Defensive Handgun Session 1: How to Select a Defensive Handgun

I'm Rob Pincus, executive director of the Personal Defense Network and this class is going to help you understand potential defensive handguns and learn how to select the defensive handgun that's going to be the best for you. There's a couple of different attributes that we're gonna talk about over and over and over again. And there's a few that we aren't gonna talk about very much because they're really important to understand at the very outset of your attempt to find the perfect defensive handgun. One of those is reliability. Without reliability, we're definitely not in the right ballpark. When it comes to a defensive handgun, first and foremost, the most important thing is going to be that the firearm is reliable. What do we mean by reliable? We mean that it's going to work when you need it. That it's incredibly likely that when you pull the trigger on the gun with the intention of firing a bullet at an attacker that's going to hurt you or someone you want to defend, that that gun is going to go bang. That the bullet is going to come out, that the gun is going to function properly from that point and allow you to subsequently fire a followup shot until either the firearm is out of ammunition or hopefully you've chosen to stop shooting because the threat has either left or has become unable to hurt you or has made the decision to surrender and stop trying to hurt you or whoever you were trying to defend. So reliability is incredibly important. Now it's true that various types of firearms have various levels of reliability inherent in them. Different brands, different firearm and ammunition combinations. And we always have to remember that it's possible that you have a firearm that other people have had a great deal of success with. Maybe one of the firearms I'm gonna show you today that I do know to be reliable for me with the ammunition I put in it, you may get an example of that mechanical device that isn't reliable. You may get a bad batch of ammunition that doesn't cycle properly inside of your semiautomatic firearm. So it's always gonna be incredibly important that regardless of what my recommendation is or the recommendation of your local gun shop or anyone else that you trust, that the firearm you actually intend to have on your person or a stage inside of your home for personal defense needs is tested with the exact type of ammunition that you're intending to fire. And of course, once you fire a bullet, and you know that it worked, that bullet can't be loaded back into the gun. So the best you can do is buy ammunition from the same case lot, make sure that you test some of the ammunition that came in that case, keep some of the other ammunition for your actual defensive use. That's going to be an accepted best practice. Now you're also going to have to make sure that the firearm is maintained very well and that will go ahead and increase the likelihood of reliability. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to scour it clean and strip it down to the smallest part every time you go practice. But you do wanna make sure that it's in good working order, that it's kept appropriately lubricated and that it's maintained in a way that is not only congruent with what the manufacturer recommends, but also what your instructors recommend, your local gun shop and some of the things that you'll see through other courses that we offer through Personal Defense Network. You can also get a lot of good information about maintenance of the firearms from the people who make the cleaning kits, the solvent, and the lubricants that you're gonna trust to keep your firearm working reliably. Now as I alluded to, all of the firearms that I have here on this table today are personally owned by me. All of these firearms, I have found to be very reliable. Now that doesn't mean necessarily mean that you can pick up one of these models and find it to be reliable for you and that's why I always recommend that very important testing procedure after you've chosen your firearm. So reliability is a must. Reliability is the starting point. The next thing that we're gonna talk about is efficiency. And what I'm gonna do is go over all of these different types of firearms and talk about why some of them are more efficient than others. First let's define efficiency. Efficiency means achieving our goal with as little time, effort, or energy as possible. And achieving our goal is merely effectiveness. All of these firearms should be effective in terms of being able to fire a bullet into a target that represents a realistic size that we'd be shooting at during a defensive situation. So maybe a 10 by 10 inch target, like we would have for the high center chest at 10 to 15 feet. All of these targets could be hit by bullets fired out of these guns from any even beginner level shooter in a controlled environment. In a dynamic environment, then a moderate to advanced level shooters should have no trouble getting multiple hits relatively quickly into that type of a target with any of these firearms. That doesn't mean that they're all created equal however, in terms of efficiency. Effectiveness is merely a starting point. So after we have reliability, then we obviously wanna make sure that we can be effective with the gun, but we personally need to make sure that we are going to be as efficient as possible. Defensive shooting is very different from target shooting. If you think about a target shooting environment, it's very controlled, it's very choreographed, it's very sterile, you can use very mechanical techniques, there's a lot of different ways you could choose to hold the gun or stand while you're shooting, there's different techniques you can use for aiming, whether you're using different types of sights, whether you're using your sights or not, whether you're doing a kinesthetically aligned unsighted fire, all of these different variables come into play in the target shooting environment. In the defensive shooting environment where you have much less freedom, we have much less control over what's going on. We know that there are certain things that your body is going to be able to do very well, very efficiently. There's other things that are gonna be hard to do with your body because of changes that occur when you're startled or when you're scared. For example, in target shooting environment, you'll see that many people choose to stand perfectly upright, obviously supporting their weight on their skeletal structure. Makes it easier for them to hold the gun, hold the gun steady, less fatigue. But when people get into a fight