In the current environment, adding stuff to guns to “improve” them is all the rage. In fact, in our industry, customization has been king for the entire time of my life. While I dabble in ‘add-ons,’ they tend not to be the frontline in personal defense – or in daily use.
I recently ran a story from instructor-author Dave Spaulding about selecting the defense handgun. I published it because it was good material, written with common sense by a smart dude.
After I’d posted it on social media, I got a response which I’ll paraphrase here: “(W)hen we were rookie cops, we were issued a fixed sight .38 revolver and thankfully about the only change we could make (were) grips and the ammo. Without much in the way of options, we simply carried and adapted to the weapon. Today with a bewildering number of choices we often rely on the gun rags or social media source's we often end up with the poorest of choices. I've gone back to carrying (a revolver) with a (smaller revolver) as a second gun because I carried this setup for almost 20 years and found it was the best balance for me …”
Actually, the guns I tend to carry are unmodified -- or only lightly modified. I am having a Tiger McKee "Chopper" built, but it's personalized for a feature and as an heirloom. On a medical appointment day, it was a pair of M&P340 revolvers modified only with Crimson Trace Lasergrips that were carried.
Another answer was likewise instructive: “This combination here...for over 30 years now. On duty, off duty, IDPA, USPSA, etc. I have carried a full size and a compact Glock in 9mm or 40 depending upon the mood of the agency at the moment. The G27 has a Lone Wolf 9mm conversion barrel in it. It's 20 years old, beat up from having the snot shot out of it...but it remains the most accurate compact 9mm I own, so I don't care how disreputable she looks. The G17 is the last one I bought on Blue Label. Both are lightly modified with a Ghost 3.5 and an extra power striker spring that yields a crisp, nominal 4.5 trigger press with a short reset.
“I own many, many other pistols and revolvers...but being one who thinks the whole notion of "carry rotations" and "summer guns" etc. is stupid amateur hour (stuff), I stick with what I have 27 years of documented agency qualifications and hundreds of thousands of rounds through. Keep it simple, reliable, and accurate.”
Nothing’s perfect, but familiarity is a huge advantage. My occupation has me carrying different guns on occasion - as does my status as “the elderly.” The predominant carry gun is still the G19, which I’ve carried in one form or another since 2001. The backup is a lightweight analog to the M60 I got and started carrying in 1978. Familiarity is a thing.
The bottom line is that it’s less the implement and more the user; we’ve had TV/motion picture entertainment that focused on the gun in the sense that the type of gun (make/model/caliber/modification) was essential while the skills (including ability to think) of the user were less important. Consider the “Bounty Hunter’s” “Mare’s Leg,” the Rifleman with his spinning M92, even SGT Saunders and his M1928 Thompson SMG – or Dirty Harry’s 44 Magnum. It’s the gun, it’s the device that gives you such power.
Hogwash.
As a kid, I fell for the “special gun” nonsense hook, line and sinker. I wasn’t the only one; the fake ‘reality show’-style news helped drive the “type of gun/ammo that causes crime” narrative in their efforts to push feeble-minded legislators into enacting infringements not relevant to the problems they said they were solving.
Examples include the “cheap, easily concealed handguns” in the 1960s-70s, followed by the ‘high powered sniper rifle” (your dad’s deer hunting gun that came out once per year), the “dum-dum bullets that don’t blow up – but make you blow up,” to “cop-killer bullets” that didn’t kill cops but were carried by them, to “assault weapons,” “military style weapons,” and other silliness.
It ain’t the gun, never has been. It’s the user. If you’re a serious student, you learn how the most common examples work and study the best way to handle them safely. As to your personal selection and “dolling them up,” you may consider that money and effort spent learning how to be effective with your chosen sidearms is better spent than buying gizmos.
-- Rich Grassi