Do you carry all the time? 9x out of 10, looking at photos of your pistol, I can tell if you are lying. You see, carrying is a commitment. It’s not easy. It’s not fun. And usually it’s downright pain in the ass.
At the recent Chainsaw Party 2015, Freeze and I were out cutting winter firewood. Between running chainsaws, tractors, a bobcat and physically having to load and unload each and every piece of wood, things get dirty. You get dirty. Your clothes get dirty. You get banged and bruised. Your CCW piece gets banged and bruised up.
Wait? You don’t carry a full-sized pistol when doing hard, manual labor? Ok. Fine. Do you carry a pistol at all? Now let me allude back to the opening statement regarding how your CCW gun looks.
Here we have the tale of two guns and two holsters. Freeze carries a standard VP9 in a hybrid (Leather and Kydex) at 4:30. I carry a VP9 LE model in a kydex AIWB. Note the difference in moisture and dust. My pistol sees more “gunk” but generally stays dry. Freeze’s pistol is typically covered by a shirt and his holster, being leather, it holds much more moisture. It’s a combination of poor airflow and THE leather. There’s a Madonna coochie’ joke in here somewhere, but I digress. But I can warn many of you, blued guns in working leather that gets moist is ripe for corrosion. And again…another Madonna joke has popped up…Sorry…I’ll stop. Traditional blued guns and wet leather holsters are not a match made in heaven. I personally don’t care since I used to carry a blued 1911 at work. But I know some of the pistol-princesses would be ready to jump off the roof at surface corrosion. Modern tennifer, plasma-nitride coated guns are pretty impervious to casual rust issues.
In closing I would like to say this. Many people “default” to the micro-pistols and sub-compacts. I admit…It’s easy to carry a pocket-rocket. But frankly, the argument that a full-sized pistol is “hard” to CCW is bunk as well. It’s a commonly accepted lie that starts at every gun-counter in America. So most don’t even try. Which is a shame, since they typically hold more ammo and shoot better for a wider range of people. Both GREAT attributes in a self-defense pistol.
Try CCW’ing a service sized pistol as proof of concept for 3 months. Daily. I’ll bet many of you switch permanently.
Marky
www.tacticaltshirts.com
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