OOH! Fedex says my new sights have been delivered.

Trijicon HD's with orange dot, because I basically just follow the crowd.

Next, I should get my shipment of 147gr. Golden Sabers to shoot through the new G19. If they work, I think that's my new carry load.

One is none, and two is one, and three is some, and math is fun!

I'm pretty excited about a Glock 19 over here. I killed two birds with one stone over the weekend* by trading a .45 XD for the slightly-more-compact Glock to go with my G17. Also put an end to that disturbing one-gun-long "new gun from a gun store" streak. Don't want to let that kind of thing get legs under it.

So, if I understand this correctly, I had one copy of my carry pistol before, and now I have added a second. This leaves me with one, which is much better than before, when I had none.

But seriously, folks, I'm pretty happy about this. I plan to vet the G19 and start carrying it daily, while the G17 will wear the yellow 5.11 training barrel most of the time so I can dry fire whenever I want. That should make it a lot easier to dry fire daily for awhile, which should make it easier to do more serious work in dry fire. After that disqualification at Lefthander's club match last week, I've been working on movement with the gun, and using the yellow barrel makes me feel like maybe I dare dry fire in the back yard. Not sure about that, but there should be a lot more dry fire when I don't have to unload my actual carry gun to manage it. The G17 will also become my "gamer gun" for now.

Next Glock question: what sights to put on the G19.  I've been pretty happy with Warren Tactical 3-dot night sights on the 17, especially after I bothered to sight them in at 25 yards and see what kind of sight picture I needed to see. On the one hand, that argues for the same sights on the 19. On the other hand, it's a chance to try something like the Trijicon HD's that Tamara and the rest of the internet like so much. It wouldn't concern me to have different-looking sights, necessarily, but I'd like to have similar sight pictures for both guns in terms of where the point of impact is compared to the front sight.. We'll see.














*It literally takes a weekend to trade handguns with someone in Illinois. Meet in the parking lot at Scheels on Friday, (they don't have to worry, I went in and bought much more profitable items than a used Glock) make a deal, then go home and wait to meet up again on Monday to exchange the guns. After all, if I'd handed over the XD and he'd handed over the Glock on Friday, why, we'd have had guns.

I'm Gonna Get What's Comin' To Me: A Raven Concealment Systems Phantom Holster

Since Illinois' CCL law (it's a "Concealed Carry License" here) passed, and especially after I applied and began waiting for my license, I've been checking out holsters and trying to figure out what I need and what I want (not always the same thing.) I suspect I'm like a lot of newbs in that I'd like to do this without generating the "Box o' Holsters" that all the wily CCW veterans talk about. Unfortunately, the longer I try, the more I think the process of choosing a set of holsters that cover the range of needs of one person, different from other people, who will try to carry a pistol every day, cannot help but require trial and error (that's the "Guess and Check" strategy for all you math teachers out there. Holla.)

I've had my IL CCL in hand since March, and in those two months I've already made some changes. More on that in some other posts; this post belongs to the future! Also the present.

Today, I'm wearing my present solution, a Blade-Tech Phantom IWB. This is the injection-molded mass-market offering that PDB raved about; he considers it "better than" the more expensive holsters he's tried. I don't have the breadth of experience to make that claim, but it's certainly a lot of value for a little money. It's cheap--Fobus/SERPA cheap--and I suspect others may be more comfortable. But it's a solid, safe holster with firm, positive retention and a surprisingly strong mouth that stays open despite my preference for a very tight belt. Its rubber pull-the-dot snap loops grip the belt and hold it securely and consistently, but they make it much easier to put on and take off again, which may be a bigger deal to me than it is to you. I've been semi-forced to use the B-T Phantom with only one snap loop, which has actually worked better and allowed a more concealable cant; I might make that its own post, given the enormous length this has already reached, but suffice it to say that I'm pretty happy with the B-T Phantom overall. But that's where the Box 'O Holsters gets you, isn't it? When you're pretty happy with the holster you have, but you just know you can do better? I agree with PDB on the value the B-T Phantom delivers for the money, but I do think there's probably a better (albeit more costly) balance of cost and performance out there.

The next thing coming my way is another Phantom, but this one will be coming from Raven Concealment Systems.

 I hear almost all good things about RCS, and I want to experiment with OWB carry a bit this summer. I thought I would want a tuckable solution for summer, but in practice, what I've begun to do is to wear short-sleeved, untucked shirts over thin undershirts as the weather has gotten hot. It's not the sloppy fat-kid look that I remember from 100 pounds ago; I just needed smaller shirts. Specifically, while I have worn shirts as large as XXXXL and still own a few XXXL shirts, I'm wearing an XL over a Glock 17 right now. The thing is . . . if you're going to wear a reasonably loose, untucked shirt all summer over jeans, slacks and shorts with 1.5" belt loops, why not go all out on comfort and keep your holster outside your waistband most days? I like that the RCS Phantom appears to keep the grip tucked in close, which the B-T Phantom doesn't seem to do well, and I like the promise of modularity in the mounting systems--it can be adapted to IWB if I change my mind, including tuckable options, and there's also more than one OWB mounting option, although I've started by selecting "standard OWB loops." If the promise pays off, I may have a single holster that works well for most of my daily carry needs, but also makes training and gun school classes simpler.

