Yikes! I’ll definitely be showing this one to the students in my next concealed carry class when we talk about holster selection!

Guy gets a custom beavertail glock frame and uses a busted, worn out old Galco holster…

Your holster is a part of your kit, MAINTAIN IT!

I don’t want to look…I don’t want to look…I don’t want to look…

I have to look.

Eh…the wound pictures weren’t too bad.

Could have been worse for the guy. I carry iwb at 2:30/3:00.

Several things would have helped this guy. A kydex holster, a grip safety, carrying in condition three. Still…gotta’ be aware.

I liked this comment on the original post
“I’m glad no one in my environment carries a gun along, because it’s not very comfortable to be in room where you have to be afraid to be accidentally shot.”
Little does he know their are probably several people he comes into contact with that carry responsibly every day…

I’ll stick to nylon, thank you very much.

Or maybe the title should be: The Importance of an External Safety.

Wouldn’t have happened on a 1911……..Just sayin’.

Cheers- Rusty

This is why I only use Rhino Holsters, check them out.
http://www.rhinoholsters.com

Well let that be a lesson : alwayscheck your holster for wear…
That’s one of the reasons kydex holsters are so popular : they don’t morph with time.

BTW the guy used a Galco holster, which are not bad.

More to the point: “The Importance of Paying Attention To Your Gear”.
From the looks of the leather, that holster has been like that for a while. Yes, a better holster would have prevented this; but he should have seen this coming.

I’m notice the holster has obvious wear patterns that indicate it has been developing a wrinkle in the shape which contributed to the incident.

I’m calliing operator error in a lack of scheduled maintenance – check your gear for fit as it breaks in to ensure exactly this sort of thing can’t happen. Any make holster/gun combination could do this, especially minimalist designs of a universal nature.

It’s apparent the holster was not cut and blocked to fit a Glock – and this somewhat painful experience should be looked into by everyone – TODAY – to check and see if their firearm has any potential snagging issues. Especially an old favorite.

A significant cause of well tested and trusted gun/holster combinations is a lack of continued preventive maintenance and checks. The story of an ankle holster carried revolver being jammed with lint comes to mind.

While checking a gun into a central armory at end of shift may seem obtuse, the one advantage it does offer is a critical set of eyes monitoring maintenance, especially when they would then be responsible. We need to look after our gear the same way – be that “lazy” armorer who makes us take care of it right.

Cheap price to pay, compared to being the subject of this expose’. And big kudos for stepping up and posting it. Despite some less forgiving comments from others to whom this would never happen, maybe it will open the eyes of the more sentient and humble.

so much for the praised internal safety features of the Glock.

Here is the original post with some more info:

http://www.itstactical.com/warcom/firearms/safety-warning-worn-leather-holsters-can-cause-accidental-discharges/#more-10131

Reference the importance of a good holster I would add, ‘and the danger of an old comfortable holster.’

Carrying a gun for a living for many years as a LEO I learned early on that while the quality of the firearm was important it was no less so than the manner and holster in which it was carried. All too often I hear people talking about the holster and praising it not for the fit to the gun they are carrying but for its price. Leather, still my preferred material, does wear out and, especially with semi-autos, a worn leather holster doesn’t break-in and get better like a baseball glove. As the leather gets softer and more malleable the holster can become downright dangerous. You don’t just take care of your gun; you need to take care of, and closely inspect, the holster as well.

This guy was lucky that all he got was a painful bite on his hip. It could have been much worse.

Keep up the good work. I certainly do enjoy your blog.

Looks to me more like the importance of using a handgun that has an actual safety on it.

Just wanted to give you guys a heads up that the Website you linked to stole our content from ITS Tactical and removed the copyright watermark from our images. To their credit, they did link us as the source at the very bottom in tiny text LOL. Keep up the great work!

..I guess cops ought to know better than to carry with rounds in the chambers as well? What good is carrying a good when it’s going to go “click” when you pull the trigger?

Also, reading the comments on that link made me sad.

