TCinVA
10-11-2022, 08:32 AM
If you've spent any time seriously pursuing self defense you have doubtless encountered a number of pieces of "common knowledge" or "conventional wisdom" that are really just myths and misconceptions ossified into a pernicious default setting that has to be overcome to begin an intelligent discussion.
One that I have encountered quite a bit over the years is misconceptions about the evolution of retention holsters for duty use by peace officers.
According to the myth, so called "retention" holsters evolved because of an epidemic of peace officers being killed with their own weapon. The conception is that officers were routinely being overpowered by suspects who wrested their sidearms from the holster and used to murder them. While instances of that did certainly occur, that phenomenon wasn't as common as the myth would have us believe.
Often officers who lost control of their weapons had the weapon in their hands when they lost control of it. There are plenty of modern instances of ill-timed presentation of the sidearm from the holster resulting in a fight over the gun. This incident captured on a public bus illustrates the problem:
https://youtu.be/xkci3wFr-Gk
(You may have to follow the link to youtube to view the video)
The female officer's poor habits and tactics presented her pistol to a deranged but unarmed man. After narrowly missing the bus driver with a negligently discharged round during the scuffle, she lost control of her sidearm and probably would have been killed had it not been for another officer recognizing what was happening and terminating the threat. The officer's carry gear is completely irrelevant to the sequence of events in that incident. Bad decisions about when to present the weapon and bad tactics used when closing distance on a violent threat would have produced that officer fatality and would explain a sizeable percentage of situations where officers were killed with their own sidearms.
If the officer in that video had ever been trained on retention tactics with a drawn pistol, it doesn't show. Officers may be exposed to some retention training in an academy setting but often there is no refresher training beyond that exposure in the academy...and without proper repetition and followup training exposure is all it is.
Bad tactics and bad/insufficient training existed a generation or two ago as well, but officers in those days also had to contend with some supremely bad gear.
Scott Reitz has a youtube channel where he shares some incredibly useful historical insight into the history and practices of one of the largest and most famously professional police forces in the United States, the LAPD:
https://youtu.be/j-TUlpV3-i8
Take careful note of his discussion of the tendency of popular holsters of his early days to jettison the sidearm within them when there was a fight or other vigorous activity going on. Gimmick holsters with good-idea-fairy mechanical mechanisms to let go of the gun were legion in police use. What LAPD did, many other departments and individual officers across the country copied. On the other coast, the Audley Safety Holster was extremely popular with some large police departments, notably the NYPD. In fact, you could actually see officers carrying revolvers in old Audley holsters in NY until remarkably recently.
The Audley Safety Holster used a piece of spring steel that protruded into the trigger guard of the handgun to retain it in the holster. To draw the handgun, one would grip the weapon and press in with their trigger finger, moving the spring in and allowing the gun to come clear:
95482 95483
...seem familiar? The "press a button with your trigger finger to release the handgun" concept wasn't invented with the Serpa. Or even the clamshell holster Reitz demonstrated in his video. It's an idea that keeps turning up like a bad penny throughout the 20th century.
Hopefully it's obvious that a piece of spring steel that you can defeat using what little force you can generate by inward pressure with your trigger finger is woefully insufficient to actually retain the handgun in the holster during vigorous physical activity...like the vigorous physical activity taking place during a fight:
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/16/nyregion/officer-is-killed-with-his-own-gun.html
Naturally the news account of how the Audley Safety Holster works is hilariously inaccurate, but the description is sufficient to identify that it was most likely the holster involved in the incident. It was extremely common for guns to squirt out of those holsters during a fight and then the weapon was jump ball. Unsurprisingly, NYPD had a very high percentage of officers killed with their own weapons.
Unfortunately stupid gimmick holsters are still fairly common today, as the prevalence of the Serpa in police, military, and citizen use demonstrates. The Serpa's stupid gimmick gained traction in part because of overcompensation for the phenomenon of officers being killed with their own weapons. In the later 80's through the 90's it was common for officers to have retention holsters that required removing a snap or thumb break of some sort and then twisting and pulling the gun in a specific manner to actually get the gun out of the holster. This supposedly kept them from being snatched by a thug...but probably more often than that it stopped the officer themselves from drawing the pistol as doing so efficiently required a fair bit of practice that the typical officer wasn't doing.
So when a holster that was cheap and just required the "simple" act of pressing a button came along, people thought it was fantastic. Positive retention AND officers can draw from it! The fact that it was poorly made, easily locked up by tiny pebbles or bits of grit, and encouraged a completely stupid action that is immediately adjacent to violation of a major firearms safety rule was all missed because it isn't a problem until it's a problem, and then it's too late:
https://youtu.be/2BfsoIJbFis
...sort of like how the Audley Safety Holster's failures to retain a sidearm aren't a problem until it's your gun that's now on the ground with a nutcase trying to grab it and shoot you with it. Or the clamshell holster is awesome until your duty revolver gets yeeted out and goes for a swim when you are pursuing a dangerous suspect.