There are two big questions to be answered about OWB concealed carry in general and the RCS Phantom in particular, in my mind:

1. How much difference is it going to make to have the bottom of the holster hang down near the bottom of the shirt? Am I going to find that I keep raising the hem of my shirt and exposing this holster, so it becomes relegated to jacket/coat/open carry duty? With the B-T Phantom and other IWB holsters, as long as the shirt doesn't come up above my belt, no part of a holster or gun is visible.
2. With no cant and a Glock 17 that can't be trusted ('cause you should never trust a big butt and a smile) to be all that discreet, can the RCS Phantom tuck the butt in close enough to avoid looking like I'm trying to show off, under a thin cotton blend button-down shirt?

I dunno, but I'm looking forward to trying out my new holster.

*It's kind of a long story, but I'm a school teacher by trade. Schools in Illinois cannot bar CCL holders from storing their firearms in their vehicles on school grounds--they have "safe harbor" as long as they don't carry the firearms outside their vehicles, with the exception of unloaded carry to lock a firearm in a trunk. However, I can be fired for bringing a firearm onto the campus without regard for whether it's legal for me to do so, so I choose to disarm down the street and have a couple of pleasant walks per day. I do not choose to draw a loaded gun, unload it, walk it around to the trunk, and then get it out when I'm done, sit in a car and load the gun, and holster it, because that seems like a recipe for an AD in public to me.

SIRT Pistols: Triggers, Magazines and Lasers, Oh My!

(Part 3 in the thrilling Wooden Swords and Laser Guns series.)

• Wooden Swords and Laser Guns: How Do I Practice Using Deadly Force?
• Little, Yellow, Different: 5.11's Training Barrel
• SIRT Pistol Practice: Triggers, Magazines and Lasers, Oh My!
• Laserlyte's Got What Plants Crave, So Why Didn't I Buy One?
• Bonus! Somewhat-Less-Deadly: Sabre's Spitfire OC Spray

I have a confession to make: that post on Monday would have been better with photos, right? Sure it would, and my wife gave me a point-and-shoot camera for my birthday that makes it look easy. However, I went looking for the 5.11 barrel and didn't find it. If you could see how cluttered our home is, that wouldn't seem too surprising, but it pointed up the fact that I haven't used the yellow barrel for at least a month. It has largely been replaced, and Big Red over there is the culprit.

What have you done to it?

Before we start, I should note that my personal SIRT is different from others. It started life as a "Performer RR" model, which meant that it cost a little over half what the Pro model costs, and had two major differences. First, the RR model has one red laser to indicate that the slack is being taken out of the trigger (or that the shooter has not completely released the trigger) and one red laser to show the shot break. The Performer RG and the Pro model have a green laser for the shot. The other big difference is the weight; the Pro model has a metal top end, while the Performers make do with plastic and are thus a little light to simulate a pistol perfectly.

Personally, I was buying a SIRT primarily to practice running a trigger, so the weight wasn't a big deal to me, but the previous owner did some work with lead weight tape from a golf pro shop to put more weight out front. I've never weighed the thing, actually, so let me go do that now . . . . 22.2 oz. with the weighted magazine inserted, still about ten ounces less than Glock quotes for a loaded Glock 17. That's still significantly lighter, but for my purposes, I'm not sure I'd ever really notice the difference.
The other big change was the sights; one of the SIRT's selling points is that it will accept sights cut for Glocks, and the previous owner was thoughtful enough to add a set of Sevigny all-black sights with a nice narrow front and a nice wide rear notch (I still haven't replaced the stock plastic sights on my real pistol, so the SIRT has a noticeably better sight picture going for it at all times.)

What does it do that dry fire doesn't?
Technically, not much. It's an excellent tool for practicing several skills:

• Handling a pistol safely--drawing, presenting, reholstering, reloading . . .
• "Presentation" (draw a pistol and find a sight picture.)
• Trigger press

But I can do all those things with an unloaded pistol. In fact, my particular SIRT has a much lighter trigger with a softer break than my Glock; I'm told the trigger is adjustable, but I haven't tried it or even learned how, yet. And an unloaded pistol can be used to run malfunction drills, slide-lock reloads--everything that requires running the slide is impossible with the SIRT. But there's always a catch, isn't there? There are actually two catches. 

Resetting triggers preserve sanity.

