Category: review

Review: High Noon Holsters – Mister Softy

A few years ago, I was looking for a holster for my Glock 19 as a temporary setup to hold me over until my custom kydex order showed up. Several of my trusted friends recommended the Mister Softy from High Noon Holsters. Even after receiving my high-speed kydex stuff, I’ve found myself going back to it again and again. Here’s a brief review.

Glock 19
Glock 19

Things of note:

Price – At $30, it’s a really good value. It is also in stock and ready to ship. Mine has held up really well. I’ve got my money’s worth. The price point means that if I have a friend who is carrying in an Uncle Mike’s nylon job, I wouldn’t feel bad giving them this one as a solid upgrade from nylon.

Sig P250
Sig P250

Multiple Gun Fit – It fits all of the G19 sized guns I own. I have successfully carried the Glock (26,19,17), the Beretta PX4 Compact, and now the Sig P250. The pliability of the cowhide allows slightly different guns to fit the same holster. I usually would poo-poo a ‘universal holster’, but this one does a good job of doing what a holster needs to do, while accommodating several guns. It’s like a quality gun sock. That’s a win.

Beretta PX4 Compact
Beretta PX4 Compact

Belt Clip – The stout spring clip snaps over belts with ease, and stays put. I have used this in force on force and in a lot of range trips and competitions. Never a hiccup. It DOES require a belt though.

Belt Clip
Belt Clip

Concealment – This is a good carry holster, but not a great training or competition holster. It’s a basic holster with no wedges or claws to tuck the grip into your waist, but still does a fine job. You can see where the top of the clip meets the grip/trigger guard that the holster rides low in the pants.  This is great for concealment, but requires you to tilt the holster as your fingers slide into position to establish a full firing grip before drawing. Retention is provided via friction by the rough side of the leather. I carry this at 1 O’clock. It is a straight drop holster.

Construction – The small gripe I have with the construction is that the mouth of the holster is not reinforced besides a second layer of cowhide. I’d love if it were steel or kydex reinforced, but that adds to price significantly. While it’s new, you can still holster the gun easily. The lack of reinforcement means the mouth of the holster closes a bit once you draw. The more sweaty and worn it gets, the worse this issue will get. This is why I say it’s not a great training or competition holster. For daily carry, it’s perfectly serviceable.

No reinforced mouth
No reinforced mouth

That’s pretty much it. It’s a holster that I have no problem recommending for an off-the-shelf option.

Thanks for reading,

Mark

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Book Review: Left Of Bang

This is one of those books that is on nearly every self defense instructor’s must read list. And for good reason. The book was written for Marines to detail the principles of the Combat Hunter Program. It is essentially a step by step manual on how to characterize a location, and notice patterns in the people so  you can quickly determine when something or someone is out of place. It is essentially a ‘situational awareness’ manual for combat. Being Left Of Bang simply means having the information necessary to be able to act before (left-side on a timeline) the *bang* of an attack.

Buy Left Of Bang: How the Marine Corps’ Combat Hunter Program Can Save Your Life
In both personal protection and combat (so I read) we have to make decisions with less-than-perfect and incomplete information.

It is necessary to have heuristics to allow us to make good-enough decisions more rapidly. Sometimes ‘good-enough’ right now beats ‘perfect’ too late. This book details these methods for Marines. With some adaptation, we can use them when at the mall or shopping for groceries.

This book is critical for a war-fighter or police officer. If you work (or live) in the same area/neighborhood/block for an extended period of time, you can fully implement the author’s suggestions.  The authors primarily use military situations and anecdotes to relay the principles. If you personally like the military tone and that appeals to you, then you’ll have no issue translating the lessons to civilian life.

I personally wouldn’t give this book to a teenager or 20-something university student who is living alone in the city . The military stories might seem too alien and it might not hold their interest. A better book for that audience with more visceral day-to-day anecdotes would be The Gift of Fear.

The Principles

  • A summary of Cooper’s color codes, the limbic response to stimuli, avoiding ‘right of bang’ reactionary living.
  • Establishing a baseline in an area allows us to recognize anomalies, which should warrant attention.
  • Using “human universals” which are common features of culture, society, language, behavior, and mind that span all ethnography and history.
  • Kinesics – Conscious and subconscious body language. Posture, gestures, and expressions that indicate inner emotional state. None of which rely on seeing the face. The body betrays the conscious mind and facial expressions aren’t as important. Dominant vs. Submissive, uncomfortable vs. comfortable, interested vs. uninterested. Very useful for personal protection and reading people in general.
  • Biometric Cues – The uncontrollable outward expression of stress. Skin flush, pupil dilation, blinking, dry mouth, pacifying behaviors, etc.
  • Proxemics – The study of distance and movement. How certain people and places either attract or repel people. e.g. a person changing their speed or altering their course to follow you in a parking lot.
  • Geographics – How people act in certain areas. Whether they are familiar, comfortable, and how they interact with the area. For us, think malls/restaurants/amusement parks/shops. Home field advantage is a real thing and people act differently where they are comfortable.
  • Iconography – Colors, symbols, graffiti, flags, bumper stickers.
  • Atmospherics – The ‘vibe’ of an area. For instance, the feeling at the DMV is frustrated and anxious. The feeling at a carnival is joy and excitement. A sudden change in the vibe of an area, or a person or group not fitting with the vibe warrant attention.

