If you’ve been around firearms for any amount of time, then you’ve at least heard the name “Glock” and know about the concept of concealed carry. What you may not know, however, is that carrying concealed is sometimes a challenge.
Why? Because the whole idea of carrying (other than the fact that you are armed at all times) is that the firearm is actually concealed, meaning that no one else knows that you have it on your person. That’s sometimes easier said than done with pistols that are large enough to be practically used for self-defense being also too large to hide.
So, what do you do? One option is to modify your pistol so that it is smaller and easier to hide than it would otherwise be. Take the Glock 17, for example. As Tamara Keel explains,
It’s a fairly popular concealed carry gun in some circles, but it certainly wasn’t designed for concealed carry. It was designed to win the Austrian service pistol contract and get carried around on web belts by officers, MPs, and the like.
It isn’t just Keel, though, who wanted to look for other ways to make carrying concealed easier. Keel continues,
It was the difficulty of shooting these little concealment guns well that was one of the first things that came to mind when inventor Mike Full read the news of the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater massacre back in 2012. Full started out carrying a Glock 19, the gun that’s pretty much the standard industry answer to “What gun should I carry?” but he found it difficult to conceal when carried outside the waistband and uncomfortable to carry inside the waistband.
Keel further notes,
Being not only a gun fan, but a movie buff who likes to go to the theater with his family, Full read the news of the Aurora mass shooting and imagined what could only be called a nightmare scenario. Trying to engage a body armor-clad, rifle-bearing shooter from halfway across a darkened movie theater is hard enough. But doing it with a six-shot, 9mm subcompact is a scenario that even the best-trained shooter would find somewhere on the scale between daunting and next-to-impossible, he reasoned. That was the genesis of what became the Full Conceal M3D.
So, what can you do? Well, if you’re Mike Full, you invent the M3D modification in which “the trigger guard is replaced with a hinged assembly that collapses flat between the grip and dust cover.” As you can see in the picture above, this allows you to “fold” the pistol into a smaller package, making it much easier to carry concealed.
A nice bonus feature is that, when folded, the M3D modification creates a situation in which “the trigger bar is locked in place, and the trigger shoe is folded up and completely covered.” In other words, this modification may make your Glock actually safer to carry than in a conventional holster. You’ll still probably need cargo pants or cargo shorts, though.
If this pistol interests you, you can purchase already modified Glocks or kits to modify a Glock which you already own (only for certain models).