Guns

Building a Tiered Carry System: Matching the Gun to the Day

We carry a pistol just in case we find ourselves in a gun fight. If we know we will be in a gunfight, the best option is to not be there. Failing that, we should bring the most gun we can, along with a lot of friends who also bring the most gun they can. Still, that’s inconvenient to do 24/7. My friends and I can’t live our lives as if we were a Marine platoon about to be ambushed.

So we carry a pistol. Most people spend a lot of time trying to find the one perfect carry pistol.
Experienced shooters eventually realize something different:

There is no perfect gun—only the best gun for today’s constraints.

What I’ve built is a four-tier carry system that scales with clothing, concealment, and performance needs. It’s not just practical—it’s exactly how I maximize capability without sacrificing consistency.

Smith & Wesson Model 642 Airweight (Pocket Carry)

This is the “always gun.” It has some advantages:
Extremely light (~18 oz loaded)
Minimal grip height → very low printing
Works in gym shorts, light clothing, or no-belt situations. I can drop it in my shorts pocket as I head out the door, and now I am armed for a quick run to the store. In Florida’s heat and humidity, this is far more important than you realize. It’s rounded profile hides well in pockets, it’s highly reliable regardless of grip or draw angle.

The disadvantages are low capacity, and they are nearly impossible to reload. This revolver doesn’t deal with speed strips or speedloaders very well, so this pistol is 5 shots and done. Not only that, but with this extremely short barrel, high pressure loads aren’t possible, meaning the bullets are just not great performers.

This relegates the J frame to a niche role: The gun you carry when carrying anything else is difficult or unlikely. The reality is this is not my most capable gun, but it’s the one that ensures I’m never unarmed, not even for a quick run to the store. It’s my “get off of me” gun that I will push into an attacker’s midsection and pull the trigger 5 quick times, an “oh shit” gun.

Concealable IWB Upgrade: Smith & Wesson M&P Shield Plus (10-round)

This is where you step into a true fighting handgun while staying highly concealable. The advantages here are the Shield has a thin, flat profile, which makes for excellent IWB concealment. The ten round magazine capacity is double that of the 642. The 9mm has better terminal performance than the J frame, the reloads are faster and more easily accomplished, the handgun is more controllable than a snub revolver, and the XS DXT sights on mine are exponentially better than the sights on that pocket pistol.

I carry my 9mm with 124gr +P gold dots. That bullet is a proven performer, and in the +P loading, it is a superior performer. I will admit that I own compact automatic pistols in 9mm, .40S&W, .45ACP, .357Sig, and .380ACP. Bullet design has come a long way, and in a sub-4 inch barrel and limited magazine size, 9mm is equal in performance to any of the others.

That places this pistol in the role of best balance of concealability and capability when I can wear a belt and holster. Still, it’s the pistol I carry least often, as it is only marginally more concealable than my tier 3 gun:

Smith & Wesson M&P Shield Plus Performance Center (Ported + Microdot, 13-round)

The most useful carry gun I have. It’s an optimized defensive system. The advantages here over the stock shield plus are faster follow-up shots and target reacquisition due to the compensated porting and the microdot sight. A thirteen round magazine gives me enough firepower to face multiple attackers without reloading. This is, in my opinion, the best EDC pistol that I own. It’s my primary carry gun when concealment allows slightly more size and weight.

Some time has passed since I bought this pistol in 2021. I bought it with the intention of volunteering for the Guardian program that turned out to be a farce. The only thing that was wrong with it is the Crimson Trace microdot failed and I replaced it with a Holosun about two years ago.

Tier 4: Smith & Wesson M&P 10mm M2.0

  • This is my no-compromise option. Advantages:
  • Full-power 10mm performance
  • Superior penetration and energy
  • Larger grip and sight radius
  • Maximum capability in worst-case scenarios

I carry this one when clothing allows full concealment (jackets, winter wear) and want full power available. That doesn’t happen often here in Florida. Maybe 30 or 40 days out of the year. This is not about convenience, it’s about maximum capability when concealment constraints disappear. Loaded with full power Underwood 180 grain XTP, which gives me 1300 fps and 676 foot pounds. This is great for delivering a lot of energy into a target wearing heavy clothes or behind a barrier like a car door. The only real disadvantage here is the size of the handgun and the risk of overpenetration. When I can carry a large boat anchor of a handgun, this is my go-to.

Summing It Up

What makes this system effective isn’t just the guns—it’s the decision-making framework behind it. I’m doing something most people don’t: Adapting my carry gun to the environment instead of forcing one gun into every situation.

