What have I got in my pockets? After numerous requests, we’re taking a look at my own personal everyday carry gear. Then, we’re going beyond the gear to break down the reasoning behind my approach to concealed carry and other carry gear, why it’s probably different from yours, and some tips for finding the best carry hardware for you.

Details are in the video below, or keep scrolling to read the full transcript.

Hey everybody, I am Chris Baker from LuckyGunner.com and today I’m going to talk about all the junk I carry around all the time, or what the cool kids call EDC or Everyday Carry.

I’ve put off doing a video like this because it always seemed a little immodest to assume the world should care about the mundane crap I keep in my pockets. But you guys do ask about my carry gear on a fairly regular basis. Mostly my carry gun and holster, but I also get questions about my watch and my pocket knife and stuff like that. So we’re gonna do this. But we’re gonna do it my way. Which means I’m gonna start off talking about the gear, but then we’re going to dive into some related issues that you guys had no idea you were signing up for when you asked for this. But you did ask for it, so you only have yourselves to blame.

Let’s take a look at what we’ve got here. My carry gun is a Smith & Wesson Model 332 Ti snub nose chambered for .32 H&R Magnum. I carry that in a Phlster City Special holster with a DCC belt clip. The knife is a Spyderco Cat. For a flashlight, I carry a Streamlight Protac 1L. The watch I wear most of the time is a Citizen EcoDrive. I’ve also got a POM flip-top pepper spray dispenser. And then there’s my car key, an iPhone Mini, and my wallet, which is an Alpine Swiss Minimalist.

Why a Snub Nose?

I’ll talk a little more about the gun first because that’s probably what you all came here for. The gun I’m carrying day to day changes a lot more frequently than any of my other carry items. Part of that is just because of the nature of this job. But there are other reasons, and I’ll get into those more in a minute.

I always end up coming back to a lightweight snub nose revolver. My favorite so far has been the Smith & Wesson 332 Ti. It has an aluminum frame and a titanium cylinder, making it among the lightest of the J-frames at just 13 ounces loaded. Smith only made J-frames in this caliber for a few years in the early 2000s and they’re tough to find today. I got lucky and picked this one up at a bargain price because of the worn finish. But mechanically, it’s still in great shape.

I installed a set of Crimson Trace laser grips – the shortest ones they make, model LG-405. Even without the laser, these have the best grip shape that I’ve found for J-frames. The ballistics of .32 H&R Magnum are comparable to .38 Special out of a 2-inch barrel, but with less recoil and six rounds instead of just five. My carry ammo is the Black Hills 85-grain jacketed hollow point. It consistently penetrates about 15 inches in ballistic gel tests and it also tends to have better availability than most other ammo in this caliber.

The main thing I like about snubbies is the ratio of weight to size. They can be extremely light, but they’re not so small that I have a hard time fishing one out of my waistband. The angle and size of the grip make them easy to draw consistently. Any semi-auto that weighs 13 ounces is going to have some ergonomic challenges to deal with that I don’t have with a J-frame or a Ruger LCR.

Other Carry Gear

I’m not going to go into a ton of detail about these other items. I’ve been carrying some of these things for a very long time. The knife and the watch, I’ve had for over a decade. I have duplicate backups of each of them. They’re nothing special. They weren’t very expensive. Most of the things here were relatively affordable. The stuff I carry gets knocked around and abused. Some of it gets lost on occasion. I don’t want to have to stress over whether I should use or carry something because I’ve got a lot of money invested in it, so I tend to stick with stuff that’s “decent but affordable.”

The knife is not a fighting tool. 95% of the time, I use it to open packages. The rest of the time, it’s a makeshift screwdriver or pry bar – things I would never do with a $300 blade, but this was 45 bucks, so… no big deal.

I’ve owned a few of the Streamlight Protacs and I like them, but that’s one piece of gear I will probably change at some point. I use the light multiple times every day and I end up changing the battery at least once a week. In the near future, I’d like to replace it with one that has a rechargeable internal battery.

I never leave the house without a pepper spray dispenser. If I happen to encounter a potentially violent situation, there is a very good chance it will not require a deadly force solution. Pepper spray offers an option that is, in the words of Chuck Haggard, “between a harsh word and a gun.” The POM formula is reportedly very potent stuff and the dispenser is one of the most user-friendly on the market. They’re affordable. I buy these by the case and give them out to friends and family. It’s really hard for me to find a reason not to carry something like this every day.

