Back Up Gun Consistency

One thing that common sense dictates when it comes to backup guns is that your backup gun is as consistent as possible with your primary. So that just like if you're gonna have a home gun and an office gun, or a home gun and a carry gun, maybe home gun staged in different rooms, you'd probably wanna use exactly the same firearm or at least the same type of firearm. Well, the same is true if you're gonna carry two guns on your body. Now, one of the things that's launched against that is, well, it's hard for me to carry two full-size guns, or it's hard for me to carry two guns that operate the same way. Well, I'm a relatively small guy.

This is not a very bulky, I'm not wearing a parka. I'm not in that kind of a situation. I'm actually carrying three firearms right now. And to be honest, the one that probably would be easiest to be seen is the small one. It's the one that's different.

Let me go ahead and pull this cover garment off. And what we're gonna take a look at is why this consistency is important, not only consistency and operation but also consistency of spare magazines. So if I've got a primary gun at the four o'clock, I've got a secondary gun here at appendix carry at the one o'clock, or maybe for you, it's different. Maybe this is your primary, and this is the one you're gonna consider your secondary. Either way, these two guns work exactly the same way.

They have the same type of trigger. They have the same type of magazine release in exactly the same place. There's no extra buttons or levers that I need to worry about, and the magazines are interchangeable. So in other words, my one spare magazine that works with my secondary gun will also work with my primary gun. That means I've got three magazines on my body which work with both of the guns that I'm carrying.

Now, if I go to the deep concealment option, this other concealed gun that I have inside of my pocket what I realized is that now I've got some things that are very, very different. Okay, first of all, this has a manual safety that I have to actuate. So now, if I'm in a worst-case scenario where I'm going to a pocket gun, I'm going to a backup gun because my primary whichever one of these would be my primary has failed. I now have more fine motor skills that aren't the fine motor skills that I normally practice with my primary firearm. The trigger is also gonna be very different.

This is a single-action gun on this tip-up Beretta. So the trigger is gonna be very different from this gun. And obviously, there's no way that I'm gonna be able to get my primary magazine into this backup gun. It's not even the same type of ammunition. So there's no redundancy here whatsoever.

There's no consistency. Yes, it is easier to carry this gun. It's easier to take this firearm, and slip it into the pocket holster, and know that it's there and have the option of going to it. But it doesn't do me nearly as much good as having two guns that are set up very, very similarly that operate in exactly the same way, that have the same trigger, that take the same ammunition, that even take the same magazines. This sets me up much much better to survive a true worst-case scenario.

So if you're going through the trouble of carrying a backup gun, you wanna think about how consistent that backup gun can be with your primary. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have two guns that are practically the same, like these two Glocks, but at least have two guns that operate the same way. One option might be something like a modern striker-fired gun. That's a double stack gun, like the Glock, like the M&P, like the XD, and have a slimmer, maybe Walther PPS as your backup gun. That Walther PPS is gonna give you exactly the same kind of function.

You know, the one major difference there is gonna be the magazine release, but the magazine release isn't something where it's worried about with a backup gun because we're probably not carrying spare ammo for the backup gun. But at least, in the operations, you don't wanna carry one gun that uses a manual safety for example, and another gun that doesn't. You don't wanna have one gun with a double-action, single-action type trigger, and another gun that has a striker-fired type trigger. If you wanna talk about mixing and matching semi-autos and revolvers, of course, we have the same kind of situation. We've got a dramatically different trigger with the J-Frames versus the modern striker-fired guns.

However, it could be argued that they operate fundamentally the same. There's no safeties, there's no external levers. We don't have to worry about sweeping a safety off, like I would with this small Beretta. When you get ready to carry two firearms, the more consistency you can have, the better prepared you're gonna be to use either one when you need it most.