The first time I pocket-carried regularly was when I was a police officer. I had my service gun and back-up of course, both carried in proper holsters, but I also usually had a Davis D32 derringer in my right-front pants-pocket as an absolute last-ditch weapon. While I could not envision any likely circumstance when it would be needed, it was small, easy and comfortable to carry, so why not?

Fast-forward a couple of decades. I work in a workshop attached to my home. It’s pretty secure, so I never really felt the need to be armed in the shop until the backyard got rather overgrown and I started spotting rats occasionally. In response I took to dropping a .32 revolver in my back pocket when I went out to the shop. Shortly after that I made a pocket-holster for it, and I realized this was a very convenient, no fuss way of carrying. I made a pocket holster for a snub-nose .38, then one for my Detonics Combat Master .45. I usually favor a belt holster, but I was seduced (by my own laziness) into using pocket-carry most of the time, either in a pants pocket or, in colder weather, a jacket pocket.

Look, I’m no self-defense guru or gunfighting expert. I’m just a guy with some experience, and I want to share what I’ve learned. After a few years of daily pocket-carry I’ve come to a conclusion, and it is this: Pocket-carry kind of sucks.

Hold on, hear me out. I’m not saying it’s stupid, I’m not challenging your choices, but let’s face it, there are pros and cons to pocket-carry. The pros might save your life… but the cons can get you killed if you don’t take them into account when planning your self-defense strategy.

The Pros are:

*Easy- just stick the holster in your pocket.

*Low-profile- good for hot weather when an overgarment would be too conspicuous and/or too uncomfortable.

*Access- In a tense situation if the gun is in a jacket-pocket it’s possible to have your hand on the gun without ‘brandishing.’

*Some people would count the ability to fire through a coat-pocket to be among the ‘Pros,’ and I suppose it is. But I’ve seen people try it and miss a target three feet from the muzzle. Apparently it’s not easy- but should work well enough at contact distance.

*Better than not carrying a gun at all.

The Cons:

*Forget about a quick draw, especially if your hand is not already on the gun. Even if it is in a good pocket holster a belt holster would be significantly faster.

*Pants-pocket carry: if you are sitting in a vehicle the gun might as well be on Pluto- you won’t be drawing it in a hurry. Chairs are almost as bad, especially if the gun is in a front pocket. Far better to have it in a jacket-pocket, but it’s still going to be slow and you can’t always wear a jacket. Also in a tussle a gun in a jacket pocket will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to deploy, or even get your hand on to fire through the pocket.

The main issues of pocket carry pretty much all boil down to access- it’s going to be relatively slow. This is not necessarily a fatal flaw (and I do mean ‘fatal’) With good situational awareness you may be able to give yourself time to draw, either as the situation develops or when a suspect is distracted. Try to get behind cover or at least out of sight before drawing. Yes, this is always a good idea, but with pocket carry it can mean that you get to go home once the dust settles.

Practice your draw from the pocket. Don’t try to do it fast, just try to do it so that it works. Not just on your feet, either- when on the ground, when crouching or kneeling etc. Find the limitations and relative speed of doing this in these different positions, and how you need to shift to accommodate the draw. Figure out if it can be done stealthily, and in what positions and under what circumstances.

Choice of gun matters, of course, and this will vary depending on what you wear. Needless to say you should probably carry the largest gun that works with your outfit, but again this will vary with your physical size. I’m a big guy- the Detonics .45 in a proper holster vanishes easily into the front pocket of my cargo pants. You might be limited to something like the tiny Kel Tec P32. Doesn’t matter- something is better than nothing.

It also shouldn’t need to be said that you need to practice with whatever you are carrying. I know a lot of folks that use an NAA mini-revolver for pocket-carry. A surprising number of them don’t practice with theirs; they’ve shot it enough to make sure it works and that’s it. The rationale is that it’s meant for contact- distance, and aiming is irrelevant. News-flash: people sometimes miss at contact distance. Plus you do not get to dictate the terms of the engagement, and it’s fully possible you may need to engage at well beyond arms length.

