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often consider a knife as a weapon-retention tool. Many will quickly boast that “I carry a knife to cut someone off my gun” but unfortunately, most have never actually trained to draw and use their knives in this capacity. Sadly, many folks who carry concealed —
including civilian CCW permit holders — will spout the same cliché because, well, that’s what gun guys do. It’s important to remember the op- erative term in concealed carry is concealed. Your primary defense against a gun grab is the bad guy should never know you’re carrying a gun. If you happen to carry openly while on-duty as
an armed professional and concealed when off- duty or on special assignment, you should have thought about making your styles of carry as com- plimentary as possible. For example, a strong-side belt carry and a strong-side IWB carry are close enough that your drawstroke for each will share many common body mechanics, reducing the need to “change gears” between carries. With that concept in mind, it makes sense
that your knife carry and drawstroke should also follow suit. Therefore, carrying your knife somewhere on your strong side would make the most sense, provided of course that you both shoot and wield your knife most effectively with your dominant hand.
When To Draw Your Knife? The idea of structuring your gun and knife
draws to share the same mechanics should sup- port your use of the knife in most circumstances. To fully understand the logic of doing that, it’s wise to think about when you would be likely to draw your knife. The fi rst and most obvious circumstance
would be when you are not actually carrying your gun. Again, the gun cliché crowd will argue that they’re always packing, all the time. If that’s truly the case, great. However, even gun guys have to travel once in a while. If you should end up travel- ing overseas, to a state where you don’t have reci- procity for your CCW or even to a local, non-per- missive environment where guns are not allowed, your knife may end up becoming your defensive weapon. In those circumstances, your training and refl exes should allow you to seamlessly tran- sition from “gun mode” to “knife mode.” Another conceivable situation where you might
draw your knife is when your gun has suffered a catastrophic malfunction or you have exhausted your ammo supply without stopping all the bad guys. In this scenario, replicating your gun
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A proper drawstroke should take into account the realities of a close-quarters attack. A solid guard with the non-dominant hand shields the head and neck, two of the most likely targets of a contact-distance-weapon attack. The guarding action also “feeds” the motion of the drawing hand.
Here, the same guard and draw- stroke mechanics are used to support the deployment of a fi xed- blade knife from an appendix carry.
Michael Janich
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