Carrots wrote:Can anyone else either talk me into, or against this? I probably have a four month wait on my plastic and so this is hardly urgent, but I will be trying out various things at home for a few weeks. Obviously wandering around the house doing this will be rather a skewed 'road test' as it will probably work just fine, and with that said there will be no point in going through the motions of this if I can be persuaded that it is a bad idea for the real world before I start.
Of all possible waist-area carry positions, SOB is my least favorite. IMHO, it has very little going for it, and a whole lot that's problematic.
Without going into a lot of detail here, I can at least bullet my reasons for you...and I'll leave out "what if you fall on your back"; I believe that's the weakest of the reasons against, anyway.
Something I firmly believe CHLs should train for, but seldom do, is close-quarters defense. Statistics show that in an outside-the-home scenario, up to 80% of the encounters will launch at distances of 6 feet or less. What you want to develop is a combat drawstroke that has the lowest probability of being fouled by a bad guy grabbing your arm or jamming your body. That means a drawstroke with the fewest number of moving parts and the greatest degree of joint integrity. Speed doesn't hurt, either.
Again it's only MHO, but small-of-back carry is the worst possible choice under those conditions. It has more moving parts to the drawstroke than any other waistband carry option. Try it in slow motion, conscious of all the arcs and distances your hand and the muzzle of your pistol are traveling. To bring the gun to bear in a retention-fire position (indexed against your ribcage below you pectoral muscle and canted slightly outward) from a three-o'clock carry, the muzzle will travel somewhere between 7 and 12 total inches. My guess on an SOB draw is that the muzzle will travel somewhere between 24 and 34 inches.
Too, to get to the firearm you need to articulate the shoulder, elbow, and wrist. You essentially have to put yourself into a wrestler's arm-lock for a moment. Compared to a draw from three o'clock (and I just use that for comparison because it's right on the mid-line), fouling an SOB draw requires much less precise timing, and virtually no strength. All the bad guy really has to do is put his hand on your elbow once your forearm is behind your back, and he's basically just taking advantage of the arm-lock you voluntarily put yourself in.
If you ever have to fight to retain your gun in holster, anything farther back than a four o'clock position leaves you pretty much out in the cold. You have no body parts readily available to clamp down on the weapon or block access to the grip. Your elbow and forearm are your friends if this ever happens, and SOB carry leaves you with only one real option: get away. If you get tied up in a clinch, you really have no way to protect that gun.
Also keep in mind that it's probably more common today than it was 10 years ago for the wolves to travel in packs. You're probably not going to be shaken down by a lone homeless guy with a knife; it's likely going to be two or more punks working together to rob you to get drug money. Multiply by two the concern over the ability to foul a drawstroke and to retain the gun in holster.
If you SOB carry with the pistol heavily canted toward your strong side, this next is less of an issue. The first rule of a reliable drawstroke is securing a solid, three-finger master grip on the gun
before it comes out of the holster. Under the stress of a life-threatening encounter, the last thing you want is to bobble the draw and drop your gun...or worse, fumble it and end up shooting yourself. If you carry SOB with a pretty much vertical cant, the only way to get any grip at all on the gun is to articulate your wrist pretty much as far as far as it will go,
and you've got to sweep your hand underneath the concealment garment but
between the gun and your back before you can even attempt that. With a three o'clock carry, the meat of your hand is outside the gun. With SOB, you have to get the meat of your hand between your body and the gun.
So with SOB carry, I'd say you have two important mechanical factors working against you in trying to satisfy that first rule of a reliable drawstroke.
Once you obtain a grip on the gun--under extreme stress, remember (there's a recent Topic on this): your adrenal gland just did it's thing and your blood pressure went through the roof, your heart and respiration spiked, your skin went a lighter shade of pale because the peripheral blood vessels contracted, and you've lost some of your fine motor control--you now have to get the gun out of the holster, around your body (your arm sticking out like a chicken wing), then swing your elbow in and rotate the gun to bring it generally on target...all the while, hopefully, without dropping the thing or letting the muzzle sweep your body or that of a possible bystander.
All in all, not the best recipe to keep Murphy and his laws at bay.
Last up is the matter of training and practice. You can certainly dry-fire in your home from SOB all day long, but live fire is another matter. I've had the good fortune to take courses from a number of different trainers and organizations, and SOB carry is usually disallowed due to the inherent safety hazard of that long, circuitous muzzle sweep. Likewise, practical shooting sports like IDPA prohibit SOB for the same reason.
Your goal should be to ingrain your drawstroke to the level of unconscious competence--where you can execute it perfectly without thinking, whether standing still or on the move--and choosing SOB means that you will be limiting your ability to train and practice.
As always, my opinions are entirely free. So you get exactly what you pay for.
but know some that do. 
