Concealment season starts this week. Your draw stroke didn’t get the memo.
Denver’s average first freeze is October 7.
That’s the week a lot of Colorado permit holders quietly decide carrying just got easier. Bigger coat, more room, nobody’s going to print through a jacket.
They’re right about the concealment. They’re wrong about the gun.
The coat that hides your pistol from everyone else hides it from you, too. And most people won’t find that out until the one time it matters.
Why this is a problem now
Colorado issued 27,901 new concealed handgun permits last year, and renewed another 21,871. That count is missing four counties, so the real number is higher.
If you got your permit in the last twelve months, there’s a good chance you have never drawn your gun through a winter coat. Not once. You qualified in whatever you wore to class, you practiced at home in a T-shirt, and all summer your cover garment was one layer of cotton.
Now it’s three layers, a zipper, and maybe gloves.
Nothing about the gun changed. Everything about getting to it did.
What actually goes wrong
I’ve spent 32+ years teaching people to shoot, and the failures in cold weather are predictable. They aren’t marksmanship failures. The shooting is fine once the gun comes out. It’s getting the gun out that falls apart.
The sweep misses. With an open coat, your strong hand has to sweep the garment back far enough to clear the grip. A T-shirt moves when you touch it. A heavy coat has weight and swing, and if the sweep is short it falls right back over the gun while your hand is reaching for it.
The zipper wins. With a closed coat, a one-handed draw doesn’t exist. Your support hand has to grab the hem and pull it up toward your chest while your strong hand goes in underneath. If you’ve never practiced that, your hands will try to do the summer draw, and the summer draw ends with a fistful of jacket.
The gloves don’t fit the trigger guard. A winter glove can be too thick to get your finger into the guard cleanly, and too thick to feel where the trigger is. That’s two problems: you can’t fire when you need to, and you can’t be sure where your finger is when you don’t.
The gun moves. People change carry position for the season. The gun goes into a coat pocket because it’s easier to reach. Then the coat goes on a hook at a restaurant, or over a chair, or into a back seat. A gun in a coat pocket leaves with the coat.
It is always interesting to see students finally applying the techniques that I teach for the first time. In my advanced concealed carry training, students come in with what they plan to wear to conceal a weapon, and the results are sometimes interesting. If you plan to carry, it is a lifestyle change.
The reholster is where people get hurt
Drawing slowly costs you time. Reholstering carelessly costs you more.
Most carry pistols today have no manual safety. On a striker-fired gun, the holster is the safety. It covers the trigger guard completely and stays on the gun until the gun is in your hand.
Winter adds things that can get between the gun and the holster: a coat hem, a drawstring, a toggle, the edge of a fleece. If any of it rides into the trigger guard as the gun goes back in, the holster pushes it against the trigger.
This is why the Marine Corps rule is written the way it is. Keep your finger straight and off the trigger until you are ready to fire. In winter, your finger isn’t the only thing that can reach the trigger.
So you reholster slowly. Clear the coat out of the way with your support hand. Look the gun into the holster. If it doesn’t seat easily, stop and find out why. Never force it.
There is no emergency that requires you to holster fast.
What to do this week
1. Carry in what you actually wear. Put on the coat you’ll wear most this winter, and the holster and gun exactly as you’ll carry them. Not your range jacket. Your real coat.
2. Dry practice, unloaded, in that coat. Unload the gun, verify it’s empty, and put the ammunition in another room. Then do it slowly:
- Coat open: sweep, grip, draw, present. Ten times.
- Coat zipped: support hand pulls the hem to your chest, strong hand draws. Ten times.
- Seated in the car with the seatbelt on. Ten times.
- Every reholster: clear the garment, look it in.
Slow is the point. You’re building the path, not the speed.
3. Do it again in gloves. If your gloves won’t let you get a finger into the trigger guard and feel the trigger, you need different gloves, or a plan to take one off. Find out now, not later.
4. Pick the coat for the gun. If you can’t draw cleanly through your coat after a week of practice, the fix isn’t hoping. Snaps open faster than zippers. A shorter coat clears faster than a long one. Sometimes the answer is a different coat.
5. Decide the coat-pocket question before winter decides it for you. If the gun goes in a coat pocket, it needs a pocket holster that covers the trigger guard, and you need a rule for what happens when the coat comes off. If you don’t have that rule, the gun stays on your body.
6. Then take it to the range. Dry practice builds the movement. Live fire tells you whether it holds up. If your range allows drawing from the holster, shoot your first strings of the season in the coat you’ll be wearing.
The standard
Concealment is easy in the winter. Access is not.
The gun you can’t reach when it matters might as well be at home. The test isn’t whether you can shoot well. It’s whether you can get to the gun, in what you’re wearing, without thinking about it, and get it back in the holster without hurting yourself.
That takes repetition in the clothes you live in. It doesn’t take long, and it doesn’t take talent. It takes doing it before the day you need it.
If you want help building that draw, or deciding what to carry and how to carry it this winter, that’s what I teach.
John Rader
Colorado Tactics, LLC
Slow is smooth… Smooth is FAST!
720-464-SHOT | 720-464-7468
Sources
- National Weather Service Boulder, “Denver Fall and Winter Statistics” (average first freeze: October 7) — weather.gov
- Complete Colorado, “Nearly 28,000 new Colorado concealed carry permits in 2025,” March 9, 2026 — completecolorado.com
- County Sheriffs of Colorado, 2025 Concealed Handgun Permit Report — cdn.myocv.com