Is that Roscoe an Accessory or a Survival Tool?

Roscoe: noun; handgun, circa 1914

The handgun is a tool for limited hunting, sport, personal defense and/or accessorizing.

In Free America, the legal open-carry/concealed carry of handguns is ubiquitous.  I get civilian open-carry when in the woods or when you are not around a lot of other people. But if a human- predator focuses upon you, open-carry invites trouble. Inadequately concealing a handgun is no concealment at all and subjects the carrier to the same predator hazards as open-carry.

Practicing situational awareness and handgun concealment reduces the probability that others will assess you as the armed potential threat that you can be to a predator.  You do not want predators to know that you are armed and thus cause them to focus upon you, or target you to be taken-out, or to relieve you of your handgun.

Whenever I see open-carried or poorly concealed handguns, I do exactly what a predator does; I analyze how I can take that firearm, if I chose to do so. You cannot allow someone to take your firearm. Just having it seen by predators can get you killed.

That brings me to the title of this piece. Absent hunting, at a firing range, or relatively alone in the wilderness, if you don’t make the effort to carry your handgun in a manner that it can’t be detected or taken from you, it is a vulnerable accessory and not a survival-tool.  In short, you are ill-prepared to survive when targeted by human-predators.

There can be several reasons why someone would carry a handgun as an accessory.  I am guessing that the number one reason is because the person fails to understand the seriousness of handgun retention and/or concealment in a predatory world.  He sees the world, and his personal vulnerability profile, as mostly benign.  If the world is so benign, what is the necessity to carry a firearm with its attendant liabilities?  The flawed world view can be modified with appropriate training.

In some cases, the display of a handgun as an accessory is a false security or a conscious/unconscious public statement derived from delusional or self-serving motivations of power exhibition.

You do not have to be a warrior to be successful in self-defense.  But, why not act as one?  Warriors don’t treat firearms as accessories, and neither should anyone else.