It’s generally true that the smaller the gun the more you need to practice. This is not because small guns are inaccurate, it’s just that they tend to have small grips, tiny sights etc. that make it difficult to shoot them accurately.

Whichever carry method or methods you adopt it is vital to understand the limitations and issues, and to know what you can do from those positions under a variety of circumstances. Not to be melodramatic, but your life may depend on it.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 8 July 2019

This debate has been going on for at least as long as I have been aware of guns, and it’s likely to continue long after guns have been replaced by phasers or whatever. At which point it will be just as stupid and pointless as it is today.

Bullet design has come a long way in the last 30-40 years. Hollow-points have become hugely more reliable in terms of expansion and penetration, and 9mm has benefitted from this a great deal. Perhaps this argument was more relevant in the 1980’s when hollow-point expansion was much more hit-and-miss? You might think so… but you’d be wrong.

In the 1980’s Evan Marshall took the radical approach of looking at actual, documented real-life shootings to determine what worked. This study was flawed by focussing on one-shot stops, but it was the first public scientific study of real-world shootings. (I call this approach flawed because, as one Marine quipped during the recent war in Iraq, “Who shoots them once?”) When comparing 9mm ball and .45 ACP ball he was rather shocked to discover that there was no significant difference in their ability to produce one-shot stops- and neither was all that good at it. This is not anecdotal evidence, war stories or what have you- this was documented in actual shootings.

The Miami shootout of 1986 prompted the FBI to adopt first 10mm, then .40 S&W. But it also launched a thirty-year comprehensive study of handgun stopping power, which reached the conclusion that handgun stopping power sucks. What matters is breaking things the suspect cannot operate without. This means that the bullet has to penetrate deeply enough to reach those things, and you have to be accurate enough to hit them. Everything else is icing on the cake. Well… almost everything else.

More recently Greg Ellifritz  ( https://www.activeresponsetraining.net/ ) did a study of real-world shootings, and it does seem to indicate that caliber has some importance, but the difference isn’t heavy & slow vs. small & fast. All calibers had instances where they simply failed to stop an attacker with any number of hits, but common calibers below 9mm/.38 had this occur significantly more often; far, far beyond the statistical margin of error. That’s .32, .25 and .22. 327 Magnum and 7.62 Tokarev may buck this trend, but it seems there was insufficient data to determine this.

Counter-intuitive as it may seem, for calibers .380 and above, there was no statistically significant difference in stopping among the calibers surveyed- which included all major commercially available calibers chambered in defensive firearms.

This is not to say that no one should carry a .40 S&W, .45 or what have you- just that you shouldn’t do it with any expectation that the caliber will give you a margin for error. No matter what you are shooting you need to be able to place your shots where they will do the most good- and need to fire a bullet that will penetrate deeply enough to break the things it needs to- those being the heart, spine, aorta and brain.

So everyone should carry a .380? Not at all. On average there is little difference between these rounds, but conditions differ. Can you reasonably expect your assailant to be wearing heavy winter clothing? Do you need the ability to deal with dangerous animals? In these cases a more powerful round with better penetration may be advisable. In a very hot climate you might need to carry a smaller handgun- but this is balanced to a degree by the fact that people wear less (and thinner) clothing.

So caliber is less important than previously thought, but that’s no reason not to ‘stack the deck’ by buying high-quality, modern defensive ammo. In this day and age information about bullet’s terminal performance abounds; Youtube can provide FBI-style test information about all of the common bullets used in modern defensive ammunition. Pick a good one in the caliber of a gun that you like, shoot well and, most importantly, will actually carry and likely you’ll be just fine.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 30 June 2019

It’s no secret that I shoot some odd-ball stuff; cartridge conversions, antiques etc. These, naturally, come in some odd calibers- .380 Revolver, .32 Colt Long, .44 Colt, .38 S&W etc. None of these take ‘normal’ bullets; the first three I listed use Heel-Base bullets like a .22, and the third uses a .361 diameter bullet rather than the ubiquitous .357-.358 bullets used in .38 Special and .357 Magnum.

