Is the self-defense training Industry finally reaching out to a long-neglected segment of consumers? An introduction to “just in case” guns and their pitfalls.
By Jon Trobaugh
As I sit down to write this piece, I am remembering my late great-aunt, a dauntless free spirit whose life story was colored by hijinks and shenanigans of all shades. We are talking about drag racing and election fraud and exotic animal smuggling and drunken barroom brawling and more than one documented incident of grand… well, let’s not share too much here, Jon. Keep it non-incriminating. Anyway, for reasons unknown to me, she chose to live alone most of her life and in some less-than-reputable parts of town. For protection, she carried a pistol in her purse everyday.
Her firearm of choice was a Raven Arms MP-25 in .25 ACP. With a faux-chrome finish and faux-pearl grips, her little striker-fired saturday night special looked good, but its performance was utter dogshit. To begin with, the thing was zinc. The slide and frame were made from an alloy known as ZAMAK, and as you can guess, these guns were susceptible to frame and slide cracking. She didn’t shoot it much, maybe a few times a year, but I remember her replacing a broken Raven with a new copy more than once. Still, the gun was economical, small, easy-to-carry, and easy-to-use. The most important thing to her? It was there, just in case.
Darryl Bolke and the concealed carry pistol as emergency equipment
For centuries, gun makers have produced firearms whose sole purpose was arm’s length self-defense and/or protection from unruly animals. Bicycle guns, belly guns, Ladysmiths, knuckle duster revolvers, pen guns, derringers, lemon squeezers, Fitz specials, detective specials, saturday night specials, pepperboxes–all have a place in our history, and similar firearms remain popular today, especially among “non-gunnies” who, like my great-aunt, buy guns only for the unlikely event they will need to protect themselves or their family.
Renowned trainer and former SWAT officer Darrly Bolke is a proponent of a concept he calls the “fire extinguisher gun,” a small or medium sized handgun that is purchased to defend a person or a person’s home. The gun will wait loaded in a purse or a safe or in a drawer until it is needed, the same way a fire extinguisher stands hidden in a cabinet until a fire occurs. Good fire extinguisher guns are designed to be both easy-to-use and easy-to-carry. They should be resistant to breakages caused by neglect as well as unintended discharges due to poor gun handling and general negligence.
Bolke seems to prefer the revolver over the semi-automatic for his “just in case” guns. In a recent Revolverguy.com guest post, Bolke discusses his rare and pristine 3-inch Colt Detective Special whose provenance leads to a well-to-do Texan who kept it loaded for 50 years in a drawer. He writes, “For that lady that owned it, the revolver was a comfort, and she would have had a very good chance of being able to operate it, and have it work, if she had ever needed it–even with no training or shooting practice at all.” Bolke contrasts this situation with a hypothetical one that arms the lady in question with a striker-fired handgun. “Would this be the type of person we would want grabbing a striker-fired pistol, with a short and light trigger, out of that drawer in a crisis?” he says.
As you can gather from the previous quote, Bolke understands that many non-gunnies do not plan to shoot their guns much, or at all, so he promotes tools that, like actual fire extinguishers, are intuitive. Bolke is one of the minds behind Smith and Wesson’s new Ultimate Carry J-Frame revolvers in .38 special and .32 H&R magnum. He is also developing tactics to help emergency gun buyers, offering revolver-focused training at Gunsite and other popular ranges and shooting schools across the United States.
Problems with pocket pistols and J-frame revolvers for home-defense and EDC
You might not be surprised to discover Bolke is in the minority of trainers when it comes to this topic. Few well-known firearm instructors accept, publicly at least, pocket guns as viable concealed carry or home-defense weapons, and even fewer offer classes specifically for these types of pistols. At the moment, it seems like Bolke and Claude Werner are the two biggest names out there, and I recommend following them both. But to be fair to the majority, some good reasons exist for pocket guns’ less-than-stellar reputation among knowledgeable people.