First, when I run dry practice with my striker-fired Glock, I use the slide to reset the trigger, and at the risk of sounding like a pansy, that's a pain in my butt. The SIRT resets, which allows me to keep my grip and press on, and also allows me to practice riding the reset (if you're into that sort of thing--I'm still undecided.) There's no recoil impulse messing me up while I do these things, but then nothing's perfect. 

With dry fire, quantity has a quality all its own.

The second catch is that all dry practice is not created equal. Dry practice is used to preserve and develop very perishable skills; consistent practice over time is the only dry practice that matters. Sporadic dry practice is . . . well, "waste of time" might be overstating it, but it's just not very useful. The SIRT fights the good fight against those long breaks from dry practice by being a completely inert gun-shaped object that cannot fire a bullet no matter how many mistakes I make. I don't store it in a gun safe, nor do I have to carry it with me to keep sticky little hands off it. As a matter of fact, I allow my seven-year-old son to try it out from time to time around the house, and he knows the difference between the SIRT and a firearm. What that lets me do is pick up the SIRT any time I have a couple of minutes to spare and run through whatever's bugging me. Now, if I want to run through a bunch of draws, and I'm wearing a pistol in my holster (and I usually am, nowadays) then I have to put a little more preparation in than that. But if I just want to get in 10-20 good presses of the trigger strong-hand-only and 10-20 weak-hand-only, I can grab the SIRT after I get dressed in the morning, run the trigger carefully while moving the sight picture from the newel post at the top of the stairs outside my bedroom door to a mini-USPSA silhouette in the opposite corner. When I'm done, I toss it on the desk and take off. I realize that probably doesn't impress anyone who lives in a house where only adults and animals live, but in a house with young children and squirrelly teenagers roaming free, that's performance a $2500 custom pistol can never match. Even the 5.11 training barrel I talked about on Monday doesn't quite match this, because it's not just the absolute safety of the device, but the convenience of it. You could certainly argue that I should be willing to do what I have to do in order to get enough dry practice, but the SIRT makes it so much easier that it amounts to more practice.

OK, but nothing is perfect, right?
True. The main drawback for the SIRT is its cost; the Pro model is not that far off the cost of another pistol, and even the Performers will set you back.  I paid under $200 for mine, and that included the excellent Sevigny sights and four of the weighted magazines, plus the previous owner's custom balancing work, but hey, $200 is $200. I bought the SIRT before I bought a "backup" to my Glock, and I can't claim it hasn't delayed that purchase. I can think of a few "types" who wouldn't find the SIRT nearly as useful as I do for home dry practice:

• Someone who already has time (or makes time) for serious, frequent dry fire with a pistol.
• Someone who lives or works in an environment where it's safe to store a firearm for dry fire sitting around where it can be picked up casually for a bit of work (for instance, a home with no children)
• Someone
• Anyone who has complete faith in their ability to prep the gun and the environment for dry fire every single time, such that there's no possibility of firing an unintentional bullet.

That last one looks a little bit sarcastic to me, but I'm serious about it. I am not that person, but I know they're out there. I, on the other hand, store firearms on one floor of the home, and I dry fire on another (because I don't have a safe direction there.) I take some time and trouble every time I dry fire to make sure it's safe . . . I don't dry fire with ammunition in the room, or in a direction without a safe backstop . . . and I've never had a mishap.

Yet. 

The SIRT doesn't provide guarantees that I never will, but every little bit helps.

Glock 17 vs. Glock 19: Go Big or Go Home

I'm not gonna lie; there are two facts that define every aspect of my decision to purchase a Glock 17 and carry it in a Blade-Tech Phantom:*

1.  Everybody says the Glock 19 is the perfect size for every job.
2. Nobody puts baby in a corner and you ain't the boss of me.

These were, it must be admitted, not the whole story. It turns out that even though I don't like to be told what to do, the grip on a Glock 17 really does tend to poke out at people like an inconvenient erection (only smaller, ladies.)  This has led to a new plan: sell the XD, purchase a Glock 19, and carry that, possibly while sending the 17 off to get cut down for 19 magazines (but probably not, as that smacks of effort, and, when you think about it, you only need one Glock 19 carry magazine at a time. Having three factory G19 magazines, I have enough to carry it forever, 'cause I can always just carry G17 mags on the belt for every purpose. The G19 mag's only virtue, after all, is relative stubbiness.

Anyway, you ever start to talk yourself into something, and then hear the issue reframed so brilliantly that you realize you've been wasting your time trying to think it through with your own feeble brain? Me, too.

Hat tip to ENDO: 

*Like PDB, I like the Phantom. Unlike PDB, I'm not quite ready to declare it better than everything else. Also, I broke mine as soon as I got it in a way that I think made it work (completely unintentionally) better for me. But as a way to spend $20 to have a safe, workable IWB holster without a long wait, it's brilliant.