During the 1990s, Mike Lowe, a Boise, Idaho, police trainer, noticed a disturbing statistic: 48 police officers were killed by their own service weapons between the years 1992 and 2001. That number may seem small compared to the number of officers killed in shootouts or car crashes. But Lowe was in a position to see, based on his own trainees' behavior, that many of those deaths could have been prevented. Officers were clearly having problems not with their weapons, but with their holsters. Throughout the next six years, Lowe, through his Boise-based company Tactical Design Labs Inc. (TDL), would conceptualize and design a solution to the problem: The Professional holster.

"Manufacturers have focused on gun retention as a holster feature for the past 12 to 15 years," says Lowe. "This was due to the increase in officer disarming and law enforcement's outcry for a solution. As in many industries, the response was to go directly to the issue — retention — without looking at the totality of the needs." The resulting designs included straps, hoods, pinch retention and clips that locked on to the weapon's trigger guard.

Yet as Lowe trained police recruits and veterans alike, he noticed they were having trouble accessing their guns. To draw, then reholster their weapons, they had to twist or rock them; sometimes they even had to twist their bodies to complete the action. Worse, after drawing the weapon, officers often had to regrip it in order to fire, adding time to their reactions. In training this was a significant enough problem; but the real problem was occurring on the street, in situations that put officers under extreme duress.

"Adrenaline per se doesn't interfere with motor skills. In fact, in many cases it enhances motor performance by making your body faster and stronger," notes Chet Zajac, National Training Alliance (NTA) director at TDL. "However, adrenaline excretion and 'dumps' are part of many physiological effects of a Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) discharge, [which] occurs during a sudden, spontaneous event (like a lethal force event) that's perceived to have severe consequences.

"Adrenaline and the SNS can [therefore] interfere with perception by affecting vision and hearing, thus affecting cognition and decision-making. SNS discharges also affect fine motor skills because of vasoconstriction, [which] redirects blood flow away from the extremities and into the major muscle groups and organs for what's commonly known as a 'fight or flight' response. The fine motor skills involving small muscle groups are therefore less profuse and innervated, so [they] don't function well.

"Additionally, cognitive functions are diminished to being reactive, instead of responsive, due to brain override. [In sum,] fine and complex motor skills diminish under stress, [whereas] gross motor skills continue to function long after fine and complex skills stop."

The Professional focuses not on one aspect of weapons handling, but on all three: access, holster and retention. Furthermore, it eliminates the need for fine motor skills, relying exclusively on gross motor skills to draw the weapon. "We first defined how a holster needs to perform and then set out to design it," says Lowe. Released in July, the holster currently supports all Glock models. Lowe expects it will also support Sig Sauer, Heckler & Koch (H&K), and 1911 models some time this year.

Retention features include:

• A hidden mechanism using the weapon's ejection port to secure it.
• A finger tube providing the only access to the retention device and requiring user-specific knowledge to operate.
• A single protective shroud around the weapon to eliminate open edges.
• Automatic, immediate retention, which doesn't require systematic or intermediate processes to release the weapon.
• Injection molding that ensures the weapon properly fits inside the holster.
• Ruggedness. "You can train as hard as you want with our product and not compromise the integrity of our holster," says Lowe.

Access features include:

• Exclusivity: Access features are known only to the operator.
• Indexing occurs on the gun, not the holster. Rather than train users to work with their holsters, most manufacturers instead rely on product features: namely, an "indexing location," a place on the holster the user must find before using a series of sequential motions to draw the weapon. "Our holster has no such indexing location," notes Lowe. "When you need your pistol from our holster, you index your pistol, not your holster. (We like to say we're not teaching you to draw the holster — it's handgun skills that are required.) To draw from our holster, you use only the skills needed to handle your pistol."
• The holster forces the finger along the gun's frame, so it never needs to be regripped to ensure an accurate firing position. Additionally, the design forces a master/shooting grip for more accurate shooting.
• The holster reduces the operator's risk of drawing the weapon prematurely. "Many officers today draw their weapons when they [only] think they need it, due to the recognition that their holsters require too much time to draw under pressure," says Lowe.

Holstering features include:

• Design to facilitate the weapon's rapid feeding into the holster using a belt loop ramp.
• "No-look," one-handed holstering.
• Automatic retention engagement.
• "The holster builds confidence in transition up and down the force continuum," says Lowe.

Ultimately, these features are a matter of ergonomics — a science that focuses on more than sitting at a computer desk. Tony Senn, TDL's vice president of engineering, speculates the reason manufacturers haven't focused on ergonomics is that no national standard exists for holsters. "Nothing says a holster has to allow an officer to draw and fire within a certain amount of time or has to have a certain strength," he explains. "Some manufacturers have therefore come up with arbitrary levels of retention. However, this doesn't help the officer. Although a Level IV holster may retain the weapon better than a Level I holster, it's also more difficult to draw and reholster."

Lowe says more than 500 law enforcement agencies are currently evaluating the holster. One firearms instructor and range master, Sgt. Dave Douglas of the San Diego (California) Police Department (SDPD), has been using The Professional for about two months. "We use a combination of static line shooting and scenario-based firearms training," he says, "and The Professional performs well all around."

