Key Takeaways
- Proper gun handling is vital, especially when holstering, as it reflects a person’s skills and attitudes towards safety.
- Frequent risk arises because we holster handguns multiple times a day, leading to a dangerous normalcy bias.
- We often see influencers demonstrating poor holstering habits, which may influence others negatively.
- The main mistake is pointing the gun at ourselves while holstering, jeopardizing safety rules.
- To improve, we must slow down, pay attention, and build a better holstering process for ourselves and others.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
I am of the opinion, that you can tell who the real pros are by how they handle the guns they carry. Not how well they shoot them, or what cool tricks they can pull off, but the substance of their gun handling. One of the tale-tale indicators for me that will shape my perspective of a person probably more than it should, is how a person holsters their gun. How much attention they pay to the process. What level of caution they bring to one of the most dangerous things we do with guns, and for most of us, we do this thing sometimes multiple times a day.
Frequent Risk
On a day-to-day basis, there are few things we are doing as frequently, and as dangerous as holstering a handgun. The reason it is dangerous is not because the action itself is dangerous, but because we tend to approach holstering a handgun in a haphazard way. I think this is for a couple reasons. One, we do it all the time. More than we probably do anything else with a handgun, we are putting the gun in a holster. The constant exposure without incident creates a dangerous normalcy bias. Oh, nothing has gone wrong before, why would it go wrong now. The whole fortuitous outcomes lead to bad tactics thing. Except in this case, fortuitous outcomes lead to suboptimal gun handling. If you continually make a mistake, but rarely experience a poor outcome from the mistake, we tend to ignore the mistake. This is human nature. The problem is, experiencing the mistake can be of incredibly high consequence, and then too late to correct.
What the World Shows Us
Two, we see poor holstering habits in the wild all the time from people we would consider peers or influencers, and we want to be cool like them. There are very few people paying due attention to how they holster a handgun. Especially true of AIWB users. With the way we as a community consume social media, probably even fewer are represented in that space on average than in real life.
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Solutions
So, what is the mistake I often see that I referenced above? Mostly, it is pointing the gun at ourselves as we are holstering the gun. Now, the beauty of the traditional firearms safety rules that most people follow, there is built in redundancy. In reality, you have to violate at least two rules simultaneously to incur injury (injury, not property damage). We often get away with violating one rule. But this is dangerous, and the stakes are too high to be okay with it because we run the risk of eventually violating two, and the safety net of redundancy is already gone. We end up with loud noises and blood-soaked clothing instead of just bruised ego, and all because we let ourselves get lax. What then do we do? We slow down. We pay attention. We build a better process. And we don’t just do it for ourselves, we do it for everyone watching too.