Firstly, pocket pistols and J-frame-sized revolvers are universally understood to be harder to shoot well than larger firearms. The small size and weight of these weapons is primarily to blame. Limited real estate prevents many shooters from achieving a proper, full grip on the gun, and the light weight does little in terms of recoil management. It doesn’t help that, on the revolver side at least, the guns are often chambered for magnum cartridges. Pair heavy recoil and report with a heavy trigger, and you have a recipe for inaccuracy.
Speaking of cartridges, this class of potential fire extinguisher gun tends to be fastidious when it comes to ammunition. For example, many .38 special snub-nose revolvers wear sights regulated for 158-grain loadings. If you aren’t shooting the “FBI load,” your chief’s special may print unpredictably. With small auto pistols, the ammunition issues are related to proper cycling. Some pocket pistol makers, such as Seecamp, provide very specific ammunition requirements regarding brand, bullet weight, bullet design, and even cartridge length. The need for a specific loading may curtail a spontaneous trip to the range or create a potentially hazardous situation should you need to use your gun in self-defense after failing to heed the manufacturer’s recommendations.
Adjustable sights help with the above-mentioned ammunition pickiness with revolvers, but these are often not available. Some exceptions would be the Smith and Wesson Model 60 3-inch and Pro models and the Ruger LCRx 3-inch. The fixed sights on the Smith and Wesson 640 Pro and the above-mentioned Ultimate Carry revolvers are quite good and in my experience print well with Speer Gold Dots of various weights. Sights on pocket auto pistols, if they exist at all, tend to be less-than-ideal too, but they are generally better than the plain ramp and gutter setups on most snubbies and are often replaceable.
Capacity is another issue. Five to 8 rounds is what you get with true pocket guns. If we step up to the Sig Sauer P365 and related pistols, we are given 10 to 12 rounds.The small size of these pistols makes reloading difficult, especially in a self-defense situation where fine motor skills may hit the bricks, so the more rounds the gun has on board the better. The mirco-nine pistols like the P365 are much easier to manipulate, and it should be noted that these pistols are big enough and shootable enough to be accepted by most trainers as legitimate carry weapons. I see no reason why one of these micro-nines can’t be an emergency gun if the shooter is comfortable with the weapon system.
Bolke provides some great counter arguments to the above objections in his writings and teachings, but I think the history of real-life self-defense encounters provides a more compelling case for most readers. However, before we talk about this history, I want to note that Bolke and other fans of the fire extinguisher gun concept do not say the just in case gun must be infinitely small. Guns stored in quick access safes or carried in a purse or some other off-body bag can be large, very large. A 4-inch barrel Smith and Wesson model 10 or a full-size Sig Sauer P250 might be the perfect emergency firearms given the right emergency.
The Mercy-Fitzgerald Hospital shooting and the Seecamp .32 ACP
Getting shot sucks. Getting shot with a tiny gun sucks just as much as getting shot with a big gun. Both make you want to stop what you are doing and get the heck out of there. In other words, any firearm can be used to protect yourself or your loved ones and having any gun is better than none. Case in point: the Mercy-Fitzgerald Hospital shooting in Darby, PA.
During the afternoon of July 24, 2014, a psychiatric patient with a long criminal history pulled a gun during a therapy session at Mercy-Fitzgerald Hospital. The deranged man shot and killed his case worker before shooting and wounding his doctor, Dr. Lee Silverman. But Silverman was able to return fire, wounding the shooter and ending what could have been a much more tragic event. Authorities revealed the shooter had dozens of more rounds for his Iver Johnson .32 Automatic Safety revolver.
You read that correctly. The murderer used an archaic pocket pistol first produced in the late 1800s. This design isn’t too much younger than the first modern fire extinguisher, interestingly enough. “They are extremely old, bordering on antiques, but in very good shape, very well maintained,” Delaware County District Attorney Jack Whelan said at the time about weapons found in the shooter’s residence. “The murder weapon almost looked newish.”
