Get some!

http://store.trianglekravmaga.com/product/hex-tool

What are your EDC must haves?
Glock 19 and extra mag- EGA "leatherneck" IWB holster
Benchmade Presidio auto folder tanto
Streamlight ProTac 1L 110 lumen
Monkeys Fist extendable key chain (steel ball bearing woven in)

What's in your pocket?

Thanks Nate- good stuff right there

I'm really a fan of Trijicon sights. They really take a beating! I've broken Glock plastic sights clean off my guns racking them against barricades and such during 1 hand re-loads-

Notice the difference in my carry gun with the standard sights and my backup carry gun with the set back sights. That 1/4 of an inch set back makes a world of difference in sight radius. On my Glock 34 it's like using the irons on a SBR! ;)

The orange hi vis sight is on the Glock 34

Molot Super Vepr .308- this dude is a brain surgeon! Even with me behind the wheel out to 600 meters! Haven't got to reach out any further than that yet but looking forward to seeing what she can do! There's just something about these commie rifles!

Troy Defense 556 carbine- took her out for a spin last week and dialed her in! Surprisingly accurate with low bid ammo. Love the glass in the Nikon! I think all those years of building cameras has taught nikon a thing or two about making crystal clear lenses! We will see how she holds up!

The beloved Frankengun 14.5'sh AR15- this gun has followed me around the world and never failed to deliver an appropriate ass whoopin when called upon- enough said! However the trigger group began feeling a little crappy on it last range day (prolly close to 100k rounds on the lower, so I popped on a BRO drop in trigger group for it and some no walk pins. She may even finally get an ambi selector.

Mossberg 500 Flex- just a danged old shotgun gents!

People keep asking how I fealt about the ferguson mess. I put it in a letter form.

Dear P.O. Wilson,
Everybody thinks they know what it takes to be a lion until it comes time to do lion crap. I don’t care what will be said about you in the years to come or what kind of precedents your “lion crap” sets for me in the future, I’m glad you’re alive today. Truth is you staunched up and took the fight to the ass hole and that my friend opens up my shotgun seat to you any day brother!

You see people don’t get it, and they never will. People expect us to do great things out there and don’t even consider how it happens until crap goes awry. The vast majority of people have never stood toe to toe with a physically imposing ass hole, hopped up on dope, staring through you as if your very existence on this earth is of no consequence to them and survived to tell about it. I hope they never have to.
 
You prevented the death of a police officer that day and unfortunately, it seems, the entire damn world lost their “baby boy”. Had you died that day, instead of Mike Brown, only a small community of your family and comrades would have mourned your loss for any period of time, and 25 years from now Mike Brown would be out on parole. It is a sad state of affairs, isn’t it buddy? We are overwhelmingly de-valued every day and for some that is a hard pill to swallow. However, we drive on!

Our lives are of no real value to the majority of people. The communities we protect all too often see us as expendable. Sure they will pretend to mourn briefly, but the fact remains, our line cars will have a fresh ass in the seat before they fold our flag. I heard the other day from a certain societal derelict that I, “can’t boast about putting my life on the line on one hand and then expect to be able to defend myself with the other”… What kind of bull crap is that?

Being brutally honest here, I don’t think of Mike Brown’s death as a tragedy. I truly believe after seeing the evidence at hand and reading your testimony the worst possible tragedy was averted. What is truly tragic here is we are challenged with protecting a society who can’t see the forest for the damn trees! It’s a true tragedy we had this ass hole raised up to believe things people work hard for are his for the taking by force. It’s a true tragedy we have people exploiting this incident and community for their own personal gain. It’s the truest of tragedy you have to live the rest of your life with the burden of having to have taken a life to protect your own.

The ignorant will continuously second guess you, spew their “expert” bull crap, and ask each other, “How, if he was so scared for his life, could he pursue this man?” Let them; however do not concern yourself with them or their opinions. Remember, "Lions mustn't concern themselves with the opinions of lambs". Make no mistake; You, my friend, are a lion.
Cpl. B. Cornelius

I'm just going to put this right here- Not sure where else to put it. I author a brief which is mostly distributed amongst LE but the theories in some of the briefs are really applicable to the most of us. Just ignore the cop references and focus on the content... (Moderator's note-maybe we could make a section for these?)

Officer involved suicides

I am going to preface this entire brief by saying I am no psychologist or philosopher or any particular caliber of emotional ninja. I am often even described as “black and white” or “emotionally unattached” or, “lacking emotion”. Sound like anyone else you know? Much like the readership here, I have sat through countless hours of death by power point on emotional survival and suicide prevention. I have even said to myself, “If I have to sit through one more of these classes, I might just kill myself to make a freaking point”. All of that aside, this is not a brief about not killing yourself. You can get that somewhere else. This is a brief about why officers kill themselves and how we should respond to it. I’ll try not to get all touchy feely here. If I do slap me around in reply! I realize suicide is not a laughing matter, but forgive my political incorrectness if I crack a joke here and there. We would do it in the squad so cut me some slack on this platform.

We deal with the scum of the earth and the by-product of the scum of the earth on a daily basis. Rarely in the course of events do people call us to tell us about how good of a day they had and to offer us an intelligent conversation on… anything. If this happens to you, let me know where you work because I’m going to put in my application. We deal with this day in and day out sandwiched with long periods of pure boredom and trying not to wreck our cars. People expect us to bring instantaneous order to situations that took twenty years to culminate.