Folks like @Tom Givens (https://pistol-forum.com/member.php?u=59) can provide more context and intelligent discussion on this since they lived it.
One that I have encountered quite a bit over the years is misconceptions about the evolution of retention holsters for duty use by peace officers.
According to the myth, so called "retention" holsters evolved because of an epidemic of peace officers being killed with their own weapon. The conception is that officers were routinely being overpowered by suspects who wrested their sidearms from the holster and used to murder them. While instances of that did certainly occur, that phenomenon wasn't as common as the myth would have us believe.
Often officers who lost control of their weapons had the weapon in their hands when they lost control of it. There are plenty of modern instances of ill-timed presentation of the sidearm from the holster resulting in a fight over the gun. This incident captured on a public bus illustrates the problem:
https://youtu.be/xkci3wFr-Gk
(You may have to follow the link to youtube to view the video)
The female officer's poor habits and tactics presented her pistol to a deranged but unarmed man. After narrowly missing the bus driver with a negligently discharged round during the scuffle, she lost control of her sidearm and probably would have been killed had it not been for another officer recognizing what was happening and terminating the threat. The officer's carry gear is completely irrelevant to the sequence of events in that incident. Bad decisions about when to present the weapon and bad tactics used when closing distance on a violent threat would have produced that officer fatality and would explain a sizeable percentage of situations where officers were killed with their own sidearms.
If the officer in that video had ever been trained on retention tactics with a drawn pistol, it doesn't show. Officers may be exposed to some retention training in an academy setting but often there is no refresher training beyond that exposure in the academy...and without proper repetition and followup training exposure is all it is.
Bad tactics and bad/insufficient training existed a generation or two ago as well, but officers in those days also had to contend with some supremely bad gear.
Scott Reitz has a youtube channel where he shares some incredibly useful historical insight into the history and practices of one of the largest and most famously professional police forces in the United States, the LAPD:
https://youtu.be/j-TUlpV3-i8
Take careful note of his discussion of the tendency of popular holsters of his early days to jettison the sidearm within them when there was a fight or other vigorous activity going on. Gimmick holsters with good-idea-fairy mechanical mechanisms to let go of the gun were legion in police use. What LAPD did, many other departments and individual officers across the country copied. On the other coast, the Audley Safety Holster was extremely popular with some large police departments, notably the NYPD. In fact, you could actually see officers carrying revolvers in old Audley holsters in NY until remarkably recently.
The Audley Safety Holster used a piece of spring steel that protruded into the trigger guard of the handgun to retain it in the holster. To draw the handgun, one would grip the weapon and press in with their trigger finger, moving the spring in and allowing the gun to come clear:
95482 95483
...seem familiar? The "press a button with your trigger finger to release the handgun" concept wasn't invented with the Serpa. Or even the clamshell holster Reitz demonstrated in his video. It's an idea that keeps turning up like a bad penny throughout the 20th century.
Hopefully it's obvious that a piece of spring steel that you can defeat using what little force you can generate by inward pressure with your trigger finger is woefully insufficient to actually retain the handgun in the holster during vigorous physical activity...like the vigorous physical activity taking place during a fight:
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/16/nyregion/officer-is-killed-with-his-own-gun.html
Naturally the news account of how the Audley Safety Holster works is hilariously inaccurate, but the description is sufficient to identify that it was most likely the holster involved in the incident. It was extremely common for guns to squirt out of those holsters during a fight and then the weapon was jump ball. Unsurprisingly, NYPD had a very high percentage of officers killed with their own weapons.
Unfortunately stupid gimmick holsters are still fairly common today, as the prevalence of the Serpa in police, military, and citizen use demonstrates. The Serpa's stupid gimmick gained traction in part because of overcompensation for the phenomenon of officers being killed with their own weapons. In the later 80's through the 90's it was common for officers to have retention holsters that required removing a snap or thumb break of some sort and then twisting and pulling the gun in a specific manner to actually get the gun out of the holster. This supposedly kept them from being snatched by a thug...but probably more often than that it stopped the officer themselves from drawing the pistol as doing so efficiently required a fair bit of practice that the typical officer wasn't doing.
So when a holster that was cheap and just required the "simple" act of pressing a button came along, people thought it was fantastic. Positive retention AND officers can draw from it! The fact that it was poorly made, easily locked up by tiny pebbles or bits of grit, and encouraged a completely stupid action that is immediately adjacent to violation of a major firearms safety rule was all missed because it isn't a problem until it's a problem, and then it's too late:
https://youtu.be/2BfsoIJbFis
...sort of like how the Audley Safety Holster's failures to retain a sidearm aren't a problem until it's your gun that's now on the ground with a nutcase trying to grab it and shoot you with it. Or the clamshell holster is awesome until your duty revolver gets yeeted out and goes for a swim when you are pursuing a dangerous suspect.
Folks like @Tom Givens (https://pistol-forum.com/member.php?u=59) can provide more context and intelligent discussion on this since they lived it.