Defensive Shooting Fundamentals Session 6: Understanding Presentation from the Holster

Presentation from the holster is an important skill if you're going to be carrying a gun concealed in the public environment or if you're gonna have a holster staged with your home defense firearm. Now, that last part may not seem exactly intuitive to you, but the reality is what I explain to most people is that if you're thinking about ever having to move through your house, rather than thinking about moving through your house with the gun to go check on your kids, to see who's in the living room, for whatever reason it is you think this is a good idea at the time, we wanna make sure that you're not running around pointing the gun at someone that doesn't need the gun pointed at them. And we also wanna think about the fact that if you're training to present from the holster for the concealed carry environment then you can do the same thing inside of your home environment. So staging the gun with the holster inside of your quick access safe or wherever you keep it means that you'll be able to get up, put your belt on, put the paddle holster on maybe, whatever it is you're gonna do. Have the gun here in the holster and then go check on the kids. If you can do that quickly and efficiently, it's probably a better idea fundamentally than just running around with your gun extended or compressed even in that environment where you aren't sure what's going on inside of your own home. Now, primarily we teach people to stay barricaded, and even in a barricaded situation, it may be a good idea to have a holster because after you're done with your situation, if you do have to drive out and shoot someone, you don't know if there's other people in the house, you need to make sure that your family is safe. You may need to give medical attention to yourself or others. Again, it's gonna be very convenient to be able to have that holster, go back into the holster and then take care of whatever you need to. So from both a concealed carry and a home defense standpoint, presentation from the holster is an important skill to master. The trick here is efficiency. It's not just effectiveness, right? We could very easily just do virtually anything. We could pull the gun out with our weak hand, we could pop the gun out here, drop it down, swing it up, bring it to our ready position. We could rock the gun backwards, we could rock the gun forward and still get the gun out of the holster. But for safety's sake and for the efficiency of getting the gun into our shooting position as quickly as possible and as reliably and consistently as possible, we're gonna take a look at how we break down all of the steps of presentation from the holster to be much more detailed than you may have heard it explained before. So here's how we do this. First thing we're gonna do is make sure that we're presenting from the holster in inappropriate context. Now, concealed carry or inside of our home, we're probably gonna have a lowered center of gravity. So this is important. Now, right now, I'm demonstrating from this strong side carry. I'm demonstrating from the three o'clock position. This is exactly the same thing if I loosen this belt up a little bit. If I were back here in the four o'clock position, it would be primarily exactly the same movements. The movements change a little bit if I bring the gun all the way around and I were gonna be in the appendix position, and we'll look at some of the unique aspects of that here in a second. Let me reset this belt. It's really important to have a good solid foundation whenever you're presenting from the holster or when you're practicing it, because although you may not have as good a foundation when you're actually in an environment where you're using these skillsets, having as much consistency as possible is important. So first thing we're gonna do is lower that center of gravity. Next thing we're gonna talk about is getting our grip. You wanna get as good a firing grip on the handgun as you possibly can while it's still in the holster. Now, depending on how built up the holster is, that may be easy, it may be hard. One of the things you wanna look for in a holster is that it allows you to get as much of a good firing grip as possible. Now, this particular holster, there is a little bit of a buildup here of the inside edge of the kydex. And what that means is I can't quite get my thumb into the exact position I want it in on the gun. If the gun were out, my thumb would be high on the gun up against the frame. Because of the way this holster is designed, I can't quite get there. And when I can't quite get there, then what I'm gonna need to do is make sure that I get as close as I can, as close as possible. One of the areas that this is really important is to make sure that we're not down here underneath the beavertail. We know that our grip, we wanna be as high up on the gun as possible. We wanna be in that position here and not have to readjust our grip when it gets up to this position. Another thing we're gonna think about is our trigger finger position. We want our trigger finger down along the side of the holster, regardless of whether there's a release button here or not. Our finger extended down along the side of the holster means that when the gun comes up out of the holster, it lays exactly where we want it on the frame or on that seam of the slide in the frame. We wouldn't wanna have our trigger finger back here in this position near the trigger