situation, they don't stand bolt upright. In fact, they lower their center of gravity. So when we do our defensive firearms practice, we always practice to shoot in a lowered center of gravity condition. There are other things that are more directly impactful on our firearm choice that are also caused by things that our body does naturally during a fight mode. One of those things relates to complexity versus complication. Now, firearms are complex. There's multiple moving parts. Defensive shooting is complex, there's multiple different things that you have to do and you have to keep track of mentally and physically that overlapped during the fight. So it's not a simple thing. It's not just one motion or one action or one decision. There's a multiplicity of things that are going to have to happen and that makes it complex. Complicated, I define as having extraneous or extra thoughts, extra decisions, extra observations, or extra movements or actions that have to be completed in order for you to achieve your goal that aren't really necessary. Now, with some of these guns on the table, there are going to be extraneous actions that complicate the effectiveness of the gun. In other words, it's less efficient for me to be able to simply get the gun out of my holster or get the gun out of a quick access safe and use it to defend myself because there's actions that have to be taken on some of these guns that don't have to be taken on others. Obviously, the number one thing we're talking about here are safeties. Whether or not there are mechanical safeties that need to be manually operated by you prior to shooting the gun when it's removed from wherever you've stored it. That quick access safe or inside of your holster, or if you choose to tuck it under your pillow. If there is a manual safety engage, which requires an extra movement that you don't already go through anyway, I would put that gun in the complicated category. We're gonna talk about how that looks on some of these guns and how that works. Doesn't mean you couldn't train to use one of those guns, but it does mean that you're adding an extra fine motor skill to the process between the time you realize you need to shoot to defend yourself or others, and the time that you're actually able to. So those would be inside of the categories of guns that we don't recommend. Another thing that can complicate the situation, as opposed to just dealing with the complexities that are inherent in the situation are long, heavy trigger pulls. The longer and heavier the trigger pull on your defensive firearm, the harder it will be for you to control deviation. Deviation control is how we talk about making sure that our bullet hits the target that we need to hit. If you have a target that's 10 inches wide versus a target that's five inches wide, you obviously have to control your deviation more on the five inch target than you do on the 10 inch. Again, if you have two 10 inch targets but one is 20 feet away and one's only 12 feet away, you're going to have to control deviation at a higher level to hit the target that's 20 feet away than you will the target at 12 feet away. So we don't wanna think about what is the maximum potential of accuracy or we usually talk about precision for our guns, we wanna talk about how much precision we actually need in order to be accurate. And we simply define accuracy as hitting our target. If you hit the target in the center, or you hit the target on the edge, we're gonna consider that equal in the defensive shooting situation. So we define our target, usually we talk about the high center chest, and we define the amount of precision it takes to get a hit on that target as deviation control. And that's where we start applying our skill. Well, obviously if we have a longer, heavier trigger pull on our gun, it's going to be harder to get any given amount of deviation control with that gun under various circumstances than it will be if we have a lighter, crisper trigger pull. So a light, short, crisp trigger pull is less complicated than a heavy trigger pull, right? Complex? We have to pull a trigger. We can't just think about our bullets flying out of the gun and they go off towards our target. We actually do have to perform that mechanical action. That's the complex part. We're making it harder and longer than we need to. Now we're potentially making it more complicated than we can handle in any given situation. So we're gonna be able to reply to a wider plausible set of circumstances with an easier trigger, lighter and crisper. The reason that we sometimes stay away from very light and very crisp triggers is because they're so light and so crisp. In other words, crisp meaning they have such a short travel distance before the gun goes off, that they require based on the standard practices and safety considerations of the industry and our shooting community, they require a manually operated external safety in order to be considered appropriate for defensive use. And that creates that extra step. So what we're really trying to balance out with some of these guns is somewhere between the light, crisp target shooting trigger that's the easiest to get the hit with, and the very heavy, double-action trigger pull that's the least likely to be set off accidentally, and therefore it doesn't require a safety is the middle ground. And that middle ground is really where we wanna operate. A trigger that requires enough distance of travel and enough weight of pull that it's a definite conscious act that we're not going to accidentally set the gun off if the safety isn't on. Now, a lot of our other practices when you talk about defensive shooting, keeping our finger somewhere other than the trigger until we're ready to shoot, making sure that our gun's in a proper shooting position and orientation before we choose to pull the trigger, all of those things will also work to help keep us safe. But trigger weight and trigger distance, the travel distance of the trigger do contribute to those things as well. It's also gonna help us to maintain our consistency if we have only one type of trigger pull. So you can imagine if there's two different types of trigger pulls that you have to learn on one gun, that is a complication as opposed to a complexity. So we wanna try to stick with consistent trigger pulls whenever possible. And we're gonna see how that works when we look at these guns. So primary issues, reliability, efficiency, and avoiding complications. Those are the three things we're gonna look for before we even start talking about exactly which gun is gonna be best for us when it comes to self-defense handgun selection.