Over at Straight Forward in a Crooked World, Matthew published a great article with 11 tips for smart concealed carry.

Go read the article to get the full G2. Here’s my comments on each point (and you’ll have to read the article to understand the context):

1. Bottom line is to set goals to help you improve, and work on them.
2. Everyone cares about home-defense so, have you measured off your home? Do you know how long the longest shot could be? Do you know how long typical shots could be (e.g. across this room, down this hall, etc.)? If the answer is no, go measure.
3. Vertically between the tracheal notch and xyphoid process, horizontally between the nipples. Or, make a triangle from notch to nipple to nipple to notch. When you line up your handgun iron sights, you can make a line with the top of the sights and the armpits.
4. What he said.
5. Minor bit of disagreement here. Overall I agree with him tho.
   1. Slide locks don’t always work (thumbs can and do get in the way).
   2. If you do know the gun is unloaded or otherwise not-operable, do get it back in operation as quickly as possible.
   3. Never holster an unloaded gun. When you go to holster, do reload before you reholster; and of course, only reholster if you are sure you don’t need the gun any more.
6. If nothing else, having dummy rounds is good for practice. Helps you practice reloads, malfunctions, ball & dummy drill, etc.
7. Springs are cheap, replace them. Downloading by one (or two in larger cap mags, like 30-round AR mags) is a good guidelines.
8. Amen.
9. Amen. I like Comp-Tac.
10. A-fucking-men. This is probably THE most important point of the entire article.
11. I’ve been struggling to find a better wallet… the leather on my current one has stretched too far.