at least a moderately high capacity semi-auto.  In other words, hopefully at least 10 rounds in the gun and another 10 rounds in a spare magazine.

Notice we are talking about semi-autos, not revolvers.  This was an assumption in the previous article that needs some explaining.

The Problem with Carrying a Revolver

Sure, we love revolvers as much as anyone else, and sometimes every carry one, too.  But a revolver – especially for concealed carry – probably has no more than five or six rounds in its chamber.  We say you need to plan on anywhere from maybe three or four rounds per bad guy if you are very lucky, and up to maybe eight or more rounds if you’re not so lucky.  So in your ‘worst case’ scenario planning, that means you need to plan for being able to get at least eight rounds downrange, per bad guy, in a hurry.

(A quick side-bar comment :  Recommended strategy for multiple adversaries is usually to fire one shot at each target first (more or less from greatest and most immediate threat to least – but still deadly – threat), then return back and add extra shots as needed to stop the threats.  So when we’re saying ‘eight or more rounds per bad guy’ we’re not suggesting to fix on just one bad guy and get as many rounds as needed his way before switching to the next bad guy – you’re going to want to share your favors out on a more even basis than that!)

A wheel gun has five or six rounds.  After you’ve emptied your chamber, you’re then in a world of hurt.  Sure, maybe you have a speed reloader, or a Bianchi strip reloader, but how long will it take you to reload in a high stress situation like this?  Reloading a revolver includes using micro-motor skills that are hard when you’re full of adrenalin and trembling both from the adrenalin and the animal fear that will be overwhelming you.  Reloading a semi-auto is vastly simpler in all respects and easier to do in a stress situation.

In Front Sight’s skills testing, they allow 7.0 seconds to reload a revolver, compared to 2.4 seconds for a semi-auto.  Those extra 4.5 seconds are almost literally life and death in a gun fight.  In 4.5 seconds, a bad guy can run almost 50 yards – hopefully away from you, but if he is charging towards you, then you’ve got big problems well before you’ve got your revolver running again.

Bottom line for revolvers :  They are a good, simple, and reliable weapon, but most effective against only a single adversary.  If you’re facing multiple adversaries, you need a semi-auto that both has more rounds in its magazine to start with and a faster reload time if (when) you need to reload.

How Many Adversaries to Expect

Which leads to the second part of this article.  How many bad guys do you need to plan on attacking you?  That’s a bit like asking ‘How long is a piece of string’ – the answer could vary anywhere from one to one hundred.  The earlier article linked to a story about two people being attacked by a gang of 30, and that is probably as close to a worst case scenario as you never need to consider.

At the low end, it is realistic to expect a minimum of two bad guys.  Particularly in situations where bad guys are going out with the intention of carrying out some type of violent crime, they will want the odds in their favor, and so are much more likely to bring a partner or two than if they were doing some empty house breaking and entering, or simple car prowling.  So you should plan for at least two bad guys as a minimum.

But what about the maximum number you should realistically plan for?  In partial answer, let’s look at another newspaper story, this time about how some small towns in what is (was!) otherwise peaceful idyllic rural Washington state are being terrorized by gangs.

There’s a lot to worry about how gangs are migrating out of the big cities and into smaller rural towns, where there is not the matching concentration of police to combat them, and you might wonder ‘What are gangs doing in rural Washington?’  Here’s a hint – based on the names of the gangs, they seem to be exclusively Mexican gangs (a fact which the liberal newspaper can’t quite bring itself to feature as a main story point).

The relevant part of this newspaper article is the quote ‘…these packs of eight or 10 of them’.  Apparently, at least in eastern Washington, gang members like to congregate in packs of 8 – 10.

So what would you do if you found yourself confronted by a murderous gang of 8 – 10 gang members?  Other than run away as fast as you can, of course!  Do you have enough ammo for a shoot-out with 8 – 10 gang members?  That could see you needing 100 rounds or more, in a situation where your prime objective would be to find cover, call for help, and then wait up to an hour for some deputies to get to you, firing only when necessary to keep the bad guys from rushing you.

Say you have a pistol with a 16 round magazine.  That would mean carrying five loaded spare magazines in addition to the one in your pistol.  It probably isn’t realistic to carry this much spare ammo.  But while 100 rounds is more than most people could conveniently keep on their person, the chances are you can probably carry one more magazine than you currently do.  And you probably should, too.

