Welcome to the forum.knauck wrote:Also...does anyone who carries on this board ride a motorcycle? If so, where do you carry? I'd like an 'inside the waistband' that's in the 'front', but I can't see how that'd work straddling a streetbike.
I don't ride any longer.....simply because I can't afford a new bike and my old one got destroyed, and it's been so long that I've gotten past the NEED part of "need to ride".....but I had a lot of years of sport bike riding/roadracing experience at one time back in SoCal. I was one of those "always wear your gear, even when it's hot and uncomfortable" kind of guys....and I likely still would be today if I had a bike. I have considered how I would carry if I were riding today, and the conclusion I've come up with is some sort of variation on shoulder holster carry. If the weather is cold, I would just use my Galco Miami Classic rig under a jacket and carry a mid-to-large framed semiauto, and just keep the jacket on. If the weather is hot, I would use something like a Kangaroo Carry or an UnderArmor shirt with gun "pockets" under a lighter shirt and jacket and remove the jacket.....or maybe something like this: http://www.guntuck.com/.
E.Marquez mentioned the possibility of injury if falling while strapped, and I guess you just have to decide whether you'd rather have that bruise on your hip, or on your ribs......but he's right.... there WOULD be a bruise and a pretty good one at that. I've done thousands of racetrack laps and never got tossed even once, but have been down 3X on the street, one of which was a 65 mph get-off on a mountain road (dadgum sand in a corner). That one at speed gave me a deep tissue hematoma right over the greater trochanter of my right hip that lamed me up pretty good for a couple of weeks.....crutches and everything. I lowsided in a tight right hander, but because of the steep camber of the highway I slid off to the inside of the turn rather than the outside and slid over a bunch of golf-ball to baseball-sized rocks in the dirt there. I was wearing my racing leathers at the time. One rock actually punched a small hole through the leather over my right hip. It didn't get through the padding or inner lining, but it was angular enough to bruise me really deeply. I can't imagine if there had been a hard angular gun there to land on too. The rock that did it to me was hard enough. I want to point out that the get-off itself was not particularly painful. I was dressed for it and had rehearsed many times in my mind what I should do if I low-sided. The transition from being leaned over in a pleasing turn at a brisk clip on a nice mountain road, to realizing that it was time to let go of the bars, flatten out on my back, and ride out the slide, was a smooth, slow-mo, and suprisingly calm transition. The bad part was what happened after I was down, not what happened on the way down, and that part I had no particular control over other than to remember to lay flat, ride it out, and then don't be too quick to jump to my feet before doing a fingers/toes, ankles/wrists, knees/elbows inventory to make sure everything was still working.
None of this is an argument against carrying when you ride, and the decision to A) ride, and B) what to wear when you're riding is an intensely personal one; but as always you should at least consider the common sense of something before doing that thing. And then after having given it sober thought, you either do or don't do that thing......like the decision to wear/not wear a helmet.
Me personally, I have enough pain in my life, but almost all of it is along the arc of my pelvis on either side and across the small of my back—where I have an 8" long surgical scar with a bunch of metal parts not too far under the skin. Just the thought of landing on a pistol anywhere along that arc makes me wince, particularly in the SOB position. On the other hand, I have little or no pain in my ribs on any given day, so under the shoulder carry up against my side seems like a good alternative from that standpoint, and it also seems like it might be easier to conceal that way while riding.
Just my 2¢.