Clip-it question

[Sasquatch]

There is no national/industry standard for retention method. Some argue passive retention is a method and count that.

I don't quite know where to start on this. A long time ago in galaxy far, far and away nobody spoke of this voodoo know as retention levels. Then, in the '70s, a guy named Bill Rogers at the FBI wanted to know why cops were getting killed by their own guns. He 'discovered' what we all intuitively know, and that is the harder you make it for somebody to steal something of yours, the less your stuff gets stolen, so he came up with a practical test...can somebody wrench a gun out of a holster w/in five seconds...and made up some holsters that would keep assailants from doing that. And Rogers' Level I was born. Rogers decided each way you could 'lock' the gun in the holster would be an added level of retention. So he started selling his holsters and business was brisk enough that he licensed the design to Safariland just to keep up with demand. Later, Safariland bought him out and the rest is history. Rogers is also credited with the first commercially successful hybrid leather/kydex and created the first kydex holsters.

The real takeaway from this traipse down memory lane is that any holster can claim to be any level of retention it wants to, so you better damn for sure know how those methods work.

Thanks for that read.

When I was a security monkey 20 years ago, I carried in a Safariland 070 that I picked up used from a friend of a friend whose department was switching from leather to nylon gear. It was around that time too that the "Raptor" holsters were introduced that included the SLS hoods. A coworker of mine ditched his 070 for the new Raptor (model 6573, I think.) Shortly thereafter, he found he had to buy steel sights for his Glock, because the Raptor sheered off the plastic front sight during practice with it. They also had recently released the 6280 SLS and the 6004 drop leg SLS.

Those holsters all only had passive adjustable retention screws and rotating hoods. Fast to draw, fast to reholster. Still had to remember to slap the hood back in place.

I eventually switched to nylon gear myself, and tried the Bianchi Duty-Lok holster that locked on the trigger guard. I didn't like it as much as the Safariland, because it required using either your middle finger or pinky (I used my pinky so I still had two strong fingers on the grip at the beginning of the draw) to deactivate the lock.

A few years ago just for open carry when afield in the woods & streams, I picked up a Safariland GLS (grip locking system) models and I like it better than the Bianchi setup. It too actually retains on the trigger guard, but it is deactivated by a natural grip on the holstered gun. I think you could technically have a level-4 holster if you had the SLS hood, ALS ejection port lock, GLS trigger guard lock, and passive tension screw. It wouldn't really require any more effort to draw a gun from such a monster than the old 070 did, which had a thumb break, a tension stap behind the trigger guard (and the fake snap on the face of the holster to draw one's attention) and required a rearward rocking motion to unlock the ejection port.