In Defense of the Pocket Pistol...

With summer rapidly approaching, more folks are starting to transition to pocket carry in the warmer weather. With the mosquitoes and black flies of summer (okay, late spring on the black flies...), a reminder of the warm weather, some toters find themselves paring down the carry hardware to something that can be hidden in a pocket - and along with that, someone will be commenting that if you can carry a pocket gun, you can carry a "real" gun.

Now, I understand the line of thinking here; heck, I used to espouse it. Never carry a handgun in a caliber that doesn't start with "4" and end in "5", right? If six rounds of .38 Special is good, then 18 rounds of 9mm is 3X better, right? A gun with a full sized grip in a "major" caliber is what you want on your side if the ball drops and things go all pear shaped, right? Something that'll put the bad guys down at 25 yards is what you need, either a full sized 1911 or a wundernine with eleventy billion round capacity.

See, the problem I kept running into was that those guns tend to stay home in the safe, whereas something like these:

would be far more likely to come along for the trip. I don't carry the Colt Jr., but there's a lot of folks out there that'll toss a Baby Browning or Beretta Jetfire in their pockets on a hot summer's day. The other two find themselves in near-constant rotation from about this time of year through September - basically any time that a cover garment would be suspect or just too darn hot.

The fact of the matter is that, statistically speaking, all handgun calibers suck. If you were really concerned about threats, you'd carry a rifle - or, better yet, barricade yourself in your armored home with something in the minigun family. But since we do tend to venture outside of the home on occasion, and toting a rifle is frowned upon in many locations, we wind up carrying handguns. And the facts of the matter are that, statistically speaking, *any* gun is better than no gun, and *any* handgun caliber is going to require multiple hits to a specific area to have any effect.

Whether that round is a .380 ACP, 9mm, or .45 ACP is of far lesser importance than a) having the gun on you in the first place, and b) being able to shoot it sufficiently well that you can make the best use of the gun's capacity. Insert old saw about "the .22 you have on you is better than the .44 at home in the safe" or "a hit with a .32 beats a miss with a .45". Having a firearm - any firearm - on your person with which you are reasonably proficient and prepared to use will greatly increase your chances of surviving the worst - whether that firearm is a .32 or a .44 Magnum.


Just be sure to actually carry it - and try to take it to the range sometimes, too!

That is all.