Glock is not the only pistol that used strike fire. In fact a large percentage of pistol coming out are strike fire.

The operator will forget to switch it off the manual safety in a gunfight. That’s why police departments went with strike fire pistol. Before strike fire pistol police department used DAO revolvers like the model 10.

“carrying a good” obviously should be “carrying a gun.” Whoops! I’m not even drunk.

@jdun

I was personally always under the impression that it was never a very good idea to have a round in the chamber with a Glock due to the lack of an external safety and the relatively light trigger pull.

Funny how all the Glock-haters have absolutely never heard of any of the people who discovered that their good old 1911 had the safety off all day, and especially never of the ones who discovered that fact via a loud bang.

Definitely the holster’s fault, not the gun’s. There’s a reason why I use kydex holsters for everything except pocket carry (and with those, I take the holster out, put it on the gun, then put the entire thing back in my pocket). Fun fact: kydex holsters can also easily be designed so that a single-action pistol absolutely cannot be inserted unless the safety is on, or so that the holster itself automatically pushes the safety back to safe, and in both cases will not allow the safety to come off unless the gun is pulled out.

All-leather IWB holsters just aren’t that great of an idea these days, IMO.

@rubbershotgun You carry with a round in the chamber or you don’t carry. Condition 3 (Israeli carry) is dumb and designed solely to minimize accidents within a minimally trained conscripted force.

“This is what happens when you place your “safety” in the middle of the trigger. That’s like having your “brake” installed in the middle of your gas pedal on your car.”

LOL

Gad people! Stop picking on the gun. The only safety that actually WORKS is between your ears, but you have to USE it!

Great respect for Glock pistols, but I do prefer my Sig Sauer P250 Compact, Double Action Only (DAO), no external safeties, but as safe as a revolver! Probably with the P250 this would not have happened, but it’s extremely important to periodically check your equipment!

While I am not a huge Glock fan, I do believe their internal safeties provide more protection that what is found in a typical revolver. From what I can tell, there are a huge number of people who use the time tested J frame (and other revolvers) as their CCW. I don’t think the Glock is any “less safe” just because it doesn’t have a thumb safety. At the end of the day, the most important safety feature is the one found between one’s ears.

I think that this post highlights the importance of considering a CCW as a system, not just a gun. This means, weapon, holster, belt, ammo, reloads and most importantly of all……TRAINING! I don’t fault this guy for carrying a round in the chamber, but it seems that he did fail to consider his system as a whole. Carrying a gun is not the same as strapping on a wristwatch before you head out the door.

I apperciate that the person that this happened to shared it. If it had been me, I probably would have been too embarrassed to let anyone else know, must less put it on the internet.

Personally I side with the “It’s a Gun Issue more than a Holster Issue” crowd.

With a 1911 even if the thumb safety gets somehow pushed off in the holster there’s still the Grip safety which is automatically on all the time that there isn’t a hand gripping the gun. BTW, in 15+ years of carrying an IWB 1911 the thumb safety has never been accidentally taken off. Not once.
And I always carry cocked and locked because i don’t want to have to depend on having 2 hands available to rack a slide if I’m ever assaulted.

rubbershotgun,

I think you’re out of your league here. You always carry a handgun loaded or you don’t carry it at all. This isn’t like the movies where the good guys always win.

You carry a gun loaded because you as a law abiding citizen is reacting to the threat. The extra time you take to load the hand means you digging a deeper hole for yourself in a gunfight. It is also the operator responsibility to make sure that your firearms is not taken from by criminals. An unloaded carry firearms make it easy.

Riceball,

I don’t know where you got the impression that you should not have a round in the chamber because there is no manual safety. The vast majority of handguns have NO MANUAL safety at all.

The anonymous person whom it happend to is why the accident happened. Not the holster and not the gun. The gun did not holster itself.
Shot hasppens and this will happen again.

Jdun1911:

It is not the advice that people here seem to object to, that is always welcome. And opions are like arseholes, everybody has their own.