Elderly death scenes, infant death scenes, fatality car accidents involving entire families and other situations that spike your adrenaline output higher than the majority of the world will ever understand is the manner in which we roll. Now I hate to make a generalized statement here, but the majority of cops I know don’t have fleeting thoughts of suicide when you sit down in a car after a hot call. Maybe later, you might want to kill yourself to save yourself from the paperwork but it’s generally not these events that shake us… initially.
But they do pay a toll. Your brain, your emotions, your feelings are like any other part of your body that’s subject to trauma. I’m not talking about stress. We shake off stress. Trauma leaves a mark. If you don’t believe this, you are ignorant. Go drink some beers and come back and tell me if you don’t feel a little different, then we will go get your head examined because you are a rare case my friend. Let me paint you a picture.

Tackleberry is high speed low drag copper/swat operator, with ten years on the job. He’s seen a thing or two. He has the occasional nightmares of the room full of dead bodies or the greyhound bus involved in a fender bender in which he has to collect information from ALL of the passenger’s on, but other than that he’s pretty boring. Tackleberry is generally well liked amongst other officer’s. He’s been described as slightly “high strung” or “wound up tight” but he puts in his hours and goes home to his pretty little misses and babies after every shift and watches his DVR’d play-off games like the rest of us.

One day he finds out he’s been wrote up for violating policy on an arrest he’s made. He doesn’t really think it was a big deal but the administration believes he should be forced to resign or be terminated. Two days later after hearings with city hall he comes home and finds out the little misses is going to leave him and take the babies to Cinci-freaking-nnati to stay with her sister because all of the sudden, she’s “afraid of him”. We can all agree that Tackleberry is sucking right now.
 
In any lesser individual, this would be a breaking point all in itself. But Tackleberry is a big strong tough guy remember, swat operator? High speed low drag type of guy? Tackleberry get’s on the family computer and is searching for some help to deal with his impending disciplinary action and stumbles across a chat log between the little misses and some A-Hole! Tackleberry decides to do what any red blooded American man would do in this situation and he looks for solace in the bottom of a bottle of really expensive bourbon his… soon to be… *ex* father in law got him for Christmas one year. The solace at the bottom of the bottle is overshadowed by a billowing rage within him. He sends the estranged little misses some text messages along the lines of “the world would be better off without me” and shuts his phone off. The little misses all of the sudden cares deeply for Tackleberry so she sends his beat brothers to the house to “check his welfare”.

This is where you come in, and this is where you need to be on your “A” game my friend. First we need to understand a little bit about why big tough cops commit suicide. We say it’s a completely selfish act! Tackleberry feels he has no one to account to at this point, how could it be selfish?! We say coppers who kill themselves are cowards! Tackleberry once drug your ass out of a bar when you got knocked the hell out with no regard for his own safety! We say he’s just seeking attention, he won’t do it. Tackleberry knows this is how you are thinking and he just may feel enough peer pressure to carry it out in order not to prove you right. Seasoned cops are hard people; we find this truth to be self evident.

A half a career of events have carved his, mine, our brains into the guy that jokes about how bad the rotting corpse of an unattended death smells in August! A half a career finding ourselves pushing through situations that scare the hell out of us carve our brains into the guy who respects death but doesn’t fear it. Takleberry has the tools and the ability and now the entire shift is screaming silent to rescue their hurting brother and there is nothing more important in their mind! STOP!

We have found the problem! There WERE so many things more important in their minds up until this very moment, nobody bothered to check on him before it got to this point! We all think we are emotionally invincible and all of our coworkers are too. We don’t like to think about the guy who “drug our ass out of the bar when we got knocked out” could be the same guy, crying in his bath tub, about to suck start his Glock!

If you thought this was going to be a brief on tactics, I hope my creative imagery has kept you reading up to this point at least because that was where the butter meets the bread. No tac brief here guys. No critical thinking questions and no learning objective this week. It is something to think about though. Don’t be so situational*ly* aware of things that can hurt you from the outside that it clouds the things that can constantly hurt you on the inside. I heard the term “Cumulative PTSD” mentioned in a power point somewhere, one time, half awake. Basically it’s the culmination of all the bad stuff we deal with taking an emotional toll on us that leaves us weak or susceptible to things happening in our own lives. It’s generally *not* the sequence of work related events that causes us to kill ourselves. These events make us stronger externally, but it weakens the armor, internally and we are confused by this. In a normal course of daily events we may never notice we are a hurting unit. We can shake off the toxic daily happenings. However, when you sustain a catastrophic incident where it happens to you… the things you deal with from the public which aren’t supposed to happen to you… it might just be the trigger which sets the internally catastrophic wrecking ball in motion.

If you are aware of this potential, not only in yourself, but in your fellow brothers and sisters, you may just save a life. You never know when a simple phone call might just become the most meaningful and momentous occasion for a hurting friend. You wouldn’t turn your back on him out in the street, why would you do it now?

Stay Staunch,
Blaine Cornelius

This has been my trusted EDC Rifle for years. This sucker just runs. It's been in a couple different configurations but I keep going back to this flashlight grip adapter from CAA. Light is a streamlight something or other...