This is a brief guide to arm oneself for the purpose of defense. This is the most affordable, practical way to enable one to become as proficient a shooter as possible. Check the notes for potential updates.
This information is largely the result of years of discussion among a group I manage, among my own personal research, and among experience in teaching and developing shooting skills. Our group easily has a century of combined experience coming from numerous backgrounds including national competition, professional instruction, and fields where knowing how to win a gunfight is a vocational skill. We have very meticulous reasons for every single decision made in this process, refined by a lot of trial and error, built on as much empirical data as we can gather. This is a long list. This is the second time I wrote this today. I'll be updating it for clarity and content. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. So, do the following.
Join the Glock Shooting Sport Foundation. For $30, you will be mailed, annually, a coupon good for one purchase of a Glock handgun from Glock's Blue Label discount program.
Go on to Glock's website and use their Blue Label finder to locate a dealer. Look up reviews on the shops you're looking into and contact a few. Shop around a little.
Order a Generation 5 Glock 19 on the Blue Label program by contacting a dealer of choice. These should be $400-500. Mine was $450. Handle one in the store to see how it feels, even rent one first from a rental range if you can. The G19 is the gold standard of a handgun that is both small and light enough to be concealed, but not so small as to sacrifice any shootability versus a full-sized handgun. The Glock is also the easiest and cheapest to supply with parts, accessories, work, etc. Basically anything you could possibly want to do with a Glock can and has been done. You will save a huge amount of money in the long-term by choosing to get a Glock over a budget gun. Unless you are a truly ridiculously sized person, like myself, you don't really need something bigger or smaller.
Buy a TLR-1 HL. A light is non-negotiable on a defensive weapon. You need to see what you're shooting at. The TLR-1HL is the best ratio of performance to cost out there for handgun lights. Buy a box of CR123A batteries.
Buy a box of 124 grain 9mm HSTs or Gold Dots. I would suggest purchasing a couple boxes, in order to shoot some and get a feel for the shooting characteristics of the load and to see how it performs out of your gun. Just get 124gr FMJ for your training ammo. Look up ammo brand reviews on reddit and youtube. Use Ammoseek to find deals on ammunition.
Get a few spare magazines. Your handgun should come with three 15 round magazines. Some states will be limited to 10 round magazines. These are your most reliable magazines, and thus will be what you use for defensive purposes. For training uses, however, I would recommend Magpul's Pmag 21 Glock magazines. Their other magazines are wonderful, it's just the 21 round magazines occupy a somewhat unique position in the aftermarket. Another brand I have experienced no issues with thusfar has been KCI with their current Generation 2 pattern magazines. Label your magazines with numbers, by the way. Just a good way to track malfunctions.
Get a light-bearing concealment holster. Look at Vedder, Henry Holsters, and PHLSTER. You will need one specifically for the weapon light you purchase. PHLSTER also makes the incredible Enigma system which is truly a miraculous tool. I have friends much smaller than me who are able to carry full-sized guns with more ease and comfort than I can thanks to the enigma. Safariland makes fantastic holsters, but these are for professional, range, and competition use, and less important for the barebones nature of this list.
Get a red dot mounted on your pistol. This is the only piece of equipment you can buy that will make an immediate, drastic change in your shooting capability, because it fundamentally simplifies accurate shooting. This is well illustrated by empirical data gathered in the Sage Dynamics Pistol Red Dot Sight Whitepaper, if you need a reference. I will elaborate upon this in the next section.
The purpose of a red dot is to simplify the shooting process. It is a reflection of an LED projected to what is often called an "infinite" parallax. This brings your aiming to a single, fixed focal point rather than the three, constantly-shifting focal points you experience with iron sights. All you do with a red dot is keep both your eyes open, and superimpose the red dot on the thing you want to hit. That's all. It also gives the added benefit of helping you diagnose grip inconsistencies that would impart inaccuracies on your shooting, which is easily the most difficult part of handgun shooting to master. Yet, mounting a red dot is not a standardized process. We need to speak on three options you have to attain this goal.
Option One, is by far the easiest. Spend about $80 extra on the MOS model of the Glock 19, then mount a Holosun SCS to the weapon. This is a purpose-built optic specifically for this handgun. The optic uses automatic brightness adjustment and a power cell that will automatically charge itself via solar panels. It has enough battery capacity to run continuously for years on a single charge, as all Holosun optics do. While it doesn't quite have some more advanced features, this is the ultimate set it and forget it solution.
Option Two would be to mount optics of choice to the MOS system via the mounting plates it was designed for. This is the least ideal, as Glock's factory mounting plates suck and have serious durability problems. Aftermarket solutions are quite popular, however vary in quality considerably. CHPWS is probably the most popular company making these, and they are easily the lowest quality. On the other hand, Forward Controls Design makes quite fantastic mounting plates for various mounting patterns.
Option Three would be to get the standard model of the gun, select your optic, and then send your slide to a machine shop to mill the mounting pattern into the slide of the gun itself. This takes a while, as it is custom work. However, you do end up with the mechanically superior mounting platform, which benefits from extreme durability.
Holosun should be the only optic brand you consider. They make optics of much higher quality than competitors for around half the price. They pioneered a lot of technology that is becoming standard in red dots. Their flagship optics like the SCS and the EPS are around $350, however they really are absolutely worth every penny. Cheaper optics by other manufacturers have a lot of durability issues, as illustrated in the Sage Dynamics Whitepaper. Still, Holosuns come in a few price brackets. Their 407c and 407k optics are typically around $225 and are absolutely fantastic. They lack some features of the more expensive ones, but still come out above any competitors in this price range. Their flagship optics are their slightly older 509t, and their newer EPS and SCS optics. The SCS is typically $350, the 509t is typically $430, and the EPS series ranges from $330 to $450.
The EPS and 509t are the most desirable of the bunch, as they use an enclosed LED emitter instead of an open-emitter design as the others do. The only reason to choose open-emitter over enclosed-emitter design is purely cost related. The largest practical consideration of this is an open-emitter optic runs the risk of having its emitter obstructed by rain or snow, or having its lens fog up or get wet, while an eclosed-emitter would not.
As stated above, every one of these decisions was made for very specific reasons that are quite time consuming to expand upon. Typically discussing the finer details of these concepts on a personal basis is the easiest, as it's complicated, and I will gladly provide help for any questions anyone has. There are a handful of minor deviations to be made on this, yet this truly is as close as you can get to a one-size-fits-all approach. I will also say, this is heavily based on the learning experiences of dozens of people. Everyone I know, myself included, who started with something other than a Glock, has ended up getting a Glock and said "Man I wish I started with a Glock." Similarly, everyone has said "I wish I got this sooner" upon getting a red dot set up on their handgun. My group is trying to elaborate on as much of these as we can in our own whitepaper material, which has been under development for a while. We are also in the process of designing training plans and ironing out all the finer details of a "one-size-fits-all" sort of shopping list to take as much confusion out of it as possible.
