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We have to stay mindful that our job is not to look cool. The goal is to be efficient with your weapon. Reliability is another key factor that novel handgun models almost never exhibit. This is why you want to pick a very robust and not overly complicated semi-automatic handgun.
This is why Glock became so popular for the police departments, military private citizens and competitors. It's designed to have very few moving parts so less things can go wrong.
Make sure that your front sight is nice and bold, with some sort of bright dont on it as combat/ defensive shooting is all about front sight focus.
Your magazine capacity will be dictated by the gun you pick and the State you reside in. The rule of thumb is the more ammo in the magazine the better. Most will have at least 10 rounds, some will go up to 17 rounds per magazine. It's rather simple, if you have more ammo that means you have more opportunities to deal with the threat and take it down.
Barrel length is less important as most life or death situations unfold in a very close proximity to you so having a sniper rifle is not very important for your Every Day Carry. Having said that, we can go back to our original statement that bigger is better and a full size gun will manage the recoil better and shoot more accurately.
Safety! Most modern handguns don't have an external safety as they follow in the footsteps of Glock who introduced a mainstream handgun without one. As a result, you will have a hard time finding a major police department which has a safety on their weapon. So why am I taking this direction? Who cares about what law enforcement uses these days. Well the answer is easy, Law enforcement like any other large organization has to make sure that they can be effective even when it comes to the lowest of the denominators. Namely, people under stress forget to take the safety off in order to fire the weapon. Instead what happens is that people get wide eyed and simply press the trigger multiple times thinking “ why doesn't it fire?” or “do i have a jam?” “ F@)S this gun doesn't work” and this is when your life depends on it and you need it most.
Lessons learned :
I was once running an AR15 course and one of the participants was a local police officer who did relatively well all day but then it came time for some force on force with Simunition. We identified the scenario as a search for an active shooter. The Officer was responding to this situation and conducting a room to room search, when he turned the corner and saw the active shooter sitting there with his own AR 15 he attempted to neutralize the threat but his weapon would not fire. Needless to say that the officer was quickly taken out by the active shooter who did not suffer from the same issue of “the idiot jam” or failure to take the safety selector from safe to fire.”
This is a real life story where no one got hurt but a lifelong lesson learned by the officer. This is probably one of the main reasons why having a safety on the weapon is a subject of concern.
The rule is if you have a gun with a safety you need to dedicate more time training to avoid forgetting to take it off when it's needed most. If you can invest the time and put in the effort then the safety selector is just fine. Your movements must be automatic, no thought process at all.
Written by Mohican Shooter