guard. And now, when the gun comes up out of the holster, our finger ends up on the trigger. Obviously, this could be a very dangerous situation, especially if we're scared, startled as we come up and we fire around into ourselves. We don't wanna do that. So first thing is we're in that lowered center of gravity position. And whether we've been startled and our hands move up suddenly or we're in our ready position, trying to talk someone down, this is a great place to have our hands when we reach back and get our grip. Now, the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna come straight up out of the holster. Now, straight up out of the holster may not be technically possible. In other words, because of your range of motion of the shoulder or the elbow, the gun may move back a little bit, come forward a little bit, but as much as possible, we wanna come straight up. From this position, we're going to orient the gun towards the front if that's the way we're looking. If we were looking off to the side, if we were kneeling and couldn't turn, we'd orient the gun off to the side. And we wanna orient the gun along our line of sight. Now, this is one of the three points of consistency. Orienting the gun immediately to the front beore we start bringing the gun forward. This is a really important point for you in terms of efficiency and consistency. So first, bringing the gun straight up, next, that 90 degree turn of the gun so it's oriented towards the threat. And here's the third part, once the forward motion of the gun starts, we wanna continue that motion until the gun is in the extended shooting position. The gun doesn't stop. Now, this may go counter to some things you've heard before, but we don't wanna stage the gun here if our intent is to go from the holster to the shooting position and that's what we wanna do as efficiently as possible. So we're not gonna drive the gun down and come up, and we're not gonna stop here and then drive out. A lot of times, you hear about people who were shooting one handed when they could have or should have been shooting with two hands on the gun. One of the reasons I think is because it's not intuitive unless we train it to get our two handed grip while the gun is moving. But when someone's scared and startled and trying to stop the bad guy, it does make sense to get the gun out as fast as possible. So the idea of stopping and then starting that forward motion again doesn't make sense to me. It's not congruent with the behavior we have when we're really in a hurry to try to defend ourselves. So we know that we can get the two-handed grip while the gun is moving, and that's what we wanna do. So let's take a look at that again. We're in this situation, we have a lowered center of gravity. We recognize that we need to get the gun out of the holster. We're gonna reach back, get as much of our good grip as we can, we're gonna come straight up out of the holster. We're gonna orient the gun towards the threat. We're gonna drive out, get our two-handed grip, and of course that's where we would start shooting. That's our extended shooting position. Now, part of training presentation from the holster is also training to get the gun back into the holster. One of my pet peeves on the range, I don't wanna see you shooting and then driving the gun straight back to the holster. After we shoot, we always come back to the ready position. Pause, assess, make sure everything's okay, and then go back to the holster. And only once the gun is actually securely back in the holster, not while we're dancing around trying to figure out what's going on, once the gun is securely back into the holster, that's when I'm gonna relax, and only then, once the gun is secure. Get back into my position, let's look at the position again. This is when we recognize that we need to shoot. We're gonna get our grip. Now, what happens with this hand? You can index it on your belt, you can index on your chest, you can leave it up here somewhere. You can do anything you wanna do with it, but what we wanna make sure that we're doing is not bringing it over here to grab the holster where we're covering ourselves, okay? Think about maybe you're pulling up a shirt, pushing back a jacket, clearing a concealment garment, clearing that out of the way so that we can get to the gun. Anything we need to do with this hand other than get it in front of the muzzle when the gun comes out of the holster. So I'm in this position where I've recognized the need to shoot. I come back, I get my grip on the gun. I come straight up. I orient the gun towards the threat. I drive out, touch and press, shoot as many times as I need to, come back into the ready position, pause and assess, get the gun back into the holster, and then relax. So we wanna practice that very step-by-step, very staccato. You wanna get through each step very deliberately, then you wanna smooth it out. Then you wanna increase the pace, and then eventually of course, you'll be doing it at speed on commands, which may include orienting towards the threat, lateral movement, things like that. Presentation from the holster needs to be practiced every time you get a different gun, every time you get a different holster, and when you change your carry positions. So let's take a look at how we modify this for a carry position, which we call appendix carrier. What I usually refer to as center line carry. If I take this easy-on, easy-off holster and relatively easily put it back into this center