The most significant change has been in speed. "Access is usually the biggest time waster at the range," he says. "With most holsters, you have to undo a snap or snaps, move a lever or a hood, or twist the weapon. But The Professional offers a natural drawing motion. Your finger indexes on the gun at a natural point, and even when you're reholstering, you don't have to rock or twist the weapon to reseat it."

Speed and simplicity are The Professional's hallmarks; the weapon requires only a push to seat it properly inside the holster's retention mechanism. Douglas says it took him about an hour to "get fast" using the holster — to find the finger access and draw without looking every time. "Now I'm working on building muscle memory," he says, "which I estimate generally takes about 2,000 cycles."

Douglas says that as a contributing editor for several police and gun magazines, he's worked with many holsters and has a good command of their strengths and weaknesses. The Professional, he says, has presented no problems at all. "One thing many officers notice about the holster is that it looks bulky," he says. "But after they use it, they realize its overall superiority." He adds The Professional is lighter than most conventional holsters. The "bulky" look comes from the holster's protective shroud.

Because the SDPD keeps a list of authorized products officers can purchase, rather than buy equipment for its officers, part of Douglas' responsibility has been to evaluate the holster for authorization. As a result, a number of officers have expressed interest in The Professional, and will likely switch to it when it becomes available to carry the weapons they use.

Although The Professional is currently only available in a drop-jacket duty belt design, TDL has plans to adapt it for detectives' and tactical teams' use. "For tactical officers, we plan to design it with a drop leg so it will fit under a flak jacket," says Lowe. "For detectives, we're adding a high-rise version, with the holster's protective shroud removed, so it will be more compatible with sitting at a desk. However, it will retain the patrol version's benefit, meaning the officer won't have to move around to access the weapon." The tactical version and desk version will be available soon.

The reason these holsters haven't been released at the same time as the patrol version is that TDL's design team prefers to start from scratch with each version. "Instead of improving it incrementally, copying other manufacturers, we're designing the holsters around performance needs," Lowe explains. "That way, officers who go from one duty to another won't have to develop three different muscle memories, as they do now. The Professional has the same concept no matter where it's used."

Senn adds that TDL walks the fine line between reinventing the wheel and leveraging existing knowledge from having developed previous holsters. He offers the example of the light-bearing gun, which is becoming increasingly popular for K-9 and other officers. "If we took the duty holster we have now and added the ability to accommodate a gun with a light, we'd have extraneous accessories," he says. "But we believe that less is more when talking about reliability. Therefore, we don't have a product that we converted using Band-Aids to hold it together. We have a piece of equipment dedicated to one use."

"Tactical Design Labs is a company that offers a home for law enforcement and military operators who have ideas they feel can increase the health and survivability of law enforcement and [other] operators," says Lowe. "We aren't a new holster company — we're a new kind of company created by law enforcement and military professionals, dedicated to equipment performance that results in increased survivability."

TDL was founded after other holster manufacturers refused to manufacture The Professional. Its design team was hired based on "a variety of skill sets needed to achieve something that had never been designed before," says Lowe, "none of which were related to law enforcement." For example, Senn's 15 years of mechanical engineering experience included an emphasis on injection molding.

The team also includes two other mechanical engineers, a quality engineer, a designer/machinist and a second designer. Although none has direct experience in law enforcement, Senn says a number of them are gun enthusiasts with plenty of experience in sport or other shooting.

As chief technology officer, Lowe has final say over whether the engineers' plans will work in the field. "Chemical compatibility is a good example," says Senn. "We had to get Mike to define a list of chemicals the holster had to be compatible with to retain its functionality. These included gasoline, diesel and kerosene, along with chemicals that can be found in methamphetamine labs and of course gun oil and solvent. After we had these details we were able to select the materials we needed to work with."

Product testing is rigorous. "We keep refining and testing in a circular loop," says Senn, "because we know if the products fail, there could be loss of life. So we first rank each component on a scale of one to five, from mostly cosmetic to mostly functional. We then test in order of the rankings. Each spring, retention clip and fastener goes through a battery of tests before we finally assemble them into the finished prototype, which goes through more tests. We test each component and the finished product at several times its intended lifespan."

Senn estimates for an accessory such as the belt attachment TDL is working on now, the product could take four to eight weeks to develop. For an entire holster, the process could take closer to four or five months.

Why is all this important to the officer on the street? Senn stresses TDL is a company created for law enforcement, by law enforcement. "Officers who have equipment problems are often told they actually have a training problem," says Senn. "But often, the equipment really does need improvement. We therefore want to invite the law enforcement community to work with us to introduce new concepts, partnerships and developments."

This includes not only considering officers' suggestions for new and improved products, but also going on ridealongs, talking with officers about their needs, and receiving feedback on products being field tested. "We rank their feedback, looking for patterns in their input," says Senn.

TDL doesn't only manufacture The Professional and its intended spinoffs. Senn says the company focuses on both "hard" and "soft" goods. Soft goods include a padded support system, now under development, meant to go between the trouser belt and duty belt. Based on improvements made to belts in the construction industry especially, the support system will reduce the amount of weight and discomfort associated with carrying sometimes 20 pounds of duty equipment.

For now, Senn says the company's intended product line is limited. "We don't want a plethora of 'me too' products that don't add value to the users," he explains. "Our company is founded on innovation — not on being just another manufacturer."

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