No what gets some people here angry is tone with which you deliver both your advice and opinion.

Cheers mate. Rusty

The Glock does have a manual safety. It is, for good or ill, turned off by the same single motion that actuates the trigger. That means that if you pull the trigger, it will go off quickly, with all the advantages of that, and with the disadvantages of that.

The 1911 requires 3 motions, all can be actuated simultaneously by a hand. That means that anything that is not a hand has trouble turning them all the right way at the right time.

In this case, if the owner of this flawed, failed holster had a similar 1911, and had gripped his gun (depressing the grip safety) and inserted it into the holster, the safety might have prevented firing. Unfortunately, the 1911 safety is an “on-off” device, rather than a “safe unless actively being depressed” which would be safer. The grip safety is such a “safe unless actively being depressed” mechanism, but also would routinely be depressed when returning the gun to the holster, so would not help in this case

Cars are actually not terribly ergonomic. By choice, one would not design the go button right next to the stop button, and put them where you work them with your feet, and then hide them where you can’t look at them. The brake placement was dictated by pre-power brake requirements to put a lot of force on the brakes. That sad proximity of go and stop buttons is why there are “unintended acceleration” accidents every year. Probably there are more unintended acceleration accidents than there are gun accidents, but there are more cars-hours of use than gun-hours of use.

I can’t believe anyone is championing the 1911!
A gun where you have to let the hammer down to make it safe, and you think that’s better than a glock? Sure, millions of people do it safely every day, but one suspects more accidental discharges have occurred with 1911s than with glocks.

DonM,

“Where there is such a high risk of need for faster times going into action, that unchambered is not acceptable…”

Real life will not issue you an invitation to draw your firearm. If you see the problem coming, you will not pull your heater, you will avoid the problem.

It is, almost by definition, the problem that you didn’t see coming that may require the use of the pistol. There is no guarantee that you will have both hands available when this happens. There is no guarantee that you will be standing upright. There is no guarantee that your assailant will hang from a cable seven yards away under a spotlight and flap gently in the breeze of the air filtration system.

You are getting hung up on the wrong syllable in the word “gunfight”. (HINT: It’s not the first one.)

I think DonM managed to hit a bunch of good common-sense points dead center.

Fairbairn and Sykes also advocated carrying with an empty chamber, and having any and all safeties permanently pinned into the “fire” position. Basically equivalent to Israeli carry with a Glock. Though this was for uniformed police officers carrying openly. They also favored full-flap holsters, which need 2 hands to access the gun anyway.

But if you believed you might need to draw faster, Fairbairn and Sykes recommended a big-bore snubnose DAO revolver with the trigger guard cut away, in an OWB holster which leaves the trigger completely exposed, carried at the 2:00 or 10:00 position, and concealed under a jacket or untucked shirt. I can only imagine what the more die-hard manual safety advocates might have said to them about that.

Israeli carry really isn’t the terrible idea that some people like to make it out to be. The main time when you’re not going to have a hand free is if you’re in a grapple, or if your arm’s been injured (and if it’s injured that badly, it probably occurred while you were being grappled anyway). In which case, a gun isn’t even the best thing to have at hand, compared to a fixed-blade knife. Similarly, you’re going to be at the greatest risk of being disarmed while in a grapple. If the chamber’s empty, you could end up easily gaining the upper hand while the other guy tries to grab your (useless) gun from the holster.

That’s basically what Fairbairn and Sykes often advocated, anyway. Draw your gun only if you’re not being engaged hand-to-hand, otherwise you’re better off with your fists, a blackjack, or a knife.

My CCW guns always have a loaded chamber, and none have any manual safeties (in fact, 99% of the time it’s a Kahr, which doesn’t even have a trigger safety). That’s what I’ve determined is the best carry method for me. That doesn’t mean that one in the pipe is somehow magically the best option for everyone, everywhere, every time. Someone with much better hand-to-hand and grappling skills than me could easily be better-served by a CCW piece carried Israeli-style.

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