When concealment is hardest → I still carry (642)
When possible → I upgrade capability (Shield)
When conditions allow → I maximize performance (PC Shield / 10mm)

Are any of my readers doing anything like this? Let me know in the comments.

By Divemedic, ago

Felons and Guns

The left is all in a lather because the DOJ under Trump has restored the gun rights of 22 people who were convicted of felonies- including one they call a “fake elector.” The so-called “fake elector” was pardoned by Trump, so I don’t see how he can be a prohibited person in the first place.

The entire issue is the law allows for people who have been made into prohibited persons being able to apply to have their rights restored.  Congress blocked the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from using federal funds to review individual applications, citing the fact that the program was expensive and took dozens of staff to run. Since when do we judge how expensive it is to seek justice? One could easily make the case that supplying lawyers free of charge is too expensive and only serves to let criminals go free, but that isn’t how we operate as a nation.

This blog has long been opposed to the whole “prohibited person” category because we have redefined “felony” to mean some pretty silly things. For example:

  • In Texas, it is a felony to own more than 4 sex toys (chapter 43). 11 of the 2,324 acts that the Texas Legislature thinks are worthy of being called felonies, making you so dangerous as to prohibit your ownership of firearms, have to do with acts that you can commit with or to an oyster. Here is the entire list of felonies for Texas.
  • In Utah, it is a felony to go whale hunting in a rented boat.
  • In Colorado, incest is a class 4 felony, punishable at the maximum by life in prison. If either participant is under 21, it becomes a class 3 felony. What does that have to do with gun ownership?
  • In Montana, it is a felony for a wife to open her husband’s mail.
  • In Florida, it is a felony to access WiFi without permission. There was a man who was convicted in 2005 of using a man’s WiFi without permission. It’s also a felony to sell oranges on the street near the beach.
  • In Alaska, it is a felony to wake a bear for a picture
  • In Georgia, it is a felony to allow your chickens to cross the street.
  • In California, it is a felony to set a mousetrap without a hunting license.
  • in Tennessee, it is felonious to share your Netflix password.

The reason that the left is pissed is because Trump is using the rules to his advantage. Pam Bondi is claiming that the underlying power to grant relief now rests with Attorney General Pam Bondi, not with the ATF, which neatly sidesteps the Congressional rule against Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) using federal funds to review individual applications.

Dru Stevenson, a law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston who has written about gun rights restoration, said, “The budget rider doesn’t say the federal government can’t do this. It only says ATF can’t. So this is a very lawyerly, splitting-hairs workaround.”

A law resulting from the Enron accounting scandal criminalizes the destruction or concealment of “any record, document, or tangible object” to obstruct a federal investigation. Prosecutors actually brought a federal criminal case against a fisherman under this law when he threw back 72 grouper to supposedly avoid being caught with undersized fish. Prosecutors were trying to convince the Supreme Court that a grouper is a “tangible object” under this law. This crime has a 20-year maximum sentence. In the highlight of the oral argument Justice Scalia noted the potential for 20 years and asked “what kind of mad prosecutor” would use that law in a case like this one? The government lawyer weakly responded that the prosecutors had not asked for a twenty-year sentence against the fisherman. The Court ruled for the fisherman, but the lesson remains: stupid laws and barely restrained federal prosecutors remain a danger to all who love liberty. So if you catch a fish that is too small, Federal prosecutors would allege that you did so to obstruct a Federal investigation, and you are therefore subject to up to 20 years in prison and a lifetime of being denied a key Constitutional right.

Two 16 year old children from North Carolina were facing a total of 14 years in prison for taking nude pictures of themselves and sending them to each other. They were charged with producing child pornography, transmitting child pornography, and possession of child pornography- of themselves. Each of these crimes is a felony, and would earn the children a lifetime label of “sex offender,” meaning that they would not be permitted to be near children, and could only live in communities that are filled with sex offenders. That is how we are protecting children, by convicting them of the crime of looking at themselves while nude, and then forcibly placing them in communities where they will live with actual sexual predators.

The most egregious part of this whole thing is that the law charged them as adults for taking pornographic pictures of themselves, who are legally considered to be children. This means that they are considered to be both adults and children simultaneously. We will call this Schrodinger’s pornography.

That’s why I remain opposed to prohibited person laws. If a person can’t be trusted with their rights, they can’t be trusted to live among the rest of us. I hardly view a person who took a nude picture of themselves being handed a lifetime ban of their rights as being justice, nor is it protecting anyone beyind the paychecks of overzealous prosecutors.