Realistically, your odds of surviving a gunfight against ten adversaries are very low, so perhaps it is unrealistic to prepare for something you’re unlikely to survive.  On a happier note, not every gang member is always armed, and when rounds start coming inbound, not all gang members will adopt an aggressive posture and fight back.

But it is also quite probably true that your adversaries have been under fire before, and may have also not only been receiving incoming but been shooting back in turn.  They might be more experienced in fire fights than you, and most of all, you’re fighting a battle on their terms.  They rather than you have decided if, when, and how to initiate the conflict, while you’re compelled to be reactive rather than pro-active, because with that many potential adversaries, you need to have a defensive posture that reduces the chance of any escalation of conflict.

Here’s another measure.  Have you ever seen a group of motorcycle gang members drive down the highway?  There’s usually more than two of them driving together, isn’t there.  Maybe four, maybe more.  And sometimes with passengers on the back of each bike, too.  Get into a ‘road rage’ incident with them and you could again find yourself with half a dozen adversaries, all eager to do extreme harm to you.

My point is simple.  An encounter – outside your home – where you end up needing to resort to deadly force is more likely to involve multiple adversaries than just a single assailant.  Stopping the first guy will just enrage the second, third, and other guys all the more, and your ability to ‘project power’ and control a situation is massively reduced with a small little gun that everyone knows holds only a few rounds, especially if it is a revolver which everyone also knows will take a long time to reload.

While of course any gun is better than no gun, and a concealable pistol is a necessary compromise between effectiveness and convenience, try to select a pistol that has hopefully at least a ten round capacity (if it is .45 caliber, then fewer rounds are okay) and try to carry two (or more) spare magazines with you.

Dangerous Political Grandstanding

 Ammo, Politicians' Nonsense  No Responses »
Jul 192011
 
Otis Rolley, a gun hater and Baltimore mayoral candidate

Mayoral candidate Otis Rolley wants to tax your ammo

There are few creatures more venal than politicians running for office.  They’ll say or do just about anything in the desperate hope of winning the election.  Normal people find this impossible to understand, because most of the time, normal people also can’t understand who in their right mind would run for most public offices.  But no-one has ever accused politicians of being normal.

An egregious example of idiocy is on display in Baltimore where mayoral candidate Otis Rolley has proposed a new way of reducing crime – by imposing a $1 tax on every bullet bought.  Baltimore is one of the most violent cities in the nation – I wonder if there is any relation between its appalling crime record and Rolley’s past position as the city’s planning director between 2003 – 2007?

In Rolley’s alternative universe, adding a $1 tax to every bullet would make it too expensive for criminals to use guns when committing crimes and so would result in less crime being committed, with or without guns.

Let’s think about this (distasteful but necessary).  Most criminals never fire a gun in any crime.  Indeed, probably most of the time, criminals don’t even carry a gun.  These criminals will be unaffected by Rolley’s bullet tax.

But what about the criminals who do carry a gun?  Adding a $1/bullet tax would mean that instead of spending $500 – $1000 on a gun and then $10 on a box of bullets, they now need to spend an extra $20 or so to get enough bullets to load their gun.  Wow – that will sure make a difference, won’t it.

And what about the criminals who actually fire their gun?  Maybe they fire their gun half a dozen times in the course of a crime that nets them some thousands of dollars.  Will an extra cost of $5 – $10 really make that much of a difference to them?

Rolley of course deliberately chooses not to think about the other people impacted by his plan – honest ordinary law abiding citizens who shoot guns for recreation or for training.  People like you (I hope!) and me.

We fire hundreds, possibly even thousands of rounds a year so as to ensure we can safely and competently use a gun.  The cost to us would be hundreds or even thousands of dollars.  That would sure impact on us.

There’s a bit of good news, though.  Baltimore is just one single city, and in a very small state.  So it isn’t too far to drive out of Baltimore to find a gun shop in a city not suffering from a crazy mayor, and to buy your ammunition there.  Or to get it online.  Hmmmm – maybe even the criminals will do that, too?  Do you reckon?

Otis is a Democrat.  But you probably guessed that, already.

Good news in Wisconsin

 Hand Guns  4 Responses »
Jun 292011
 

A pseudo-official looking Concealed Weapon Permit badge

At times it is easy to feel that the gun-grabbers are winning and that our second amendment rights are being steadily whittled away.

