Surprisingly, the good people at cracked.com were nice enough to pay me for some of my sillier stories. Swell folks they are. A comment in the comments section (the seedy underbelly of any website) inspired me to write this bonus entry:
Holding your light and gun to look like a badass:
In movies you typically see:
And even more surprisingly you'll see them walking around, oblivious to the gun next to their face. Apparently the movie cop is unaware that adrenaline can and likely will cause them to jerk the trigger accidentally before they have a moment to get sights on anything. So now you're left with one functioning eye and ear. I can sort of understand why they do this. Tight camera shots of the hero(ine) are good, and adding a gun to that illustrates that this is a badass hero(ine), but it leads to terrible practices.
So how do they actually do things? Well, if you're old school, you adopt what is known as modified Harries technique:
Credit to
There are other techniques, example of which you'll see in the photo credit link.
If you're not, there are companies like surefire and streamlight that will gladly take your money to mount a light under your gun.
I can hear you asking: But do I hold this light up to my head? No (unless you're practicing the neck index, which always seemed like putting a target on your neck in the dark) you hold it either out from your body, as in the photo above, or very close in if you practice things like Center Axis Relock.
When actual police search buildings (and this isn't hostage or SWAT type searches, just your normal open building) they search at the low ready position. Both eyes open, gun in hand ready to move to sights position. This allows for a quick transition to firing stance, and keeps the barrel pointed into the unknown, which is where any threats are likely to come from.
Edit: Based on the pictures I forgot to say "Keep your damned fingers off the trigger"
