By Sam Hoober, Alien Gear Holsters

One of the tropes that gun people will argue from time to time is whether your concealed carry gun should be cheap. The idea is that since any firearm used in a defensive shooting will likely find itself in an evidence locker – and probably for some time, if not forever – and as a result, you shouldn’t spend too much. Any heirloom guns, safe queens or range toys need to stay safely locked away.

The standard retorts, which are certainly valid, take one of two forms.

You should buy the best pistol you can. After all, you don’t buy a cheap car to just run it into the ground and not care, do you? Buy a quality pistol so you can depend on it when it counts.

The alternate version is to buy the best gun you can afford. Since a gun is a tool it does have to be capable of reliably doing the job that it’s made for. You don’t have to spend top dollar, but you should be prepared to invest a little.

There is a difference between a cheap gun and an inexpensive gun. The former is shoddily built and is obviously so. The materials aren’t very good and anyone can tell when they hold it. You don’t have to pay much for it and there is a reason for that. Many examples of “Saturday Night Special” are precisely this kind of gun; small, badly-made pistols that are terrible to shoot and don’t do so reliably. You only pay a few bucks for them and you can tell why in moments.

An inexpensive gun, however, may lack attention to detail that more expensive examples had paid to them in the manufacturing process. Or it may be a functional gun that’s just a little beat up from use and was purchased new.

You probably shouldn’t bet your life on a cheap gun, no. However, there are plenty of inexpensive guns that you absolutely CAN bet your life on.

If asked for my opinion – which isn’t always that interesting – I’d say that $250 is about the bare minimum amount you should plan to spend. You might find a few examples of a dependable carry gun for a little bit (not much) less than that, but it isn’t terribly common. At that price point, there are a couple bargain brands that the snobs leer at but generally hold up well enough.

Laugh if you want, but a lot more people than you think carry a Taurus. Those PT740 Slim and PT111 G2 pistols are mighty popular.

That’s also about the price point to pick up a used example of the more conventional makes/models of carry gun of today. A lot of police trade-ins go for about that amount, and you won’t find too many people naysaying an M&P40, Glock 19 or – in some rarer cases – a Model 10 revolver.

So, you shouldn’t buy a cheap gun, no. But do you really need to spend all that much to get a capable carry gun? Not at all.

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Sam Hoober is Contributing Editor for AlienGearHolsters.com, a subsidiary of Hayden, ID, based Tedder Industries, where he writes about gun accessories, gun safety, open and concealed carry tips. Click here to visit aliengearholsters.com.