6-Jan-14 – 12:47 by ToddG

From Chuck Haggard at pistol-forum.com:

Completely discounting the trigger finger issue, the actual quality and design of the product makes it unsuitable for serious use in my experience. Too many people likely only use a Serpa in rather sterile environments and never get a clue.

I started out liking the system. A friend who is also one of my training gurus was heavily involved in design and early use of the Serpa. In some venues, like ground fighting in the mat room, we found that the Serpa was far less likely to lose the gun all by itself when other quality holsters like the Safariland 6280 types would often dump the gun while rolling.

I have actually used the system, hard, daily, for about three years, so unlike a lot of the “Serpa sucks” crowd I am speaking from a pretty good depth of experience.

Issues:

Durability- the Serpa does not stand up to serious gun grabs in training, no reason to think it will do better in a real attack. I have seen Serpas break off of the belt loop or paddle just from people sitting down and catching the butt of the pistol on the back of a chair.

Retention- without the Serpa lock the holster has none. The issue is that the spring that runs the Serpa lock can not be inspected, it can not be serviced, and when it breaks you have a holster that is a rattley gun bucket with zero retention from even mild physical activity.

I have had three of these springs break on me due to daily use of the holster, two on the “concealment” version and one of the level 2 duty holster.

There is no fix, it breaks without warning, and if it breaks while, I dunno, you are out on the street at 0300hrs working a burglary in-progress call, then you have zero retention on your duty gun until you can get back to the station or home and put a new holster on your belt. Don’t try this at home, it sucks.

Holster jams/debris issue- these are legion. There are so many cases of this happening with the Serpa in venues ranging from sand to dirt to snow that I believe it is criminal negligence for the Serpa system to be issued to troops.

Yeah, a 6280 can also jam with sand, but it is far less likely to do so, and it if does I don’t need tin snips and a friend in order to get my gun out. I can do a quick slice with my cool guy knife and my pistol is out.

Then there is the issue of the trigger finger activation of the release. Even squared away guys who have all of their crap in one bag, like Todd Jarrett, often miss the Serpa lock on the draw and have to double pump the gun to get it out of the holster. Todd can do this really fast, but it still happens. You can find it on video if you look. I found after two-three years of work I was never able to hit the Serpa 100% of the time.

I have not seen any live fire AD/NDs with a Serpa, but I have seen two cases during FoF where guys plinked themselves with either a Sim gun or airsoft. With marking rounds that is just funny, live rounds not so much.

And those are among the many reasons why SERPA holsters are not allowed at pistol-training.com classes or events.

Train hard & stay safe! ToddG