A Minimalist Approach to Concealed Carry

A trend you might notice here is that each item is fairly small and lightweight relative to other options. The gun is small, of course. My phone is small. I wear a small watch – although, that’s mostly because I have a small wrist. My car key is the only key I carry – I’ve installed push-button combination locks on everything else I need regular access to. You might also notice the conspicuous absence of certain items like spare ammo, a fixed blade knife, or medical gear – stuff that a lot of people would consider essential.

I can and have carried those things and I’ve carried bigger versions of all of the things I do carry. But ultimately, I tend to default back to a somewhat minimalist approach. The upside is that I literally do carry it all day everyday, with very few exceptions. This stuff can go with me regardless of the weather or what I’m wearing or what I’m going to be doing. But my real reason for taking this route is that I like to be prepared, but I also have a low tolerance for the physical discomfort caused by carrying around a bunch of stuff. That is not something you’re supposed to say if you want to be taken seriously in the concealed carry and self-defense world. And that’s why we’re going to talk about it for a minute.

Does Comfort Really Matter?

I’ve brought up this issue of comfort in the past. It’s an aspect of concealed carry that doesn’t get nearly enough attention, especially the subjective nature of comfort. If our gear is uncomfortable, we’re supposed to just suck it up. Think of the lives that could be saved by having the appropriate gear. Think of the pain and anguish your poor orphaned children are going to go through when you’re killed in the streets for not carrying a spare magazine.

I think that’s a phase of the concealed carry journey that a lot of us go through at some point. Hopefully, as we develop in our knowledge and skills, we also develop a more nuanced approach to the hardware.

If you need a nudge in that direction, last week, my friend Sarah from Phlster Holsters released an excellent video on this topic. She explains why we should not just ignore discomfort from our carry gear. Then she outlines some extremely helpful tips on how to alleviate a lot of common comfort issues just by changing some minor details in how our carry gear is set up or positioned. I’d consider it required viewing for anyone who has ever found their carry gun to be uncomfortable – which is everyone.

Another great resource that explores these topics is the YouTube channel Armed and Styled. Tessah very clearly articulates some of the finer details of concealed carry. She actually breaks down and explains stuff that a lot of us had to just figure out through trial and error because nobody was really talking about it. A good video to start with is the Concealment Percentage Principle – that’s about how to get a ballpark idea of what size gun is likely to fit you best before you ever try one on.

Sensory Overload

Even with great resources like these, if you want to carry on a daily basis, you still might run into comfort-related problems that nobody seems to have a good answer for. I’ll give you a personal example. Like a lot of people, I often struggle with sensory overload. In my case, it’s nothing debilitating, but sometimes I find it overwhelming to be around things like loud noises or strong odors. I have a hard time tuning that stuff out, even when the people around me seem to be able to do that just fine.

Carrying around too much stuff in my pockets or on my belt is like the tactile version of that. Even the small amount of stuff I do carry occasionally drives me up the wall. At least once a week, I’ll be sitting at my desk working and I have to just empty my pockets, take off my gun, my watch, and even my wedding band. It’s like I can’t stop noticing that it’s there.

I don’t bring this up because I want you to feel sorry for me. It’s a fairly minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things. My sensitivity level has ups and downs for months, or even years at a time, and that’s a big reason why I vacillate between small guns like the J-frame and not-quite-as-small guns like the Sig P365 XL.

I know some of you out there are dealing with similar challenges, but nobody’s ever told you that that’s not normal. There are a few different medical problems related to sensory processing or sensory overload. Most people never receive an actual diagnosis. It’s an area of medical research that seems to be in its early stages. Even in my case, I’ve known about my sensory issues for decades, but it was only a couple of years ago that I connected that to the struggles I had with finding comfortable carry gear.

Maybe you don’t have sensory issues, but you’ve got something like a nerve disorder. Or maybe you’ve had abdominal surgery. There are a ton of issues, medical or otherwise, that can make concealed carry more of a challenge.

So when your favorite shooting instructor or Instagram star or whatever insists that “anybody” should be able to carry — fill in the blank with a specific size of gun or spare mag or a tourniquet or whatever — you feel like you’re doing something wrong when that doesn’t work for you. Now, anything new is going to feel uncomfortable at first, and there is a lot you can do to optimize your gear for comfort. Most issues can be resolved with a little coaching, experimentation, and patience. But it’s also possible to do everything right and still feel like your gun or your other carry gear is physically intolerable.