Heel-base bullets are not common or inexpensive when you do find them; they are a specialty item with a very tiny niche in the market so they tend to command a premium. The solution for most people is casting their own bullets, but that is a can of worms I just don’t want to open. One thing I have as a result of my day-job is a lot of scrap steel- it occurred to me that I could swage my own from my go-to .45 bullet, Aaadvark Enterprises 200gr. LRNFP bullet. I already used these in .45 Colt and .45 ACP, so why not?

I got a small chunk of steel, bored a hole in it, then reamed it to .429″, then ran a .451″ reamer partway down to make a swaging die. I turned a steel rod down to .450″ for a punch, dropped a bullet in, set it on the anvil and hammered the punch in. Then I flipped the die and used a 1/4″ punch to drive the bullet and punch out and- voila! – I had a heel-base bullet.

Loaded into .44 Colt cartridges this worked pretty well. I went through several iterations of this basic set-up, and eventually came up with a bullet that worked very well in both .44 Colt and my own .44-55 Walker cartridge.

It’s useful to have a drill press and metal lathe to make a simple swaging set-up like the one above, but in fact it could be made with a hand-drill, Dremel Tool and vice.

Over time it occurred to me that heel-base bullets were not the only use for swaging. My Webley Royal Irish Constabulary revolver in .450 Adams prefers hollow-base bullets when using smokeless loads, and it was relatively simple to construct a punch and die to create them.

More recently bullets for .38 S&W have been an issue; this caliber uses a .361 caliber bullet rather than the ubiquitous .357 caliber bullets of modern .38s. The simple fix is to use hollow-base wadcutters, and this actually works quite well. But I have to order these on the internet, and shipping boxes of lead gets expensive in a hurry. By happy chance for a time Pinto’s had a stock of .361 150gr. LSWCs from an estate purchase, but I ran through those in fairly short order. Fortunately I discovered that Aardvark Enterprises .357 158gr. LRNFP Cowboy bullets were soft enough to bump up a few thousandths to .361, and work quite well. I experimented with some .355 124gr. RNL made for 9mm, but the slightly smaller diameter combined with a harder alloy meant that they would not bump up and properly engage the rifling, resulting in low-powered shots that tended to key-hole. The solution was at hand, fortunately. I invested $8 in a .361″ reamer and with a bit of lathe-work I was in business!

It’s all a bit labor-intensive, but it’s not hard. In fact it’s sort of meditative to listen to the radio and swage out a supply of bullets one-by-one.

This sparked an idea- it was pretty easy to up-size .355- to .361… How far could I take that? I had some .240gr. .429 bullets for my .44 magnum, but I’m not shooting that much at the moment. Yep, they swage to .451 just fine. What about those 210gr. copper-washed .41 caliber bullets I bought by accident? Yep- 210-gr .451 bullets, perfect for .450 Adams loads.

This is a pretty good deal- I often come across ‘clearance’ bullets that aren’t a caliber I shoot, but this opens the door to repurposing some of those inexpensive bullets.

Another new (to me) swaging innovation appeared in Pinto’s clearance bins- a Herters bullet-swaging die for the paltry sun of $5.

This handy device screws right into my RCBS reloading press and produces semi-wadcutters. I had to make something to replace the shell-holder to use it, but that was not difficult. Put a bullet on the plate, center it and run it up into the die. Tap the top with soft hammer and a lovely, fresh-minted SWC pops out. Brilliant!

Since making that base I’ve discovered that what I need is a ram that actually enters the die with the bullet, so I’ll be making one of those shortly. I’ll also be making swaging dies for heel-base .32 Colt Long bullets, and I’ve recently completed a set for .380 Revolver; essentially a .38 S&W with a heel-base .375 caliber bullet. (In the 20th Century British .380 Revolver cartridges reverted to using .361″ inside-lubed bullets.)

If, like me, you insist on shooting oddball, obsolete cartridges, swaging could be a viable alternative to casting your own. Worth looking into- there’s significantly less investment than getting into casting, and less concern about toxic fumes, molten metal etc.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 29 June 2019