You can find the answer to anything on the internet. It may not be the right answer, but you can definitely find them. Facebook, Tik-Tok, YouTube, and the original hive of scum and villainy, Reddit, are the stomping grounds of some of the world’s most knowledgeable people. Unfortunately, it’s also haunted by “experts” suffering near terminal amounts of the Dunning–Kruger effect, as well as outright trolls. Needless to say, there’s a lot of garbage floating around out there, especially when it comes to guns and carrying them concealed. So in this post we’re going to shatter some of the more popular myths. So let’s get to it.
The myths.
I’ve seen almost all of them on the internet at some place or another, and have had the pleasure of trying to educate quite a few people who believed them. The one that I regularly encounter in my classes is the everlasting Fudd classic, “You Don’t Need to Carry with a Round in the Chamber.”
See, Fudds tend to preach their belief in the Second Amendment, insofar as it concerns hunting. With their experience handling firearms limited solely to the few weeks of the year encompassing hunting season, they’re not really comfortable around guns. They grew up believing the lies, or are so old they only remember the bad old days of handguns, where single-action revolvers were the only choice. Back then you always had a five-shooter, as you had to put an empty chamber under the hammer. Those old guns had the firing pin mounted on the hammer, so if you carried with a full six rounds in the cylinder, the firing pin would be resting on the primer of a live round.
This could be bad. Cowboys understood this, because if Old Buttercup got a burr under her saddle and started hopping around like she had a case of Saint Vitus’ Dance, a cowboy’s gun could part company with its holster and fall to the ground. If it landed on the hammer, it could conceivably go off. This is why some folks still carry revolvers with an empty chamber under the hammer, even though modern revolvers have moved the firing pin from the hammer to the frame, making it necessary to pull the trigger to fire the gun. To the Fudd mind when it comes to semiautomatics, why the fastest way to have a negligent discharge is to carry with a loaded chamber. So carrying a revolver with a round in the chamber under the hammer is dangerous, carrying a semiautomatic with a round in the chamber is absolutely suicidal.
Okay, first off, modern pistols are designed and built with internal safeties such as firing pin blocks and transfer bars. They are not going to go off unless you pull the trigger. Follow the four rules of firearms safety and you will never have a problem.
And if you’re one of the simpletons who think that you’ll have time to chamber a round at the start of the gunfight, you’re not thinking of a couple of things. First, your opponent has already made the decision to engage in an armed encounter. He’s ready. And you’re not. Sure, you’re carrying your gun, but you have the situational awareness of a rock. You’re buried in your phone, looking at the cool Lamborghini parked at the curb, or engaged in anything else other than looking for threats.
So when Jack the amoral psychopath is suddenly a threat drawing a pistol, you’re more than likely going to freeze for at least a split second while your brain processes the fact that it may be thinking its last thoughts. You’re about to find out how horribly wrong you were about thinking that you could draw your gun and chamber a round quickly enough to neutralize a threat. Actually, that will probably be your last thought.
Do this for me. Your next dry-fire practice with a laser trainer and shot timer, (or just an empty gun and someone running a stopwatch), draw and fire a round as if you were carrying with a loaded chamber. Then draw, chamber a round, and fire as if you were carrying with an empty chamber. Compare the times. Do you see how far behind the power curve you would be in a real-life situation?
My next favorite, because I’m seeing more and more micro nines in my concealed carry classes, is “Small Guns Are Best for Concealed Carry.” Now I get it, the Hellcats, 365s, and other micros are easily concealable and light while still holding a decent number of rounds. Everyone wants to be comfortable.
There are a lot of drawbacks to these guns, however. For one, they’re pretty snappy under recoil, so they’re tough to get back on target with for follow-up shots. Now, this is easily overcome through practice, right? Thing is, the micros aren’t really pleasant pistols to shoot, so for the average permit holder who only shoots a couple boxes of ammo a year, they’re not going to put in the range time to get really proficient. No one trains with a gun that hurts their hand when they shoot.
The micros are also difficult guns to shoot accurately, as they have a very short sight radius. The more distance between the front and rear sight on the gun, the easier it is to shoot accurately. Cram them a couple inches apart and sight alignment becomes hyper-critical. Again, something that can be overcome through training, but circle back to the guns not being pleasant to shoot. Of course, you can sidestep the short sight radius by installing an optic, which is de rigeur these days.
And if you have normal size or big hands, good luck getting more than two fingers on the grip. Add that snappy recoil to a two-finger grip and the guns are really tough to shoot. I had an absolute monster of a man come to me for an individual lesson so I could teach him to shoot his Sig 365 SAS. He stood an easy six six, weighed upwards of 250 pounds, and had fingers the size of summer sausages. Trying to effectively hold this wee, tiny gun. With a magazine extension, he was barely able to get two fingers on the grip. He was shooting it well by the end of the session, but he really, really worked at it.
As an aside, the Sig 365 SAS (for SIG Anti Snag) is their “snag-free” version of the 365. It doesn’t have sights like we’re used to, instead employing a dot built into the rear of the slide. The controls, well the slide release and takedown latch, that’s all there are, are milled down flush making then completely useless. This is how they made it snagless. That has been the only SAS I’ve seen in the wild, and Sig stopped making them.
Now, Mrs. Pirate carries a 365XL (naturally, The Rose model), and shoots it well. She shoots it in IDPA and Steel Challenge along with range practice, so she has shot it enough to where she has no problems handling it. Mrs. Pirate also stands about five foot one, with little tiny hands, so she gets a perfectly proper grip. Sight alignment isn’t an issue, as she has a dot on her gun. So, given the right ergonomics, the micros do have a proper, though limited, demographic.
