“Practical” Carry
We have a new reality
This tricked-out SIG P365XL (left) or Springfield Armory Hellcat RDP are Will’s
daily carry pieces. They look normal enough to placate the typical pedestrian juror.
The year was 1930. My grandfather worked for the railroad and enjoyed a reliable job when many folks had none. Now well into the Great Depression, American society convulsed under the suffocating blanket of true poverty.
People are bad. Anyone who claims otherwise has clearly never met one. We are all of us in desperate need of salvation. However, at that time and at that place most folks still yearned to be productive. The inability to be so pushed men to some dark places.
The ATI Nomad single barrel 12-gauge will set you back a C-note and won’t freak out the neighbors.
Back in rural Mississippi in 1930, a scattergun like this made a strikingly
effective automated theft deterrent system.
An Alarming Alarm
Money back then was stuff you could actually touch and feel. Not many people had it, but the banks and railroads still did. In the case of my grandfather’s employer, the cash was kept in a strongbox on the second floor of the local station alongside a handful of other items of value.
The station master arrived for work one day to find the place molested. Some miscreant had scaled the exterior of the building in the night and gained entrance via an unlocked upstairs window. A quick inventory showed a handful of pawnable items missing. The railroad official duly reported the breach to the local high sheriff.
The following week it happened again. This time the window had been locked. The thief had forced the latch and again made off with a handful of pilferables. The local sheriff was again duly notified, but the station master had lost his patience.
The next day the official brought his side-by-side 12-gauge from home and wired it to a chair facing the window. He loaded the gun, cocked the hammers and ran a piece of hemp cord through a pair of screw eyelets from the window to the gun’s twin triggers. With the weapon thusly configured the man turned out the lights, locked the station and went home to his family.
The following morning when he reported for work, the station master found a room temperature vagrant in the yard outside the building. The demised miscreant had caught a fistful of buckshot to the chest and fallen backwards two stories amidst a liberal dusting of broken glass. The high sheriff was again notified.
The event made the local papers. The station master had the window repaired and the sheriff congratulated the man on his ingenuity. For the duration of the time my grandfather worked for the railroad there were no more break-ins.
A Mini Uzi and an MP5K might indeed be the most efficient close combat
tools in the world but good luck convincing a jury you weren’t out looking
for trouble if life goes sideways while you’re packing one.
The Real World Is Simply Not Fair
Can you even imagine what would happen if somebody did that today? The media would portray the 12-bore as some kind of vigilante assault machine-cannon and the victim as an innocent entrepreneur simply exercising his nocturnal free-climbing skills. It wouldn’t matter if the dead man had been a sex-trafficking, child-molesting, radical ISIS high Nazi potentate, the ingenious station master would be remanded to prison until the sun burned out. That’s because America has gone utterly insane.
If Kyle Rittenhouse has taught us anything, it is that biased media narrative is now reality. It doesn’t matter if the shoot was righteous or not. If you were packing something scary and some nearby 15-year-old girl caught you on a cell phone, then your life is over. The prosecutor in the Rittenhouse case would gladly have sacrificed the young man’s entire life to display his scalp amidst his office decor.
So how does this apply to everyday carry gear? Pack the best gun you can afford, but don’t get carried away. Had Kyle Rittenhouse been armed with a Ruger 10/22, a single-action Colt, or a lever-action .30-30 he still would have been dragged through the mud, but he likely wouldn’t have gotten quite so muddy. I have myself proposed both short-barreled shotguns and stubby rifle-caliber pistols as defensive arms. However, we need to view it through a realistic lens.
Pedestrian guns like this Canik TP9 from Century (left) or this Rock Island Armory
M200 .38 revolver are timelessly effective without alarming the natives unduly.
A Choice To Make
If the pending currency collapse/alien invasion/zombie apocalypse does ever upend civilized society, I will indeed grab my favorite black rifle and half-a-dozen P-Mags. Should I need to defend myself or my family against run-of-the-mill bodily harm, by contrast, I’ll stick with a handgun. In fact, the weapons I keep handy while out and about are often fairly nondescript. My daily carry gun is either a tricked-out SIG P365 or a Springfield Armory Hellcat, but the kind of iron living in my glove box is more typically something along the lines of a Canik TP9 from Century or a Rock Island Armory .38 revolver. Both weapons work great but shouldn’t provoke the ire of the local DA unduly.
So leave the Uzis and MP5s for recreational blasting on the weekends. Practice with your favorite optimized black rifle just in case the Canadians invade. For those times when life might go truly pear-shaped, however, we might better just stick with a pistol.
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