The Take Aways

  • People often override the ‘something wasn’t right’ feeling they get before something bad happens. By understanding what you’re seeing, it allows us to trust intuition and avoid a problem.
  • Humans are universally creatures of habit, lazy, poor liars, will run/fight/freeze, telegraph their intentions, predictable, poor multitaskers. This is exploitable.
  • Everything a person does is created twice – once in the mind and once in its execution – ideas and impulses are pre-incident indicators for action
  • Look for the indicators in ‘clusters’. One gesture indicating unease might be a fluke. A cluster of 3 cues that indicate unease are worthy of attention.
  • The Submissive Cluster of kinesics gives us some ideas on how to appear submissive, possibly to de-escalate and avoid unnecessary conflict.
  • Be aware that your personal iconography gives away information about you. Gun guy stickers and shirts, etc. It is also easy to remove these indicators. Why advertise?
  • Combat Rule of Three – when you observe three anomalies against a baseline, you must make a decision. e.g. At a mall, the seemingly nervous kid, in a black trenchcoat, is fidgeting with his backpack and red faced and sweating. It’s time to leave, or whatever your plan is.

    Conclusion

    This is a good book to have in the collection. It would give a person a clear picture of the broad indicators of identifying things that are out of place. Even if you only use that information to decide to leave, the book has proved useful.

    Here is the website that the authors created to further your studies. http://www.cp-journal.com/

Mark

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Course Review: Multidisciplinary Optimization Course at SBG Athens, Georgia

IG post

“I’m not interested in selling you a fear-based approach to self defense.”

Paul Sharp

Imagine my excitement when I read on Instagram that the one and only Paul Sharp of Straight Blast Gym and Sharp Defense fame would be coming to Athens, GA to put on an 8-hour version of his MDOC coursework.

The two day, eight hour seminar was hosted at Straight Blast Gym, Athens. Even though the seminar was intended only for the SBG tribe, I was able to beg my way in by asking nicely and producing a credit card.

Paul is on my short list of trainers who I will do everything in my power to train with when they travel to the Atlanta area.

What is a Multidisciplinary Optimization Course (MDOC)?

Since I don’t have Paul’s definition available, I’ll take the liberty to attempt a summary. MDOC teaches the student to navigate the initial criminal-interview process, weather a physical clash (either preemptively or defensively), gain control of the opponent, and then disengage or neutralize as needed. The physical skills taught use a streamlined MMA (mixed martial arts) delivery system that are robust enough to work even in a weapons based environment (knives and guns) with multiple opponents in play.

IMG_1657

This was an interesting course for me to take because of the students. All of the other students in the course were members of SBG Athens. They all had varying levels of BJJ, Judo, and MMA with minimal formal firearms training. The situation is usually reversed when I’ve seen this material in the past. There are usually lots of gun folks. It changed the dynamic of the course.

Going into the course, I was curious to see how Paul would tailor the course to the student base, and how the students would integrate their existing skillsets with the more ‘street’ oriented material. I think they all did a great job, and I saw a lot of lightbulb moments for the students.

“This bad guy is a black-belt in getting what he wants using his verbal skills and victim selection skills. Don’t get pulled into his game.”

IMG_1654

Topics:

  • Discussion of how bad guys do business
  • How do we deselect ourselves? How do we fail the criminal interview process?
  • Managing Unknown Contacts (talking to people we don’t know in public)
  • Preemptive striking to seize the initiative
  • A default defensive position into…
  • A boxing blast, a clinch (standing grapple) to a position of control…
  • A few strikes and throws from control positions
  • Dealing with two attackers at once using the control positions
  • Impact weapon defense (once the knife has already stuck you/worst case)
  • Firearm defense at contact distance
  • Working off of a wall (no maneuver room)
  • Putting it all together

IMG_1656

Things I took from the Course

I’ve seen this material in various packagings from Paul and the Shivworks Collective since 2010. So the material was a good refresher, but it wasn’t novel for me. That said, I got a lot of teaching points and tidbits from Paul’s presentation that will be useful for me going forward. Most are points that Paul brought up, and some are my comments when hearing Paul’s lecture. I’ll list a few key points.