Individuals Require Individual Solutions

I don’t have any easy solutions for that. Carrying a smaller gun and minimizing my other carry items has worked pretty well for me. Of course, that has some drawbacks. I’ve had to put in extra work at the range to be able to shoot a snub nose at a skill level that I’m comfortable with. And I’m also okay with that compromise because, based on my own personal demographics and where I live and hang out, I’m at extremely low risk for violent criminal assault. I also carry some additional gear in a backpack that goes with me most places, at least in my car. I keep a medical kit in there, and other emergency items and everyday tools.

What I hope I’m getting across here is that everyday carry gear is a personal thing that has to be tailored based on the needs of each individual. That’s not to say there are no wrong answers. There definitely are. If you’re unclear about what your needs are and what gear is worth trying, you can fumble around for years with stuff that is either uncomfortable or ineffective. So don’t try to figure out all of this stuff on your own, but don’t carry something just because somebody else carries it. Seek out concealed carry advice from credible people who understand that everybody’s different and they need different solutions. Except, that is, when it comes to procuring ammo. There can only be one solution and that is to buy it from us with lightning fast shipping at LuckyGunner.com.

The post My Everyday Carry Gear and Why It’s “Wrong” appeared first on Lucky Gunner Lounge.

A red dot that was working fine on my Sig P365XL suddenly decided to be not fine. Today, we’re taking a look at what happened and some lessons we can learn from it.

Details are in the video below, or scroll down to read the transcript.

Hey everybody, I am Chris Baker from LuckyGunner.com where you can get all your ammo with lightning fast shipping.

This is a broken red dot optic. I try not to ever let broken equipment go to waste. An equipment failure is always a chance to learn something or demonstrate something. I know the die-hard iron sights guys are probably going to love this. But my goal here is not to make an argument for or against optics. I think the pros generally outweigh the cons. But we have to acknowledge that optics add a layer of complexity to the firearm. They can be much easier to use than iron sights, but they’re more administratively complicated.

Problems with optics can be especially difficult to diagnose. This optic failed in a way I have never seen an optic fail before. So today I’m just going to talk about what happened and some things we might be able to learn from it.

The optic is a Holosun HS507K. Until a couple of days ago, I had it mounted on the Sig P365 XL. I’ve got the Swamp Fox Sentinel back on there for the time being. I had the Holosun on the Sig for more than a year and several hundred rounds and it was working just fine.

Then a few weeks ago, I went to a class called Cognitive Pistol and Tactical Anatomy taught by John Hearne. Excellent class. I’ll have some details from that trip in a future video. This class involved a lot of shooting at small target areas. I noticed pretty early on that my shots were hitting a few inches low. At first, I just figured the optic maybe had a little more offset than I remembered. So I started compensating for that, but I was still getting a lot of shots lower than I would have expected.

Usually, this just means bad trigger control on my part. But when I have bad trigger control, I tend to get some left and right deviation as well. During the class, most of my low shots were right down the middle. Aiming a little high got me through most of the class okay.

At the very end, we did an exercise with a steel spinner target. I could not hit that thing to save my life. But I was still halfway between thinking I had a hardware issue and thinking I just forgot how to shoot. Most optic problems turn out to actually be shooter problems, so I was reluctant to blame the equipment.

When there is a legitimate problem with an optic, nine times out of ten, it’s related to the interface between the optic and the gun. Either the mounting hardware has an issue, or there are loose screws or something like that. After class, I checked my optic screws. They were still nice and snug. The optic wasn’t moving or rattling. So I had plenty of time on my drive home to ponder how I had become such an incompetent pistol shooter.

The next day, I went out to the range to see if I could figure out what was going on. Here’s a five-shot group at five yards.

With a properly zeroed pistol optic, you will have some offset at close range, but that’s a little more than what’s ideal. That offset should have disappeared by the time I moved to about 15 yards, which is the distance I had last zeroed the gun. But here’s a five-shot group at 10 yards and it’s even lower than the five yard group. At 15 yards, my group was not only low, one of the rounds was off the target completely.