There is, sadly, some measure of truth in that perception, some of the time.  But the gun grabbers aren’t getting it all their own way (but please don’t get complacent!).

In addition to two recent favorable Supreme Court decisions, there’s been a quiet grass roots revolution going on for the last 25 or so years, whereby states have been reversing a century or more of restrictive laws constraining our ability to carry concealed weapons.  In 1986, only eight states had ‘shall issue’ laws obligating law enforcement authorities to issue concealed carry permits, and one additional state allowed concealed carry without any permit being needed at all.

Since that time, the number of shall issue states has been steadily increasing, leaping up to 30 by 1996 and continuing on to 37 by 2006, with now three states also allowing concealed carry with no permit at all.  Another two states have fairly administered ‘may issue’ type laws whereby law enforcement has discretion in who they will and won’t issue permits to, leaving six ‘may issue’ states who tend to never issue permits (for example, California and New York are ‘may issue’ states) and two hold outs that refuse to ever issue permits – Illinois and Wisconsin.

Just this week it seems that Wisconsin is now moving from the hall of shame to the hall of fame, and is poised to join 40 of the other states with a very positive ‘shall issue’ law.  If we include the two fairly managed ‘shall issue’ states, that leaves only seven states that remain resolutely gun unfriendly.

Yay to Wisconsin and its residents.  More details here.

Gun Sales Continue to Increase, Crime Rates Continue to Decrease

 Gun Control, Guns 'n Ammo, Police and Crime  5 Responses »
May 292011
 
Guns for sale in a US gun shop

15 million guns will be purchased in 2011

The entire logic of people who oppose free ownership of guns is that gun ownership causes crime.  They seek to restrict and control who can own guns and what sort of guns people can own, on the basis that the fewer the people who own guns, and the fewer the guns that are owned, the safer that society will become.

But there is no evidence to support their contention.  Quite the opposite – there is irrefutable evidence to completely contradict their claims.  The number of guns sold each year continues to steadily increase, while crime rates are equally steadily dropping rather than rising.

The FBI is the agency charged with collecting, collating and publishing uniform crime reports in an attempt to get a consistent national picture of crime in the US, and it has been doing this since 1930.  It draws data from nearly 17,000 different law enforcement agencies across the country, and their reporting is considered the ‘gold standard’ on which to measure crime rates.

They have just released a preliminary report for 2010.  And it is full of good news for us as citizens.  Robbery is down 9.5%, murder and manslaughter down 4.4%, forcible rape is down 4.2% and aggravated assault down 3.6%.  Overall, violent crime is down an average of 5.5%, and all four regions of the country showed decreases.

This decrease in violent crime isn’t a one time aberration, either.  Their report includes a table showing that in addition to the 5.5% decline in 2010, there was a 5.3% decline in 2009, and lesser declines of 1.9% in 2008 and 0.7% in 2007.

Prior to 2007, an earlier FBI report shows that for the ten years 1997 – 2006, violent crime dropped in total by 13.3%.  Reaching back even further, for the four years 1993 – 1997, violent crime dropped by 6.9%.  (I stopped looking further back when reaching 1993 due to laziness and the fact that surely 17 years of data is enough to accurately establish a clear trend.)

These statistics are all the more remarkable when you consider that at the same time the number of crimes are dropping, the number of people living in the US is increasing – for example, the 6.9% decrease in the four years 1993 – 1997 would be a 10.2% if expressed in terms of crimes per (eg) 100,000 people.

So, the good news that everyone can welcome is that violent crime is down, down, down.  In total, for every 100 violent crimes reported in 1993, it seems that today there are only 70 crimes reported.  At the same time, the US population has increased from 258 million in 1993 to 309 million in 2010.  So, if we adjust for the population increase, the actual reduction in crime per constant number of people is from a base count of 100 in 1993 to 59 in 2010.  Violent crime rates have almost halved.

Now what about gun ownership?  The same period of time has seen a resurgence of gun ownership in the US.  More and more states have allowed concealed and/or open carry of weapons, and gun sales have steadily increased.

It is hard to know both how many guns there are in private ownership, and how many people or households actually own guns.  But since late 1998, it has been possible to at least get an approximate understanding of how many new guns are being sold.

Almost without exception, all new firearms sold in the US now require the purchaser to get an authorization from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), a system instituted in late 1998 and operated by the FBI.  This provides a convenient measure for gun sales activity.