By Divemedic, ago

Washington

The Washington state legislature just passed a law making it a felony to possess digital files that can be used to make any part on a CNC or a 3d machine that could potentially be used as a part of a firearm.

Not only impossible to make work in any practical or Constitutional sense, it opens a huge can of worms.

By Divemedic, ago

Range Day

Took a couple of guns to the range: a Smith and Wesson 10mm M&P pistol shooting Underwood 180 grain XTP bullets, and the 300 Blackout pistol that I jut built, shooting 200 grain subsonic ammunition through a Dead Air Sandman 2 suppressor.

The 300 Blackout was basically a bolt action rifle. It failed to feed nearly every single round. I am thinking that, since the rounds were subsonic and there was a suppressor involved, I either need a lighter buffer or a gas block with a larger port. I will work on that. The gun was very quiet. Accuracy was great, with every single round punching the bullseye at 50 yards. I put a chronograph on 10 of the rounds in two-five round strings:

String 1: 200 grains, 896 feet per second average speed, with a spread of 40 feet per second and a standard deviation of 14 feet per second. Minimum was 876 fps, maximum 916 fps.

String 2: 200 grains, 904 feet per second average speed, with a spread of 54.6 feet per second and a standard deviation of 20 feet per second. Minimum was 879 fps, maximum 934 fps.

The 10mm did well. Recoil was snappy, as usual. Accuracy was good, with 17 of my 20 rounds impacting within the ‘down zero’ ring at 20 yards. Of the other three shots, 2 were in the ‘down one’ ring, and the last was one I pulled, only striking the bottom of the ‘down two’ zone. I think I anticipated that one a bit. I measured a 5 shot string on the chronograph and got:

180 grain bullets, 1264 feet per second average speed, with a spread of 36 feet per second and a standard deviation of 13 feet per second. Minimum was 1243 fps, maximum 1278 fps. That gives us an average kinetic energy of 638 foot pounds. Underwood lists that load at 1300 fps and 676 ft-lb, so I am right there with expected performance from a 4 inch barrel.

and yes, I was practicing with full power defense loads. I try to shoot a box of full power loads at least once a quarter, even if it is more expensive than the range ammo I usually use.

It was too cold for the outdoor range, so there was no possibility of shooting any gelatin. Still, that load for the 10mm is giving an IPSC power factor of 227.5. There aren’t many autoloaders giving that kind of power. For common defensive pistols, on the .357 and .44 Magnums do better, and they are limited to six rounds with slow reloads. I have a 4 inch .357 Magnum, but I don’t yet have a .44. Maybe one day.

By Divemedic, ago

Gun Control Fails Again

Four men, two pairs of brothers, came to Florida to enjoy the state. One returned home, and the other three were standing in the yard of their rental home, preparing to head to the airport, when the man who lived next door shot and killed all three of them. Witnesses and police say that this was a random attack, and there had been no altercation before the shots were fired.

The man who did the killings was known to police. Ahmad Bojeh was arrested in 2021 for randomly firing a gun at people and traffic. He was acquitted due to insanity and released. He was charged with felony drug charges in 2015, and resisting an officer with violence in 2020, but again, charges were dropped. The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office was asked whether there were any requirements or safeguards in place, given that he remained in the community and is now accused in a triple homicide. The sheriff’s office referred questions to the State Attorney’s Office, which released a statement saying it cannot comment beyond what has already been made public but will release information when it becomes pertinent.

In other words, the cops and courts didn’t do shit. Again. Our so-called justice system isn’t. It has become a jobs program for useless bureaucrats, and a green light for criminals.

The state claimed we needed red flag laws to stop people from having guns after they fell through the cracks. In other words, people just like this murderer are still killing people, even though the state now has the power to strip everyone else of their rights. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

By Divemedic, ago

FBI Reenters the Caliber Wars

Listen to the below video:

There are 9mm projectiles out there that are doing the same thing the forties are doing, but we can take the full power nines that are still less recoil impulse, high magazine capacity…

I own handguns in all of the major self defense calibers, including a few .40S&W and about three times as many 9 millimeters. I can’t tell you the last time I carried, or even shot, a forty caliber. When the FBI decided to use that caliber, they did so by neutering the 10mm. Why? Because female and limp wristed beta male Federal officers can’t handle the recoil of full power handguns.

I’m just going to say this: The 9mm has been a go to carry piece for me because of capacity and ease of concealment. If I were a Fed and could carry what I wanted without fear of printing or accidentally flashing, I would carry a full sized handgun.

