If you take your shooting skills seriously, you will test your shooting skills periodically in order to see where you stand. The best way to do this is through what the industry calls “drills”. I personally call them “tests” because that is exactly what they are. Take a moment and look up what “drills” are so we can all be on the same page prior to beginning. So let us start out by making it clear that tests are meant to expose what you learned and drills are meant to help you learn a specific thing/skill. For this article, I am going to cover how to do pistol drills so you can test yourself with confidence.

​Ammunition seems to be slowly getting back onto the shelves, but people still are not able to fully indulge as they once did. In turn, people have made the judgement that without enough ammunition, they can’t train. This comes from the assumption that “Range Time” is the only way in which skills are developed or maintained. In fact, I would go as far as to start this article off by saying that 99.99% of you reading this would perform better if you started training off the range and stopped thinking of the range as a primary training ground. This lack of ammo on the shelves can be a blessing in disguise if you are serious about advancing your skills.

With 9mm starting to show back up on shelves in my local area, I figured it would be a good time to give my opinion of my own M&P Shield Plus. This pistol was an impulse purchase to upgrade my situation and get a pistol I knew I could trust that was on par with the Sig P365 and the Hellcat. Though Smith & Wesson did not market this pistol in advance, I had to have it. I couldn’t stand having a single stack Shield as my smallest carry, and was looking into getting a Hellcat. The only thing that held me back was that it would be a whole new system I would have to trust and get used to. The Shield Plus is the first pistol on the market toeffectively convert a once single stack pistol into a double stack, and with minimal changes.

​The Olight PL Pro needs no special introduction since it has been out for a little while now. Plenty of reviewers have shown you the basics of how it works and functions, so I will glaze over those details so we can get to the meat and potatoes of the subject.

​I have been playing around with this idea of whether the M&P Shield 2.0 would be enough to carry me through the long years all by itself. This will likely agitate many people who like to have several guns to select from for self-defense, but this is just a topic that has crept up on my mind in the recent political climate. If I had to get rid of all but one of my guns, would the M&P Shield 2.0 suffice?

After about a year of hoping and waiting, I finally stumbled upon the 2.0 version of the M&P40C in a local gun shop and snagged it up. If you read my articles about the first generation M&P40C, you will know that I had quite an affection for that model. Unfortunately, the slide would go home automatically when I would conduct a speed reload, causing a stoppage in the process. The grip was also quite slick and made handling iffy, even in the early 9mm model I had years ago. Luckily the 2.0 version of this pistol has resolved the issues this pistol had, making it once again a contender for my heart. Just so you know, I have not spent all that much time with this pistol but it has fit into my carry and practice rotation like a glove and required no real retraining and adaptation. That is why it is already worthy of an overview.

​One of the sexiest displays of tacticool is switching from your primary/carbine to your secondary/pistol with great speed. I know a lot of people find it to be a sexy maneuver, but it is actually a basic and necessary skill that requires a lot of practice. There are a few reasons why someone would switch from their rifle to their pistol. Much like conducting reloads, it will be because they HAVE TO or WANT TO. The HAVE TO scenario is the rifle no longer functions due to no ammunition or a stoppage, and the threat is still active. The WANT TO scenario is clearing a small space where a carbine/SMG is too big to maneuver around. Now let’s look into the fine science of this sexy maneuver.

I have lost count of the amount of time I have spent trying to get the Glock 23 Gen4 to be an integral part of my carry system. It is about time to discontinue my time in Special Glockerations. In this article, I am going to discuss my closing thoughts on the Glock 23 Gen4. Many Glock fans will disagree with my perception, but that will not dissuade me from recording my thoughts and experiences. With that said, let’s get to the meat of this article.

​In this article, I want to cover the subject of shooting fast enough to matter. I am sure that most people reading this article are only going to register the first part of the title, but my goal is to anecdotally and logically assert my position on what shooting fast enough to matter actually means. There are several parts of shooting that take up time, depending on how much you work on them. I want to dissect the parts and traits of shooting and analyze the merits of concentrating on them individually during training. Shooting fast doesn’t just mean working the trigger fast, despite what the industry tells you.

Recently, as of a few months ago, I decided that there wasn't much of a good reason to go through the fall, winter, and spring with just a handheld light on the pistol I am most likely to carry with me. I happened upon a picture posted by Sage Dynamics that was captioned "No excuses" and it showed a Glock 43 with a TLR-6 on it. I was confused at first and found that it had been out for a while, but with the more popular and expensive model actually having a laser on it as well. After much research and debate with myself, I decided to get it. If you have a single stack pistol, you may find that Streamlight has a model for your gun as well, and you may want to invest due to some of the information and reasons I am going to share with you here.