Responders to the Westgate Shopping Center attack in Nairobi… Hat tip to GJM for finding this Reuters pic and noting the IDPA logo on the middle guy’s vest. So much for the old saw about no one ever wearing those vests “for real” outside of matches, I guess. Now it’s official counter-terrorism chic.
Train hard & stay safe! ToddG
(photo from Reuters)
Does this mean I can start wearing my brown leather CCW fanny pack again too? Not quite Coyote Brown or FDE but it’s close enough.
Lomshek — Only if your CCW Badge is gold. Brown & silver often clash. And don’t forget to wear your matching shoes!
I wore one daily on a high end protection gig for a year. With the amount of gear we carried it was a must have. At least I wore one of the really cool high end safari ones with a padded shoulder pad and everything.
Now, be careful with the fanny pack stuff….you’ll have both me and tpd223 to deal with. We have found that if you add a designer dog on a leash with the fanny pack, you get pegged as something other than carrying a gun.
Still the quintessential “shoot me first vest” now reinforced by popular media as militants will still know who to shoot on sight.
I saw about 50 of the pics from this. Now, understand, I’m not trying to be hyper critical, but there were a whole lot of good guys with the trigger fingers inside the trigger guard, while moving. It happens A LOT, under stress. I just posted this because it reminded me once again how important it ALWAYS IS to train the way you intend to act, under combat stress. Too many of these guys are used to having their finger inside that guard, on a normal basis, so that it didn’t feel odd for it to be there in the heat of the battle. The pic in this post is what it should look like. That dude’s IDPA vest may actually be saying a whole lot about his professionalism.
Look where his finger is not!
There were many street-level beat cops armed only with their handguns, and some with old rifles or MP5s, that maintained excellent trigger discipline, and saved a lot of people.
None of them were 300lb donut receptacles, either..
I’ve only been to South Africa on a casual/hunting basis, but it seems to me that the vests would just “fit in” better there. The outdoors type folks wear a lot of khaki vice camo. I think the temperature and lifestyle are more conducive to it. JM2C.
I’m betting vest guy is carrying a bit more gear than a lot of the other good guys in these pics, including a bunch of the uniformed coppers who appear to have a folding stock AK and nothing else, no pistol, no reload….
Chuck — Don’t hold that against them, they’re just on their way to Starbucks.
Vest guy is going to get shot first…
I just rolled through the full Reuters slideshow — how are they discriminating? The “armed police” and security seem to be in every possible motley assortment of civilian dress; false positive and false negative errors would seem much too easy.
Notice the trigger finger discipline of our vest friend compared to the others.
What the caption doesn’t mention is that dude isn’t pointing at a threat. He’s giving a procedural to the guy on his left for not using cover.
Dang, after reading all of the sage advice of the internet commandos, I’m surprised the guy with the vest on is still alive. Maybe the terrorists couldn’t count and he was shot second, not first.
I wonder whether the guy with the vest is an Israeli, as they appear to have been part of the good guy group.
@jj- LMAO. If only the photo was taken with a wider angle lens, they would have shown he was wearing cleats also- thus rendering them IDPA legal.
You think the bad guys at that mall know/knew what IDPA is? No one outside of the shooting community here in the states knows what it is, or cares.
This is why I always wear a tan boonie hat with fishing flies hooked all around the crown. The vest conceals the weapons, the hat conceals the vest.
That guy looks to be about 70 years old, plus or minus 5. That’s on the young side for a man wearing a vest in public.