My recommendation is to find a gun that fits your hand. One where you can operate the controls without changing your grip, that you can control under recoil, and shoot accurately. From there, choose a proper gunbelt and holster that will allow you to carry it comfortably and securely. Once you have the right gun and carry gear, adjust your wardrobe accordingly.`
Then there’s the school of thought that “Five or Six Rounds Are More Than Enough.” This is usually stated by an individual quoting the old saw “FBI stats say the average gunfight includes three rounds fired over three seconds from a distance of 3 yards.” While this may have been true a long time ago, it certainly doesn’t apply today. If you’ve never been in a gunfight, your first one is going to have your blood pressure skyrocket, you’ll be hyperventilating, and your hands will be shaky. None of these are conducive to good marksmanship. This means you may miss your opponent once, twice, or, well, every time you shoot at him or her.
My personal philosophy is that the only time you have too much ammunition on you is when you’re on fire. You never know how many rounds you’re going to need in a gunfight. Number of opponents, how many misses you have, how much damage your opponent can absorb are all variables that you can only cover by having enough bullets.
The reality is that in most self-defense shootings, people shoot multiple rounds, often emptying their magazines before the fight is over. Running your gun empty while the bad guy still has bullets is what we refer to in the trade as a terminal sub-optimal experience.
Now, the gods may smile upon you on the day of your gunfight, like they did with Elisjsha Dicken at the Indiana mall, where Elisjsha stopped an active shooter by firing ten rounds from his gun, unaliving the gunman by hitting him eight times before he fell. That Elisjsha never had any formal training, was able to keep his head about him, and deliver accurate shots from forty yards away is simply incredible. Or, the gods may choose to just observe that day, and not intervene on your behalf. Now, are you going to be able to function as well as Elisjsha? Wouldn’t having a gun with decent capacity give you an edge?
On the know-your-equipment front, the old “Leaving Magazines Loaded Will Ruin the Springs” line is still around. I confess to falling into this one myself for several decades. I mean, it only made sense, didn’t it? It couldn’t be good for those springs to just stay compressed for any length of time. Then I had a discussion with an engineer about it. He explained to me what was really going on, like the fact that using the springs is what eventually wears them out. I distinctly remember being on a deployment and swapping my PMags out every week, thinking I was helping the springs by letting them rest. We’ve all heard the stories about grandpa , the world war two vet, passing away and the children packing up his possessions. They find his issued 1911 and three full magazines for it, take it to the range, and all twenty one rounds run flawlessly. That’s because the magazines didn’t have some moron like me “helping” them by loading and unloading them. Loading and unloading it causes more wear than leaving it loaded, like bending a paperclip back and forth until it breaks. Just leaving a magazine loaded will not cause any appreciable wear on the spring of a quality magazine.
Still in the gear category, there’s the “Any Holster is Fine as Long as the Gun Fits” school of thought. There are a ton of good, inexpensive holsters out there, so you don’t have to use some cheap piece of crap you bought off Amazon. And cheap is usually the only thing they have going for them. They’re going to wear much faster than a quality holster, and some are just downright unsafe to use.
A holster has three jobs. It has to hold the gun securely so movement, however rigorous, doesn’t cause the gun to fall out of it. It has to protect the trigger guard to prevent negligent discharges. And it needs to keep the gun in the right place so when you reach for it it’s where you practiced drawing from. It has to do all these things while being reasonably comfortable enough to wear all day long. There are plenty out there that do this, for not a whole lot more than the Amazon specials. Yet in every class I have students show up with cheap nylon holsters that do none of the three jobs well if at all.
In my classes, I invariably get one or two “legal experts” a year come through, and, lay the following two myths on me. First, “If You Shoot Someone in Your Yard, Drag the Body Back Into the House.” Yes, that’s right, they actually believe that. Because someone told him that, or he read it on the internet. If you have legal justification to shoot someone, why would it matter where the shooting took place? Listening to this advice will have you piling charges onto you that the straight-out justifiable shooting wouldn’t have incurred. You know, the whole tampering with evidence, disturbing a crime scene, and perjury that were completely unnecessary.
This first expert is often applauded and egged on by the Ramboesque figure in woodland camouflage BDU pants who contributes “Always Shoot to Kill.” You know, because that way only one story is told. And there are instructors out there who teach this, as well as teaching double taps and Mozambiques as the norms. And while I certainly wouldn’t think of telling another instructor how to do his job, this isn’t how I teach.
We carry concealed weapons to defend ourselves against threats. We employ said weapons to stop the threat. Stopping a threat doesn’t necessarily have to end in its death. May there be occasions when you have to shoot a threat multiple times? That’s certainly possible. But if you shoot a threat and it drops its gun, knife, whatever after the first shot, do you keep shooting even though it’s no longer a threat? No.
I teach to shoot to center chest. I can hear a bunch of you already saying I meant center mass. No, I didn’t. If you look at a B27 target, center mass is around the abdomen. Center chest is where all the important stuff is, and hits here will stop a threat faster than shots to the abdomen. You want to deliver shots here until the threat is stopped. When the threat is stopped, you stop shooting.
Well, that’s it for this episode. Hopefully you were able to learn something you didn’t know that will save you time, effort, or embarrassment. If you liked what you heard here, consider telling a like-minded friend about us. We’re listed in all the podcast directories, or you can listen in at our website.
For you outdoor types, check out The Grizzled Grunt’s YouTube channel. Lots of good info to be had there.
Until next time, shoot safe.