However, one check can sometimes result in the purchase of two or more guns, but offsetting this, some second hand gun sales are also processed through the NICS system.  A second hand gun sale does not represent a new gun added into the population, but instead is simply a transfer of a gun from someone presumably no longer needing/using it to someone who is likely to value, need, and use it more than the seller.

For the sake of estimating, it perhaps is acceptable to say that the number of second hand gun transfers is balanced by the number of multiple gun transactions authorized by a single NICS check, so let’s approximately equate NICS checks with actual new guns sold.

Rates of gun sales, as empirically measured by NICS checks, have been increasing steadily every year without exception since 2002 (when 8.45 million checks were conducted).  2006 was the first year in which more than 10 million checks were carried out, and by 2008 checks were being carried out at a rate 50% greater than in 2002 (12.71 million).

In 2010, a new high of 14.41 million checks were carried out, and for the first five months of 2011, checks have been running at a rate about 10% higher than 2010, suggesting a total for 2011 in the order of nearly 16 million checks – nearly twice the rate of nine years earlier.  You can see the NICS statistics here.

In total, from the start of the NICS system in November 1998 through the end of April 2011, there have been 130 million checks conducted; which can be considered to imply about that many new guns purchased in the US.  Let’s say sales were occurring at a lower rate of 7.5 million a year prior to that.  So, during the same time frame 1993 – 2010 that violent crime rates have dropped 41%, there have been 170 million new guns sold.

It is not known how many of these purchases are replacement guns, to replace guns that have been lost or destroyed or rendered unusable by accident or design.  But most firearms have a very long life – it is not uncommon to see 30 or 40 year old guns, and because they don’t drop in value greatly as they age, few people simply throw away an ‘old’ gun, but instead will either keep it or give it away or sell it.  So most of the new guns being purchased are additional guns rather than replacement guns.

It is also not known how many of these purchases are to existing gun owners simply choosing to buy another gun to add to their existing gun or guns (although in this latter case, sometimes a current gun owner buying an additional gun will then sell one of his previously owned guns via a private sale to someone else, without the transaction needing to be processed through NICS).  It is probably fair to say that half the guns sold each year are to existing gun owners – in other words, while the number of guns in the country may be increasing, the number of gun owners is increasing more slowly.

However – and here is the point – whatever the numbers are, gun ownership is steadily growing in the US.  And, at the same time, crime is steadily dropping.

I don’t necessarily claim there to be a direct or close link between the two statistics.  But what I do very strongly point out is that the main reason gun control advocates use to justify their claim that guns should be restricted and controlled – a claim that guns ’cause’ crime – is utterly wrong.  Notwithstanding a surge in gun ownership, and many more states allowing concealed carry of weapons, murder rates are down, rape rates are down; indeed, all violent crime rates are significantly down and have been consistently reducing year after year after year.

To summarize this morass of statistics, and for the period 1993 – 2010 :

  • Violent crime rates reduced by 41%
  • 170 million guns sold
  • With less than 130 million households in the US, this is an average of 1.3 guns sold per household
  • Rates of gun sales are increasing and rates of violent crime reduction are similarly accelerating

So where is the harm in gun ownership?

As far as the numbers tell the story, and accepting the anti-gunners own claim that there is a linkage between the prevalence of guns and crime in society, more guns clearly reduce crime, not increase it.

So, my question to the would-be gun-grabbers :  With 170 million new guns in circulation in the US, and a 41% reduction in violent crime rates over the same period, where is the harm you allege guns are causing to society?  Shouldn’t you be advocating for more gun sales?

How Many Times Should You Shoot Someone? A Surprising Answer from Pima AZ

 Police and Crime, Self Defense  1 Response »
May 242011
 
A target that has had the center of it well shot out

There's no need to riddle a bad guy with as many holes as this target

If you ever find yourself deciding to use deadly force to protect yourself or your loved ones, you have a second decision to make immediately subsequently.  How many times should you shoot the bad guy?  Once?  Twice?  Five times?  Ten times?

(Note – this is assuming you are using a handgun.  If you’re using a rifle or shotgun, one shot may be enough.)

The sad part of this question is that the right answer is not just determined by ending the deadly threat you are confronted with, but also by concerns about subsequent legal action – either brought by the police, or – and perhaps more alarmingly – by the offender or his estate.

