I was warming up before jiu jitsu class this week when a training partner who follows the channel asked me a question I get in some form pretty regularly: if you're carrying concealed and you end up going hands-on, how do you think about firearm retention?

It's a legitimate question. It's also the wrong place to start. This week's Brief is about why, and what the right place to start actually is.

Let's get into it.

When my training partner asked about firearm retention in a hands-on situation, my first response wasn't a technique. It was: let's talk about everything that had to go wrong for you to be there.

One of my instructors has a line he uses in striking that applies here perfectly. He'll hold a punch right up to your chin and say: nobody asks "how do I not get hit with the right cross" when it's already at their chin. By the time it's there, the problem is already fully developed. What we want to do is stop the right cross. See the preparatory movement, read the setup, and be in a defensive position before the punch is halfway to your face. A chain of actions leads to that punch. It's a lot easier to interrupt the chain at the beginning than to deal with it at the end.

The firearm retention question is the same problem. If you're carrying concealed and you're now in a physical altercation, that's not the starting point. That's the end of a sequence of missed opportunities. What did your situational awareness miss? Why did the threat get close enough to touch you? Was there a verbal escalation you didn't act on early enough? A position you held too long? A space you walked into without reading it first?

None of that is blame. It's diagnostic. The best answer to "what do I do when I'm armed and going hands-on" is "let's figure out what has to go right so you never get there." That's not avoiding the question. That's the more important version of it.

He kept adding what-ifs. What if there's more than one guy. What if they're bigger. What if this, what if that. People do this naturally and it's not wrong to think through variables. But infinite what-ifs build impossible scenarios that produce paralysis instead of preparation. The better question underneath all of them was the one he started with, and it deserved a real answer. So here it is.

Here's the practical version. You're carrying a lethal option. A non-lethal threat is in front of you and closing. You don't have justification to draw. Now what?

Most people carrying a firearm have exactly one option in that scenario: go hands-on with a lethal tool on their hip and hope the situation doesn't escalate into a retention problem. That's a significant gap, and it exists because most people who carry think about their firearm as their defensive tool and stop there.

The tool that closes that gap is pepper spray. A ranged, non-lethal option that creates distance and buys time before the lethal option becomes relevant. It's not a replacement for the firearm. It's the option that keeps you from having to choose between doing nothing and drawing a gun in a situation that doesn't legally or tactically justify it.

The part most people skip entirely: training with it. Pepper spray carried but never practiced is almost as useless as not carrying it. Drawing under stress, deploying accurately, and creating distance after deployment are all perishable skills. They require reps just like anything else.

I'll link to some solid pepper spray options and inert training sprays at the end of this email. The training spray is the piece most people overlook. Get one and actually use it before you need the real thing.

The question my training partner was really asking, underneath the retention question, was this: how do you manage a non-lethal hands-on situation when you're carrying a lethal option?

That's the right question and it has a clear framework. These are two genuinely different problems and treating them as one is where the thinking breaks down.

Lethal threat closing on you: your priority is neutralizing that threat before it gets to you. The decision to draw has already been made by the nature of the threat. The firearm is the right tool. Retention matters because you're in close quarters with someone who wants to hurt you badly, and that context shapes everything about how you move and position.

Non-lethal threat at close range: this is the more complex situation and the more common one. You have a firearm you're not legally or tactically justified in drawing. Going hands-on with it on your hip creates a retention risk you've introduced into a situation that didn't require it. Your options here are distance, less-lethal tools, and verbal commands, roughly in that order. If the situation escalates to lethal, the framework shifts. But until it does, you're managing a non-lethal problem with non-lethal tools while keeping your lethal option protected and accessible.

The firearm is not the answer to every problem. It's the answer to a specific category of problem. Knowing the difference before the moment arrives is the framework.

The most useful thing you can do with a scenario like the one my training partner described is run it backwards. Not forward into increasingly complex what-ifs, but backwards into the sequence of decisions that produced it.

You're armed and hands-on. Work back. How did physical contact happen? The threat had to get within arm's reach. How did that happen? You were either in a space that made distance impossible, or you didn't create distance when you had the opportunity, or the threat closed faster than you read it. Any of those is a decision point that existed before the retention question became relevant.

Go back further. Why were you in that space? What did you miss on the way in? Was there an escalation pattern you didn't read early enough? A baseline deviation you discounted?

This isn't about assigning blame after the fact. It's about locating the decision points that exist before the crisis so you can train against them rather than only training for what to do once the crisis is fully developed. The further back you can push your intervention, the more options you have and the less force any of them require.

If you carry a firearm and you don't have a less-lethal option on you, you have a gap in your defensive toolkit that most people don't think about until a situation forces the question.

This week: if you don't carry pepper spray, add it. If you do carry it but you've never trained with an inert version under any kind of pressure, order a training spray and get some reps in. It's a five-dollar fix to a significant gap.

Links to solid options below.

POM Inert Trainer

POM Pepper Spray

Do you carry a less-lethal option alongside your firearm? Hit reply and tell me what you carry and why. I read every one.

Share the Brief: If this was useful, forward it to one person who should be reading it. That's how we grow this — one capable civilian at a time.

Stay capable.
Colin Lepiscopo
Founder, Model Civilian
10% of all Model Civilian proceeds go to We Get Water 💧