That was odd. So I cranked the elevation adjustment up several clicks. Shot another group at 15 with this nice cluster in the X and one guy way down here in the 8-ring. I was shooting these all from the bench, so I knew for sure it wasn’t me this time. Something was definitely up.

I shot several more groups and every time it was the same story. The first shot would be six or more inches low, and the rest would be grouped pretty close to the point of aim. I tried switching ammo. I tried a few rounds of HST, which I know this gun has grouped well with in the past. Same thing.

I would not have shot so many groups, but the fact that I was consistently getting just one low shot out of every five rounds was really perplexing. And I’m still not quite sure why that was the case. This is the first time I’ve had an optic behave like that. I was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with the gun itself and not the optic.

I checked my optic screws one more time and I snaked the barrel a couple of times. Tried a few more rounds and got this train wreck. This is a lot more erratic than before, and it’s more like what I would expect from a malfunctioning optic.

But I still wasn’t sure if the problem was the optic itself or the way the optic was mounted. Maybe it was moving around on the slide and I just couldn’t tell. So I removed the optic and put the original iron sights back on the gun. It grouped fine at 15. I took the Holosun and mounted it to the Sig P322 that I reviewed a few weeks ago. That gun had some reliability issues, but it was very accurate. And the slide is cut for the same optic footprint as the P365, so it made a good test platform.

Six rounds of .22 told me everything I needed to know. Crazy vertical stringing.

Without the recoil of the 9mm, I could actually see the dot moving in the window. After every shot, it would jump to a different spot relative to the iron sights. Apparently, whatever is supposed to hold the emitter in place on the vertical axis inside the optic is not doing its job, so the dot is just moving up and down freely.

I filled out the warranty form on Holosun’s website last Friday. On Monday, they sent me a shipping label and by the time you watch this, the optic will be on its way back and hopefully will be repaired or replaced.

My purpose here is not to drag Holosun’s name through the mud. We have six or seven of their optics here and this is the first time we’ve run into an issue. I have no reason to believe this is a common problem. I plan to keep using Holosun optics for the time being. There are a couple of things we can learn here that are not specific to this optic.

The first one is that sometimes optics fail in unexpected ways. The number one concern people tend to have with pistol optics is that the electronics will fail and the dot will just not be there when they draw the gun. Based on the popularity of optic torture tests, the second most common concern seems to be that the gun will somehow fall ten feet and land optic-first onto pavement. So everybody wants a super rugged optic with long battery life. Okay, I get that. Those are good features.

But an optic spontaneously losing zero? That’s not a problem I hear people talk about too often. In this case, I was still able to get hits, even with the failing optic. They weren’t as good as the hits I wanted to get, but they were acceptable. The optic would not have gotten me killed in the street this time. If the windage adjustment had been wandering rather than the elevation, I might have had a much bigger problem.

Again, I’m sure the iron sight guys are enjoying some schadenfreude right now. So I have to remind everyone that iron sights fail, too. I’ve had front sights launch themselves off of guns more than once, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had a rear sight wander around in the dovetail. However, I will say that when there’s a problem with iron sights, it’s usually evident pretty quickly. You can look at a rear sight and tell if it’s way off center. I had no way of knowing this optic was failing except seeing where my shots were going and there are a lot of other variables that can cause the point of impact to be off besides a failing optic.

So another good lesson to learn from this is that backup iron sights are very good to have. To mount an optic on the P365 XL, you have to remove the rear sight. That leaves you with just a front sight, which really doesn’t help much. That’s one of the biggest disadvantages of this model.

Some of the newer Sig models are not set up this way. This is a new P365 in .380. This one came with the optic. You can see that it’s a little farther forward on the slide so there’s room for a rear sight behind it. And this version has sights that are tall enough to see through the optic window. That’s an ideal setup.

If I had had a setup like that on the XL, I could have figured out that I was having an optic issue at the beginning of that class instead of the next day on the range.

We tend to think of backup sights as an emergency failsafe in case the optic shuts off unexpectedly. They could also be useful for diagnosing other problems with the optic.

Okay guys, that’s all I’ve got for now. I hope you found some of that helpful. If not, here’s another tip for you: never eat yellow snow. But do buy some ammo from us with lightning fast shipping at LuckyGunner.com.

The post My Pistol Red Dot Optic Broke appeared first on Lucky Gunner Lounge.