As soon as you fire a second round, no matter what happened to the first round – whether it missed the bad guy entirely, or just caused a light graze on his arm, or if it incapacitated him instantly and completely – you open yourself up to accusations of excessive use of force.  Imagine yourself in court, with a prosecutor talking to the jury ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, whether right or wrong, maybe the defendant believed he needed to shoot at the deceased, but did the defendant need to shoot at him multiple times, and change what might have been a survivable wound into a lethal hail of bullets?  This was a …..’ – insert your term of choice here :

  • Cold blooded murder, not an act of self defense
  • Crazed shooting spree beyond what any reasonable man would do
  • Rambo rage rather than rational response
  • Gangland style murder
  • Military type assassination
  • Extreme and uncalled for use of excessive force
  • Massive overreaction that resulted in the victim dying rather than just being wounded

or any other phrase that might be called upon.

The truth of the matter – a truth which may be overlooked by a district attorney trying to score political points, and/or a truth that will definitely be completely ignored by an attorney seeking civil damages on behalf of the bad guy or his estate (if you killed him) is that a single bullet from a pistol is extremely unlikely to immediately take the bad guy out of the fight.  Even if you succeed in hitting the bad guy with your shot, who knows where on his body the round will land, and who knows what the effect will be.

Well, actually, we can be pretty sure what the effect will be.  Unlike the movies, the bad guy won’t be thrown violently backward.  Neither will he sag and collapse where he stands.  In general terms, he’ll feel no more force than you felt from the gun’s recoil.  If he is all hyped up on adrenalin – or, worse, on drugs – even a hit that may kill him over time might have no immediate effect on him.

Add to this ugly equation the fact that he was, say, only 15 ft away from you when you opened fire, and is rapidly closing the distance, and so what are you going to do?  Stop and observe prior to shooting a second and subsequent time?  Of course not!

Front Sight teach their students to fire two rapid aimed shots to the center of the thoracic cavity (something very similar to the concept of ‘center of mass’ – ie, the middle of the target), then to pause and see what effect they cause.  If the bad guy doesn’t stop, they teach to fire one more carefully aimed shot to the cranial ocular cavity (a 3″ x 5″ card sized space more or less from the eyebrows to the bridge of the nose).

That makes sense on the range, when neither you nor the target is moving.  But in a dynamic fire fight inside your house, you’ve not got the time for any of this.  You need to neutralize the threat before the threat neutralizes you, and once you’re in physical contact, you risk losing control of your weapon and having it turned on you, even if the guy is gushing blood (which could well be AIDS positive) all over you as he does so.

If you’ve a modern semi-auto with a 15+ round magazine in it, should you empty the entire magazine at the guy as quickly as you can?

Tactically, yes, that makes a great deal of sense in this type of scenario, and unofficially many police may confide in you that is exactly what they would do themselves.  But in terms of your subsequent civil and criminal liability, each extra shot shifts the balance away from ‘righteous shooting’ and towards a much more ugly situation.

In terms of ‘the perfect world’ (or what passes for a perfect world when you need to start shooting at anyone) the concept is to keep firing until the attacker ceases to be a threat.  What does that mean?  It might mean that he stops advancing on you and says ‘Stop, I surrender’ – even if you haven’t hit him at all.  As soon as he says those words, he has ceased to be a lethal threat and you can no longer justify shooting him.  Let’s just hope you hear him say that clearly over the sound of the gunfire!

It might mean that he turns and runs away.  Bullets in the back look really bad in the subsequent enquiry and take a lot of explaining.  If the bad guy turns around and starts running away, then as long as that direction isn’t taking him, say, to your spouse or children, the gunfight is over.

It might mean that he collapses in a heap and stops advancing on you.  Bullets shot down into a body while standing over it on the floor also look bad in the subsequent enquiry (and, yes, the police absolutely can work out that this is what happened), so as soon as the guy is down and incapacitated, and not reaching for a hidden weapon or doing anything still threatening, again stop shooting.

In the real world, you’re going to be squeezing off rounds fairly fast.  You’ll have shot five or more times before you even notice any impact on the bad guy – assuming you’re hitting the guy most of the time, and that’s a dubious assumption to make.