Wow, are you telling me that old guns chambered for anemic rounds can still be deadly? I draw your attention back to Bolke’s Detective Special. An old gun that is well maintained can work just as well as some new polymer wonder. Not to be outdone, Dr. Silvermam did the good guy’s work with a Seecamp automatic in .32 ACP he retrieved from his pocket. Seecamps are great little guns, and when loaded with the maker’s recommended ammunition, they can play the role of fire extinguisher gun and, in this case, CCW pistol perfectly.
Here we have a real-world example of how simple-to-own and simple-to-use firearms in miniscule calibers can save lives. The hero in this case had no special training that I can find. He is just a normal person with people around him that he loved and wanted to protect. The cliche is true: any gun is better than no gun.
The striker-fired auto problem
A Seecamp?! Dude should have been carrying a Glock 34, bro! I hear some of you saying that right now. I get it. Some of us want the biggest, baddest gun we can physically carry and extra ammunition and medical gear and and and. If you are one of those and people, great. But a just in case gun might not be something you need.
Don’t get me wrong: Glocks are great guns. They are economically priced; they are simple to use and easy to repair and customize; and they work.They work really well. If you were to survey groups of clueful folks (instructors, police trainers, etc.), you would probably find that a majority carry a Glock of some type. Those same groups would likely recommend polymer, striker-fired handguns for CCW.
But, anecdotally, non-gunnies who purchase Glocks may not be likely to keep them long. Social media research seems to indicate the combination of a lack of a manual safety on a semi-automatic pistol with a light trigger turns these consumers off. Are Glocks safe? Yes, yes of course! They are fantastic pistols, but what people think is true is often more important than the objective truth itself. Consumers who grew up with the 1911 or who came of age when the Beretta M9 was so popular or whose mom or dad carried a Smith & Wesson DA/SA pistol on duty may not trust newer designs. To assuage their own fears of an negligent discharge, these folks may carry in condition three or not carry at all.
The following is a single data point, but I think this YouTuber’s account captures a common sentiment among new gun buyers and non-gunnies:
In praise of the small, double-action-only auto pistol
A 1911 or a 2011 pistol could fill the emergency gun role, but I think the single action pistol type is best reserved for folks who, like me, grew up on the platform or who are more committed to training. While a manual safety might be appealing, there are risks associated with it and with any grip safety. The heavier double action trigger found on revolvers and DAO semi-automatics might be an important feature of a fire extinguisher gun. The ability for a user to easily see if a revolver is loaded or not seems to be part of the appeal as well.
My own concept of an ideal fire extinguisher gun for friends or family would be something akin to a giant Seecamp, such as a Rohrbaugh R9S (the s is for sights), a Sig Sauer P250 sub-compact, or a Sig Sauer P290RS. All of these are small, double action only pistols with repeat strike capabilities and loaded chamber indicators.The sights on the Rohrbaugh are not great, but the other two are offered with large night sights. Capacity is higher than most small revolvers, and the guns can be reloaded rather quickly. All have a reputation for reliability. These guns may not be able to sit in a drawer for 50 years without being touched but neither can actual fire extinguishers. The bad news? None of these pistols is currently in production, so you would have to hit the used market to find one.
If a non-gunnie is wedded to the idea of a wheelgun, I would suggest the Smith and Wesson Model 60 3-inch or the Smith and Wesson 640 Pro.
Better than a sharp stick
In the end, the chances of needing a gun in an emergency are low, and most gun owners do not have the time, money, or drive to target shoot regularly, much less train intensively for a gun fight. Does Bolke’s fire extinguisher gun concept bridge the gap between those who can afford to train often and those that cannot? I think it does, especially for those who have had some experience with firearms in the past. The gun training industry seems to be all about speed-shooting and camouflage, but instructors neglect non-gunnies at their own peril. I applaud Bolke’s efforts and the efforts of others to provide tools and training to normal people while destigmatizing some types of gun ownership.
Conventional gun fighting wisdom might say that people like Dr. Silverman and my great-aunt could never defend themselves with a mouse gun and no training, but history tells a different story.
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