Soldier Systems Daily is reporting on a new product from Black Hawk! that was introduced at Modern Day Marine, their Omnivore Holster system. Essentially the holster is designed to solve the problem of versatility that so many holster manufacturers have tried to tackle over the years. That is that usually an individual gun owner, police department, or military doesn’t own or issue out exactly one type of handgun, but has to accommodate for a variety of handguns of different sizes and dimensions over the course of several years. With each handgun comes a new holster, and often a handgun owner will have an entire bucket of holsters.
The Omnivore uses a picatinny mounted adaptor that locks into the side of the holster called the Rail Attachment Device (each holster comes with two of these). Really it almost isn’t a holster as much as it is a protector for the handgun while holstered. It doesn’t cause any wear and tear because there isn’t any friction or any part of the handgun that is touching the holster apart from the picatinny adaptor. Drawing the handgun involves a three position thumb toggle on the left side. Currently Black Hawk! cites 150 models that the the holster can fit.
What about weapon mounted lights? There are two other versions of the Omnivore that use the weapon mounted light itself to retain the handgun in the holster, one specifically for Surefire X300Us and the other for Streamlight TLR 1/2s. Price for each holster is $59.99.
There is a very similar system out there from a company called Bad Company Tactical that uses a pincatinny mounted device in a sort of handgun protector. They even took it a step further, eliminating the entire protector by using a simple trigger guard protector. The biggest difference between these two products that I see is that Bad Company Tactical makes the metal retention system out of 4140 steel thus brings a retail price to almost three times that of the Black Hawk! version. This isn’t a case of which came first because Bad Company Tactical has been around for several years with this product.