  • Mindset Lectures are the depressing (and necessary) dark side of the self-defense world. It’s possible to get students to grasp the ‘mindset’ side without dwelling on negativity. What are you willing to fight for?
  • It’s not about who’s in front of you (the bad guy), but who is behind you (your family, friends, and getting home to them). So don’t focus as much on fear of the bad guys, but love for your people. It’s healthier.
  • In polite-society, we have trouble being assertive and appearing to be rude. Practice and repetition make you better at it. It’s OK to be rude.
  • If you have a base in sports grappling and striking, all you need to do is ‘throw some dirt into your game’ and you’ll win most fights.
  • Give the bad guys credit. They are running a calculus of benefit/cost of interacting with you. They also suffer the same physiological effects when preparing to spring their ambush (pre assault cues). Learn them and you can see a problem before it materializes.
  • Sports MMA people have the skillset to survive in the gym, why wouldn’t that apply in a street context?
  • Words mean things. Saying, “I’m Sorry” is bad if you don’t mean it. Try instead, “I apologize”. Placate an aggressor, but don’t completely relent to their dominance.
  • Posture and Body Language is a critical selection criteria. Own the ground you walk on. You only have to look like a hard target for a few passing seconds to fail the selection process.
  • Children abduction point: Teach kids to scream “This isn’t my dad/mom!” to draw attention. Teach your kids to listen to their gut. Don’t ignore when a child recoils from a certain person. Don’t tell them to ‘be nice’. Instead, shrug your shoulders and say “kids will be kids”, and keep an eye on that person. They haven’t yet had their innate danger alarm suppressed.Recommended Reading from Paul:
    The Gift of Fear and Protecting the Gift

Thank you to Rory and Adam Singer of SBG, and all the students for welcoming in the outsider and making me feel like part of the tribe.

If you’d like to train with Paul, his email is straightblastgymillinois@gmail.com

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Book Review: Surveillance Detection – The Art of Prevention

A critical aspect of personal protection is situational awareness. An important facet of situational awareness is the ability to know if we’re being watched or monitored. We as private citizens should practice surveillance detection. We want to notice if a person or group of people are patterning our behavior and monitoring us or our families (or businesses) with the intention of some sort of attack.

The surveillance could be as simple as someone loitering outside of a gas station for opportunistic crime or panhandling, through stalkers with violent intent, or as complicated as years long terrorism plots. Surveillance is a critical part of all of these criminal activities, and therefor surveillance detection is a topic you should understand.

I was interested in this topic, so I found the book Surveillance Detection – The Art of Prevention on Amazon and started to study.

The book defines terms and dispels some myths that exist around this field. Throughout the book the authors use anecdotal and hypothetical examples to illustrate their points and allow the reader to more easily visualize the techniques described. They carry the reader from designing to implementing a SD program, all the way through what to do if surveillance is detected. It’s quite thorough.

The authors give ideas for individual, small business, corporation, law enforcement, and even military level surveillance detection operations. You can be as elaborate as you choose to be.

I’ll quickly run down the major facets of SD and note things I found useful. The steps to building a personal surveillance detection program include:

  • A Risk/Threat assessment in which you list all possible threats you face, the relative likelihood of those threats, the risk factors that caused you to include them on the assessment sheet, the preventative course of action to mitigate that threat, and the residual risk AFTER you have taken the preventative course of action.
  • Route reviews which are sketched on maps that include your daily travel routes, where surveillance (SV) would be able to watch you on your routes, finding parts of the route that overlap so SV can find you each day, identifying likely attack points, and determining SV’s likely cover stories and possible escape routes. For most people like us, these are in our neighborhoods, at work, and at any other regular stops we make.
  • Building reviews which can be sketched on google maps printouts of your home/office. With this tool, you can determine the most likely places of your home/office that SV will be looking at. You can see where they will observe from, and determine where you can watch them observe you (both from inside and outside the structure). I did a similar exercise in this post.

arialhouse

  • Tips on observation. There are three categories: areas, people, and vehicles. The authors describe how to observe an area for possible SV, using arching visual fields and looking at hard corners of buildings and vehicles (think parking lot at grocery store). Noting features of people and vehicles are also covered. Practicing these skills allow you to “be a good witness”. They are valuable to everyone.

The book also goes into depth about building an operational plan for team-based SD. This is more in depth than we need to go, but I found it interesting.

While the focus of the book is primarily on a higher level, team based, corporate SD team (because it’s the most complicated), a little imagination will give you ideas that you can implement for your family. I found this to be an interesting read and worth of my time.

Thanks,

Mark
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