USCCA: Carrying in Cold Weather

Let's talk about carrying in cold weather. Now when you're carrying a firearm, generally you want as little between the firearm and your shooting position in an emergency situation as possible, but obviously there are also compelling reasons to wear several layers, particularly if you're in Minnesota in December like I am right now. Personal Defense Network headquarters here. Um, I went to college in Vermont. I've done a lot of work with the USCCA, obviously they're headquartered in Wisconsin, a lot of.

Understand that there's other than t-shirt weather, right, not everybody's down in Florida and Arizona with a firearm, but should you really be changing where you carry just because the weather changes or you went from inside to outside, right? We don't want to have 456 different patterns in our head. Now you can find plenty of videos that I've done in the past talking about how you might change, talking about uh a revolver in a pocket holster, in a coat. Now if you go from working in a. Shirt or a light shirt outside in July to working outside all day long or spending extended periods of time outdoors then it might be really a good idea for you to have two different ways of carrying your cold weather with layers or maybe in the outside layer and then your warm weather underneath something like a t-shirt or a pullover but you've also got to practice and of course during that transition period you need to make sure you get to the range, you at least practice dry, something like that.

If, however, you're like most people where you're not spending a lot of time outside when it's very, very, very cold, then I really encourage you to not. Three times a day change where you're carrying the gun. I'm carrying the gun underneath of this t-shirt. I practiced that presentation one handed and two handed. If I put on a heavy coat, and I've got a couple of layers here.

There's a fleece plus the outer layer that's gonna be the the rain or wind break, right? When I put this coat on, that doesn't mean all of a sudden that I want to take my holster off, put it in a pocket or switch guns, do all those kinds of things. Now what you might want to do is take something like a flashlight, right, and put it in the outer garment and maybe you're even staging your hand on it. As you're walking around, right, zipping this up, well, this is no different than the t-shirt when I pull this up it's a little harder, but it's the same motion even if I'm gonna do it one handed. I can come down here, pull up one handed, get my hand on the gun.

So the idea is that as little as possible is what you want to change when you're thinking about personal defense skill sets. You want to be as consistent as you can so that your warm weather and cold weather holster firearm presentation styles are consistent. It may not work for everybody, but for most people that's probably the best idea.