In the real world, don’t count your shots, and don’t look for where they are going.  Just get some lead downrange and observe the bad guy and the effect your rounds are having on him.  If at some stage, you’re fairly sure you’re getting good hits and nothing much is happening, then you have to wonder if he has body armor on, and change strategies to either ‘run away’ or start shooting at his head.

Head shots, while harder to make, are more likely to have immediate effect if you manage to get some rounds on target.  The only exception to this would be if you truly do have a zombie coming towards you.

One more thing about head shots – they are less politically correct.  Yes, there are good and bad ways to shoot someone, alas.  Don’t start shooting for the head until after you’ve sent some into the center of mass.

There is another source of valuable information about the ‘ideal’ – no, make that ‘acceptable’ – number of times to shoot an attacker.  And that is looking at what the police do when they engage someone and shoot him.

Start clipping newspaper reports of how many rounds your local police shoot at people, and see if the police officer(s) suffer any consequences or accusations of having shot too many times.  Generally you might find they sometimes have questions raised about the need to shoot at all, but seldom are questions raised about the number of rounds they shoot – assuming the number to be not outlandish.

The average police officer doesn’t actually get to shoot at people very much, and so they are almost as likely to panic as you are.  They probably get an hour or two of range time a couple of times a year, and maybe shot 500 rounds as part of their basic training, perhaps decades ago.

But SWAT officers – well, they are the creme de la creme, aren’t they.  They are the very best officers, and get massive amounts of training, and have greater experience at armed confrontations.  You’d expect them to set a ‘high water mark’ for what is acceptable, because when they are shooting, they can be much more certain they are hitting their target, they are not nearly as panicked, and they are doing something they have trained repeatedly to do.

In other words, if a SWAT officer fires four times, he will probably hit his target at least three of those times, and will do so in a calm calculated manner, knowing exactly when to stop.  On the other hand, a regular police officer may panic some, and fire more rounds in a less well controlled manner.  Let’s say a two to one discrepancy – if a SWAT officer shoots five rounds in a confrontation, we’d probably allow a regular police officer to fire ten, right?

You might want to next say ‘if a regular police officer fires ten rounds, I should be allowed to shoot twenty rounds’ but you’d be wrong for two reasons.  The first reason is that almost certainly, somewhere in those 20 rounds there’s going to be a ‘time out’ during which you have to change over magazines, giving you also a forced break from shooting and a chance to see what is happening around you.  You may be able to come up with an explanation for why/how you emptied all 17 rounds from your magazine into the bad guy, but it will be much harder to then go on and explain how you swapped over magazines and emptied a second magazine as well.

The second reason is that life isn’t fair.  To play it safe, if a regular police officer typically fires, say, six shots, you’d better stop at five unless there’s a hugely compelling reason to keep your gun running further.

Okay, now with all that as background, here’s an interesting story for you to keep in your file.  In a recent case in Pima County, AZ (a little north of Tucson) a team of five SWAT officers ended up choosing to shoot a person in a house they were raiding, in circumstances that have yet to be fully explained.

Now remember these are highly trained SWAT officers, not ordinary beat officers.

So how many times did they shoot the suspect?

Between the five of them, they shot at the man 71 times, hitting him 60 times.  That is 14 shots – and 12 hits – per officer; but most of all, it is 71 shots in total and 60 hits.

Print out this article and keep it somewhere safe and discreet.  If anyone should ever accuse you of using excessive force, show them this article.  71 shots and 60 hits?  Sheesh.

My guess is that every one of those five officers emptied his entire magazine into the victim.  Fourteen shots at – and twelve hits – would normally be getting close to the high end of what you could readily explain away, but 71 and 60???  From a SWAT team!!!

Don’t even get me started on the tactics that have all five officers fixated on one single target, and all emptying their magazines into one guy, in a scenario where, as they subsequently said when explaining why they let the guy bleed to death on the floor and didn’t allow paramedics into the house for an entire hour, they didn’t know who else was in the house or with what weapons (answer – apart from the guy’s wife and children hiding in the closet, in fear of their lives, no-one else at all).

If the SWAT team aren’t arrested, locked up, charged and convicted of excessive force and a whole bunch of other crimes, then any time you’re in Pima County with four of your friends, I guess you know that – at least there – it is acceptable to shoot at a guy with an unloaded gun 71 times.  Don’t forget, subsequently – like the SWAT team did – to claim that he shot at you first; and be no more embarrassed than the SWAT team was when it was subsequently discovered the weapon was unloaded, unfired, and with the safety on.