He says it, but in a roundabout way:

I asked the guy at Hornady, why are we seeing huge gains in 9mm performance, but not in the other calibers? His answer was “you allowed us to increase velocity.”

This is a fundamentally misleading statement. The 10mm had plenty of velocity, but you forced the industry to slow it down and called it a .40. That’s why the “S&W” at the end is said to stand for “slow and weak.” The heart of the issue is at 12:45 (paraphrased just a bit):

10mm was fine for some agents, but you can’t hand that to a “Fleet” of 13,000 agents. The 180 grain bullet generates too much recoil, so let’s slow it down. Well, if you slow it down, you might as well go to a 40.

The other issue was the handgun chosen for the 10mm: The model 1076. He says half of the guns bought had to go back to the Performance center to be reworked because the gun didn’t function correctly. That’s a firearm, not a caliber problem. Still, recoil was and remains an issue.

All handguns are tradeoffs. Still, let’s be honest here- the FBI went back to the 9mm because women and soyboys are recoil sensitive, and the 1076 was just a crappy gun.

By Divemedic, ago

Using Your Rights as Weapons

There are only two ways for humans to deal with each other- voluntary interaction or coercion. In a voluntary interaction, both people are free to choose whether or not they will do things with or for each other.

In a coercive interaction, one party chooses to use force (or the threat of it) to control the other. A great example of the two follows:

A man asks if I mind that he smokes a cigar while sitting next to me in the restaurant. I am free to say yes, or to say no.

Or he can do this:

There are those who would see the actions of the steak diner as being the coercive one, but that is not correct in my opinion. By lighting the cigar and smoking it in a restaurant, he is forcing everyone around him to smell his smoke. His actions are affecting others whether they like it or not. The only response to this is to respond with force of your own. The steak eating man asked nicely, but the smoker felt that he would be protected by society’s rules, and used them as a weapon to force others into smelling his cigar.

Now apply that to those who stand in the road as a form of protest. They have taken their right to protest and turned it into a form of coercion: society is being forced to bend to the protesters’ will, or the protesters are not going to allow anyone to get where they need to go.

People are using the rules of a polite society as weapons to be wielded against the very society which protects them and their right to protest.

There are those on the right who would do the same. Carrying an AR-15 into Starbucks, simply because it is legal to do so is a similar tactic.* Don’t be an asshole, and don’t lecture me about how it’s your right.

It’s possible to have the RIGHT to do something and still be an asshole.

Just food for thought…

.

*You carry a handgun because you might be in a gunfight. If you WILL be in a gunfight, bring a long gun. Also remember that the best way to survive a gunfight is not to be in a gunfight in the first place. If your local Starbucks is that dangerous, perhaps you could get coffee elsewhere. There is a difference between being armed and being provocative.

By Divemedic, ago

Why I Stopped Shooting IDPA

Watch this video, then read the comments.

I used to shoot IDPA. I won some local matches, but never did well at state. I originally got into IDPA because I wanted to improve my skills in more realistic conditions than simple static targets at a standard range. I liked the shooting, and I liked some of the people. I got to meet some shooting celebrities, including Mas Ayoob.

What I hated were the people who were gaming it. I used to call it “the rules committee.” They would stand there with the rulebook as they disputed and debated nearly every single thing that happened. A couple of them figured out that it was faster to shoot magazines empty by dumping than it was for them to keep partially full mags. They were called on it, and debated for almost ten minutes that IDPA rules only said they have to keep partially full mags, but didn’t prohibit firing extra shots.

It was debates like this, and the ones in comments to the above video, that make shooting not fun. To those people, it isn’t about shooting, it’s about winning. It’s about debating and getting your way. It scares off new shooters who don’t want to deal with the bullshit. It’s tedious. I avoid people like that, so I stopped shooting IDPA almost 20 years ago.

By Divemedic, ago

Federal Firearms License

Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Andy Kim (D-NJ) introduced the Federal Firearm Licensing Act, legislation that would require that individuals obtain a federal firearm license before purchasing or receiving a firearm. A license would require:

  • Fingerprints and background checks
  • Signoff from local officials
  • Be required for each firearm
  • Expire in 5 years
  • even being arrested or accused of a crime is enough for denial
  • License holders would be placed on a ‘watch list’ called “RAP Back”
  • prohibit a licensee from giving or loaning a firearm to someone else without using a dealer

No. Just no. This is so incredibly unconstitutional.

By Divemedic, ago