line position. I'll come around here, get that snap, come around here. And we do advocate this, for people that are new to the appendix carry position, you can practice this as an outside the waistband position, as opposed to an inside the waistband position when you're first getting used to it. And this is also very helpful for you to be able to see exactly what I'm doing. So as I'm in my ready position here where I'm in a lowered center of gravity, I'm trying to talk someone down, or if I'm just standing at rest and I get startled, what you're gonna see is that if I were to try to pull this straight up into my body, I'm going to hit my rib cage. I'm gonna hit my breast, I'm gonna come up here and block my movement of the gun. And depending on how much extra you have in this general area, that could stop the motion to the gun relatively early in your presentation process. What I see a lot of people do to fix that because maybe they're used to standing up and training like this, then when they get into a dynamic situation with a lowered center of gravity, they don't know how to deal with it. And what they end up doing is pulling the gun up this way and pointing it right back down into that pelvic girdle. Well, that's not someplace I want to have a gun pointed ever, particularly one that I'm in control of. So what I wanna make sure that I'm doing is learning that when I go from recognizing the need to shoot to getting my grip, I'm gonna push my hips forward. Now, pushing my hips forward means that when the gun comes straight up out of the holster, it's already pointed in front of my body. Technically, that makes this a safer position to present from than the way most people present from, the four o'clock position, which causes them to come up here and be driving the muzzle of that gun straight down towards their leg as they come from here at the four o'clock around their body, covering themselves and driving out to shoot. So here we are with the gun already in front of the body. I recognize the need to shoot, I train myself to push my hips forward. I come straight up. I again orient the gun towards the threat, 90 degree motion. And now, as I extend, I just rotate the gun so that it is in and parallel with my line of sight. And you can see that more dramatically from the front. If I recognize the need to shoot, push my hip forward as I get my grip, come straight up, orient the gun, and then rotate it in and parallel with my line of sight as I extend. Come back in, assess my environment, and again, remember to push that hip forward when I'm re-holstering to keep the muzzle in front of my body the entire time. So that process that we go through is exactly the same. If I were gonna take this gun and again undo the clip here and put this all the way back at the four o'clock position, we would see it would be exactly the same. I would come up, I would orient, bring the gun to my side. At that point, once I was over here bringing the gun to my side, that's when I orient the gun. So I come straight up to my side, orient, and then drive out and shoot. Learning to get that two handed grip while the gun is moving is also a function of a consistent grip. Now, hopefully you've watched our lecture class on how to develop your good fundamentals. One of those fundamentals is the good defensive shooting grip, which when we talk about being consistent, we talk about having the strong side thumb high on the weak side of the gun. So the strong hand, strong side thumb high on the weak side of the gun means that when the gun comes up out of the holster, I'm already having this thumb flagged. Sometimes you'll even see the tip of my thumb from the weak side. What you're seeing there is my habit of keeping that thumb high and leaving this gap on the side of the gun. So that regardless of what this hand was doing, whether it was moving a concealment garment, pushing somebody out of the way, whatever it was doing, whenever I get a chance to put it back on the gun, it's gonna go right into that gap. So in the ready position, I generally have that thumb pretty high. And as I extend out, the thumb closes down. Well, that's what's happening when I'm here. As I get that concealment garment out, the gun comes, up or for me, I come out of my appendix position. I drive out, at this point, as this hand hits the gun, that's when those thumbs are closing because that's an important subtle point of presentation from the holster is how and when to get the two handed grip. It's definitely helpful to have that thumb flagged very high in the ready position and bring it down as you reach your extended position. That creates the gap, put the hand in, you end up in your good extended shooting position. Come back in, release, thumbs up again. And that's when I go back to my holster, and having that thumb up also means that it's not gonna get in the way of re-holstering. So that as I drive the gun back in there, that thumb isn't hitting this edge of the holster, and most holsters do have some kind of a sweat guard or some kind of an apparatus here that we wanna stay out of the way of. So a high thumb is also helpful for that re-holstering as much as it is for getting the two- handed grip. Presentation from the holster has a lot of moving parts, it's very complex. That's why it needs to be broken down and practiced very methodically before you start doing it at speed, if for no other reason than to make sure you're being safe when you're developing your defensive shooting fundamentals.