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Lanyard
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Lanyard love - Tactical advantage: tips and training on tactics, guns and equipment
Author: American Handgunner
In the early part of the 20th Century most service pistols were equipped with a lanyard loop. In the era of the horse-mounted cavalry, the lanyard attached to the sidearm made sense. In the WWI trenches, a lanyard could keep your pistol from being lost on the battle field. By WWII the use of the lanyard had begun to fade. American police officers also used the lanyard as a means of retaining the handgun until the mid-1950s when the use nearly ended, except for a few State Police and Highway Patrol agencies that kept it as part of their uniform. Today, few police agencies use lanyards for patrol officers. The fact of the matter is that for many applications, the use of a pistol lanyard has great merit. In the military, the pistol lanyard has seen a bit of a revival. If you are working around water, fast roping from a chopper, or climbing or repelling--keeping your handgun from leaving at an unexpected moment can have real virtue. Early in my SWAT team days, I lost my handgun on an entry and didn't even know it was missing until a little kid came up to me and said, "Dis 'U' gun?" I looked down to see my M1911 pistol in his hand and quickly recovered it, said "Thanks kid," and then looked to see if anyone had seen what had happened. Part of the problem was the nylon tactical holsters that were the standard of the day were notorious for not retaining handguns. Today's excellent Safariland M6004 series of holsters provide a level of speed plus security unheard of 15 years ago. But, after this particular incident, I noted there was a very good reason to have a lanyard on my pistol. |
