Hand Sizing Tips When Fitting Handguns for Women

Handguns for women, is there such a thing? Well we've touched on this topic a lot at Personal Defense Network and if you've ever been to one of my classes or one of my speaking seminars, you'll know that I generally feel like we shouldn't try to gender specifically make recommendations because everyone's an individual, right? Obviously there are men with more and less upper body strength, there are women with more and less upper body strength. There are men with different size hands, or women with different size hands. As a generalization, when someone comes to me and says what handguns are best for women, what I really hear them saying is what handguns are best for someone who generally has less upper body strength and generally has a smaller hand?

Now that doesn't necessarily mean that any specific gun is gonna be just for women or just for men. It does mean that we're making a generalization about women versus men in Western society. Generally women are gonna have less upper body strength and smaller hands. So that's really important to remember. As we go through and look at these particular guns, all of which some people may think are great for personal defense or not great for personal defense, remember that as an individual male or female, you're gonna have to make sure that your hand fits your gun, and that you can manipulate and utilize the gun the way you're supposed to, appropriately to your strength, to your coordination, and again, the size and shape of your body.

We'll start over here with what is one of the larger guns that's commonly out on the range. It's used in the public sector quite a bit in law enforcement, in the military. This is the standard military handgun for most of the armed forces in the U.S. This the Beretta model 92 or M9. This particular gun was actually issued to me by a police department that I worked for, and I purchased it when we switched to another type of gun.

As you can see, it's relatively large, it's got a large what we call double stack grip magazine well, so inside of the grip area that double stack magazine holds all the bullets. So it's gonna go in there, it's gonna be thicker than a single stack. We'll get to single stacks here in a minute. This is a typical on-duty military law enforcement type gun. It's the kind of gun that a lot of people carry for personal defense, and that many people also stage for home defense.

Well, you can see that my hand fits it relatively well. I can manipulate the levers, I can move my finger to the trigger, I can do what I need to do on this gun relatively easily. But you also see that there's a large gap between the tips of my fingers and the back of my palm on the weak side of the gun. That means I'm not getting a 360 degree grip or even close to it, until I put my second hand on the gun. Now, when I go buy gloves, I buy size large.

Men large gloves. Ski gloves, work gloves, whatever it's gonna to be. Which means I must have a relatively large hand at least normal size for the American male. When I grip this gun, knowing that I have this much of the gun uncovered means this must be a pretty large gun and it is. It's not the kind of gun that we would typically recommend for a woman, or in general, for anyone with smaller hands.

Viable option, sure, best option, probably not. If we move down to this sub compact gun, this Glock subcompact gun. This one in particular is a Glock 26, it's a nine millimeter. This is available in many different calibers but it's all gonna be generally the same size gun. The reason I picked this gun next, is because it's obviously much smaller than the full-sized Beretta.

But what may not be obvious is that the grip size really isn't much smaller. When I put my hand on the grip, you'll see that there's still that same large gap between my fingertips and the base of my palm, in terms of trying to get that 360 degree grip. Even though all of my fingers don't even fit on this grip, it's the girth. It's the size around the grip area, and especially from the back strap to the front of the trigger, that I'm concerned about. So that dimension is really what we wanna look at.

It's not just the overall size, where this gun is obviously larger than this gun, it's also the specific size and dimensions of the grip area which may not be as obvious but they're basically the same size on these two guns. This is not a dramatically smaller gun. It's not gonna be dramatically easier to use in the important dimensions that we look at in terms of hand size. And that's really what again, we're looking at when we look at women holding guns. Now this gun in particular here, this is again a double stack gun.

There's been some customization to it but this is a double stack gun that conceivably will hold just as many rounds as this gun. Again, it's a nine millimeter. You can see they're similar in size. If I put them both into battery obviously there's no ammo on this set here, these guns have been cleared by everyone involved. These are relatively the same sized guns, this gun looks much more like this one, than it does like this one, but the grip area on this Springfield XD actually is much easier for the average hand to hold.

If you look here and see where my fingertips are when I grip this gun, my fingertips come about halfway back past the grip. Again, this deep cut here, is a very different shape than it is on the Glock. Also the position of the front of the trigger relative to the back of the grip area, is gonna be more narrow. So the narrowness here, the depth of this cut and the position of the trigger, all mean that this gun is going to fit smaller hands better. Now, I actually carry these Springfield XDs around as demo guns when I'm out on tour teaching because they generally fit all types of hands better, than a lot of the other modern striker fired semiautomatic guns that we recommend.

Now if you have a problem with any of these double stack guns, the first place you're gonna wanna look is to a single stack gun. When I take a gun like this, this Bersa that has a very deep cut, that has a moderate length trigger, but is only single stacks. There's only one row of bullets going into the magazine. You can see that when I grip this gun and I get my hand seated all the way in, I'll go ahead and put this gun into battery also, when I get a good, deep firing grip like I should and I bring my fingers around, you'll see that my fingers come almost all the way back to the back of my hand. I'm getting much closer to a good 360 degree grip on this gun, because of the narrowness of the grip and that makes sense.

The depth of the cut, the position of the trigger, the height of the cut, and the narrowness of the grip all combined to give my relatively large hand just about a 360 degree grip on this gun, without having to worry about putting my second hand on the gun. Another single stack gun is this Springfield. Obviously this is the Springfield double stack, this is the Springfield XDS. It's the nine millimeter single stack version. You see they look relatively the same, but when we look up from the bottom the grip area, we're gonna see the big difference in the girth of the grip, because we have the double stack gun and the single stack gun obviously taking a different size magazine, and that's one of the factors that's gonna allow us to have a better grip with a smaller hand on the single stack gun.

Where you would start to get into trouble with this, would be an extra large hand. And while we don't think of women generally of having large hands, remember that finger length is a big factor here. A lot of women have long slender fingers. If they have long slender fingers and get all the way around one of the double stack grips on the larger guns, that's gonna make this gun the perfect gun for them and maybe not this one. Same thing for guys.

Guys with longer fingers or big meaty type Paul hands, you're probably not gonna do well with a single stack or a subcompact. So keep all this in mind when it comes to choosing a gun for yourself. Male or female, handguns for women, it's a big question. It gets asked on the internet a lot. The reality is, you as a human being need the best gun, to fit your human hand.