Beretta Blog

With many things in life, I deliver better results with aggressive time limitations. There’s nothing like a tight deadline to make me focus and produce. Unfortunately, shooting isn’t one of those activities. In fact, adding a time crunch to basic shooting tasks has the opposite effect of degrading performance, sometimes to near comical levels.

If you want to become a better shooter, you must measure your both your current skill level and your progress. You can measure and track accuracy results, and depending on your personal goals, that may be enough. For recreational shooting and some types of competition, time may not matter. However, if you want to improve your defensive shooting capabilities or perhaps move up the action pistol sports ladder, being able to shoot accurately under time pressure becomes important.  

A simple shot timer is a great addition to your range kit. Here’s what you need to know about how they work. 

I don’t give a hoot about my “open carry” draw.

To clarify, drawing from an outside the waistband holster without a cover garment isn’t relevant in my chosen universe. Indeed, if I were passionate about competing in action shooting sports like USPSA or Steel Challenge, then an “open” draw would be crucial to me.

I like to compete, but I view competition as an opportunity to test and improve my skills with my everyday carry gear, sans “cheating.” That means I use my carry gun with no lightweight trigger modifications. It means I use my every day inside the waistband holster with an actual shirt or jacket that I wear when out and about. I don’t "game" my carry configuration to shave some fractions of seconds from the clock just because it’s a competition. If my setup puts me at a competitive disadvantage, so be it. My purpose, after all, is to get better with what I carry and use.

Maybe you don’t even reload your own ammunition. That’s OK, read on anyway, because this article still might apply to you.

For purposes of this discussion, let’s consider a universe containing two types of ammunition: practice and self-defense. Practice ammunition is designed to do one thing – go forward in more or less a straight line. As a bonus feature, it should also drill holes in paper or cardboard targets and make a clanging noise against steel plates. If a practice round doesn’t go bang once in a while, it’s no big deal and presents a training opportunity to work on your malfunction drills.

Some decades ago, conversations over newfangled inventions for guns went something like this...

“Hold on there son; you want me to put a thing made of GLASS on top of my trusty rifle? Are you kidding me?”

The discussion was about the idea of adding a scope to a rifle to perform the task of accurately getting sights on target. For hundreds of years, shooters had relied on a solution of simplicity and extreme durability: iron sights. Adding a potentially fragile, and more importantly, unproven invention had to be just asking for trouble, right?

There are times when the need to be discreet is going to mean carrying your defensive firearm somewhere other than on your waistline. There is also the fact that in our society, it’s quite normal for women to walk around with a purse on their shoulders, and a purse is useful for carrying any number of things such as a self-defense pistol.

I suppose that any pistol you have handy during a personal defense emergency is a perfect carry pistol, right?

Technically speaking, any handgun that shoots reliably can be a carry pistol. Large or small, mouse gun or big-bore caliber, double-action, single-action, or striker-fired. The usefulness of a concealed carry tool depends more on the skills of the user than on the hardware. However, assuming that one’s commitment to training and practice comes first, there’s nothing wrong with finding a pistol that’s optimized for concealed carry. In fact, the right features can provide a significant advantage to the skilled user.

So, what defines a perfect carry pistol?

There’s a lot more to handgun sights than meets the eye. OK, so that little play on words was entirely on purpose, but it’s true. While sights seem simple and even mundane, there’s quite a bit of thought and sophisticated science put into the design of effective handgun sights.

What do police officers' attitudes have to do with you? The nature of police work requires a careful balance between proactive action and de-escalation procedures. As an armed civilian, your mission if very different and with few exceptions, a "de-escalation" mentality will generally serve you well. Read on to learn why I take a different approach to confrontations when carrying a gun.

If you carry a defensive pistol, you should really consider making it a habit to shoot a practical pistol (USPSA) match on a regular basis. Here are ten reasons why this is so.