But don’t count on a similar standard applying in the rest of the United States.  And thank goodness for that.

So, how many rounds should you shoot at the bad guy when he is coming at you?  As many as it takes.  Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.

Lastly, this is an interesting and unexpected reason to be sure you have the most powerful/lethal gun and ammo combination you can handle.  Assuming it isn’t something ridiculous, if you can use a commonly accepted but heavier caliber pistol, and with a more powerful ammo, you will probably end up needing to fire less rounds.

In other words, if you use a 38 special revolver, consider upgrading to a 357 magnum.  If you use a 9mm semi-auto, consider a .40 S&W instead.

And for your ammo, make sure you’re firing a +P grade (and make sure your pistol is rated for +P, too!) and that it is some sort of effective hollow point round.

But don’t end up with something too powerful for you to comfortably control.  Better to be landing rounds on target with a less powerful weapon than to be missing consistently with a heavier pistol.

The Danger of Opening Your Front Door

 Home Defense, Self Defense  5 Responses »
May 182011
 

The Logitech surveillance system secures your house

I keep seeing accounts in the news about people who answer a knock on the door only to have an intruder (or possibly multiple intruders) use surprise and violent force to immediately rush through the door and overwhelm the person who innocently and unpreparedly opened the door.  Here’s a very typical story here.

This is a risk that is both surprisingly commonplace and hard to defend against.  Say you have a concealed weapon somewhere on your person when you answer the door.  Now think through what happens.  You go to the door, unlock it (you do keep it locked, don’t you!) and open it.  Maybe you get as far as to half open the door before – Wham!  The person on the other side kicks into the door with all their force, pushing it hard into you and knocking you off balance.  Before you’ve even caught your breath, they are through the door, and on top of you (quite literally, by this stage, you’ve been pushed backward onto the floor and may be mildly concussed) and have a knife at your throat.

What use is your concealed weapon in its holster now?

Now, so let’s notch the preparedness (or is it paranoia) up a further degree.  You go to answer the door and you have a pistol in your hand, held inconspicuously behind your back.  Only think about this if this is something you can promise yourself you’ll always do – and think it through.  If you’ll always have a gun in your hand when you open the door, which hand will it be in?  Which hand will open the door?  What happens if you then need to accept a package from a delivery man?  What happens if you then need to shake someone’s hand?  Or hold a clip-board and sign a petition?  Or maybe it is a friend who you invite in.  And where will the gun live when it is not in your hand at the door?

Okay, so you have answers for all these questions.  You open the door, weapon in a hand behind your back, and all of a sudden, the men outside grab you and pin your arms to your sides.  What good is the gun in your hand now?

The sad reality is that we’re usually in Condition White or at the most, Condition Yellow when we’re in the deceptive seeming safety of our own home, in our familiar neighborhood, with no threats perceived nearby.  We are not prepared for sudden and very violent attacks.  But – just as you may commute some distance to work each day, so too do the bad guys commute to their ‘work’ – which in this case might mean to your house.  When answering a knock on our front door, the physical proximity of us to an unknown person or persons (remember the 21 foot rule), and our natural politeness, optimism and hospitality, all work against us and for the other guy.

So what is to be done?

My suggestion is simple and affordable.  Forget about the peephole in the door.  It doesn’t show you enough.  Doubly forget about a ‘safety’ chain which is seldom sufficiently securely mounted to prevent a forcible entry.

Instead, get a camera system.  I’ve got a system that has two exterior cameras.  One is some distance away from my entry area, and shows me the entire entry area, including around the corners that I can’t see from inside the doorway, and the driveway.  So I can see who is at the door, if there are other people anywhere nearby, and if there are any vehicles on my property.

The other is close in to the door, giving me a closeup of whoever is out there, so I can see and hear them.  I know all about the person or persons outside my door before I even get close to the door.

I can monitor the system realtime from a phone or computer, and when I’m not at home, it – together with other cameras inside the house – do double duty as an intruder detection system.  It is a Logitech Alert system, and is affordable, excellent, and easy to install.  Here’s a good review of it.

I’m considering also adding an intercom to allow me to communicate with the person on the other side in what is comparatively normal a manner (through an intercom) rather than by calling out through the locked door, which seems much less normal.  But generally the advantage of knowing who is out there and how many people there are is all the edge I need.

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