Holstering: Layers of Safety

I don’t know about you, but I believe that humans are inherently flawed. We make mistakes...ALL the time. Personally I don’t prefer it, I think being perfect would be a lot less stressful, but alas...we are human.

There is a difference between making a MISTAKE and being NEGLIGENT. This is why when people drive drunk (and as a result take someone else’s life) they are punished because getting behind the wheel drunk was not an honest mistake, it was negligent and as a result someone died.

Sometimes we make honest mistakes with a gun in our hand, and other times we can let ourselves become overconfident and somehow think that the rules no longer apply to us, or at least some of them don’t. Let’s forget about the pride issue for a second, and talk about the honest mistakes and how to keep them from becoming negligence.

We build in LAYERS of safety. This is a concept that I got from conversations with John Johnston ( @ballisticj ). Building in layers of safety is something we can do with all kinds of firearms handling procedures, but I’m mainly talking about holstering safely today. Layers of safety exist in our daily firearms handling so that we would have to make multiple mistakes at once in order to actually harm ourselves or someone else, they’re there to stop us at multiple points instead of just making a singular complacent choice that can mark our life by negligence.

Why do I post about holstering safely so regularly? Because it is likely the most dangerous thing that we do with a gun in our hand on a consistent basis. Arguably, it’s also the procedure we will perform the most as we go about training with our firearms. If we point the muzzle into our body every time we holster, consistently chose not to clear our garment or visually check our holster for obstructions, over time we increase our chances of an ND. Obviously I’m not saying it’s inevitable, but when you start crunching the numbers the statistical likelihood starts works against your favor.