When You Can’t Carry at Home

Dear Fellow Survivalist;

I’m a firm believer in carrying at all times, or at least at all times I can. That includes carrying at home. Having a gun not-so-well hidden in my nightstand isn’t going to do me much good, if someone kicks in the front door while I’m watching a movie. I’d better have that gun on my person, or I might as well not have it at all. At least if I didn’t have it, they couldn’t steal it.

Obviously, that’s not the ideal. I have guns to protect my home and family, just as you do. For that reason, I try to carry my gun at all times. But there are times when that just doesn’t work out. It’s not that I can’t carry at home but rather that sometimes the activities that I’m involved in make it hard to carry, especially doing yardwork and carpentry. Basically, the problem is that the weight of the gun and my magazine pouch is enough to pull my pants down, even with my belt on tight.

I’m sure you can relate. Any of us who carry a gun know the value of a good belt to hold our pants up. Even so, the weight of a gun is enough to pull that belt and the pants down, unless you happen to be so skinny that the belt hangs up on your hips. I, unfortunately, don’t have that problem.

Okay, so there are things we might need to do, which make it difficult to carry a gun. How do we deal with that? What I’ve found, which works for me, is to find other ways of keeping a gun close, besides having it on my belt. Just where I put it depends on what I’m doing; but there’s never one farther than a step away, no matter what I’m doing.

To start with, I keep a gun in my desk, in a drawer right by where my right hand normally is, on my keyboard. It’s actually a shorter distance to that drawer, than it is to my belt holster and it’s considerably easier to draw the gun out of the drawer, than it is to draw it from my belt holster, when seated. The chair back and arm tend to get it the way of the draw.

The second most likely place I might be is in the workshop, so I have a gun hidden in my workbench. Considering that my garage really isn’t a garage, but is my workshop, that’s a good place to have a gun. I chose the location to make it easy to get to from either workbench or the power tools, while keeping it hidden. Since nobody else uses that workshop, safety really isn’t much of an issue.

Then there are the times when I’m working on various remodeling projects around the house. We bought a 1940s home and I’m doing various remodeling projects. Once again, they’re the type of thing where a holster gets in the way, especially of my tool belt. So, I either keep a small pistol in the tool belt, if I have the room, or in my tool bag, which is never more than a few feet away.

The one final problem area for me to have a gun, is while gardening. But that turned out to be easy to solve. All I had to do was to mount a holster on my riding mower. Since I use that as a yard tractor as well, hauling a wagon trailer behind it, it’s pretty much always with me, when I’m working outside.

Does this sound paranoid? Well, I’ve had two times, since moving into this house, when I needed a gun. Once was because a couple of guys pulled into the driveway behind my wife, looking like they wanted to cause trouble and the other with some drug dealers in the neighborhood, who wanted to threaten us. That’s in just a bit over a year. Both times I had a gun readily at hand, even though it wasn’t in a belt holster. So, no; I don’t think it’s paranoid at all.

Of course, the other thing is knowing when to grab your gun. This can be a tricky mental dance. On one hand, you don’t want to give anyone the idea that you’re threatening them with a gun. That’s illegal and can land you in jail. But on the other hand, you don’t want to need that gun and have it ten feet away. The way I’ve handled this is to grab my gun as soon as I even suspect something isn’t right; but try to keep it out of sight. That’s not the best tactical solution, because I don’t have the gun up with a good sight picture; but it’s a much better legal solution. We have to balance the two.

I just know this, if another time comes when people come around my home, with the intent of causing trouble, I want to be ready, even if I look a little ridiculous. We can recover from looking ridiculous, but we might not recover from being shot.

Play it safe. That’s why we always need to keep our powder dry and our survival gear close at hand… oh, and a gun within reach at all times.

Dr. Rich