Agree on both points and I don't even carry a Glock.

Alrighty...time to correct some errors.

1. I did not actually invent or design the SCD. Two friends of mine did. I was, however, one of the first few people to see it in the flesh...or at that time in the rapid prototype plastic...and one of the first people to sign an NDA about it. I was a beta tester and found no fault with the device. I even won the 2015 Rangemaster Polite Society pistol match shooting a Glock 17 equipped with a SCD. I have no financial interest in the SCD whatsoever.

I believe in the product 100%. Both of the Glocks I carry or use at the range have the SCD installed on them. When the product was launched I bought two SCDs of my own at full price because I like them that much.

I have a mild personal interest in seeing the device succeed on the market because it would make a friend and a friend's widow some money. (Todd Green passed away just over a year ago.)


2. The purpose of the SCD is to allow blocking the movement of the Glock's striker in the same way that you can block the movement of a DA gun's hammer while reholstering the weapon. This was a pretty standard safety practice in the days of revolvers and DA/SA automatic pistols. With your thumb applying light pressure to the hammer of such a weapon, you cannot generate enough leverage to actually fire the gun.

Reholstering is one of the primary danger areas for handling a handgun. Taking the gun out of the holster and attempting to put it back into the holster are times when accidents are likely. It is not, as many people are saying, as simple as keeping one's finger off the trigger. I have personally narrowly avoided a racing stripe down my right leg due to an unseen and at that time unseeable foreign object in the holster while attempting to reholster a striker-fired pistol. (An M&P) I felt something off as I attempted my usual careful reholster and stopped just a hair shy of releasing the striker.

Todd, one of the minds behind the SCD, was a professional firearms instructor who taught for Beretta and Sig before striking out on his own. In his time instructing he had watched hundreds of people reholster in a dangerous manner. He was always careful to explain the dangers of reholstering too quickly and to take the time to ensure drawstrings on garments, flashlight lanyards, clothing, or other obstructions were not positioned where they could get into the trigger guard of a weapon. This did little good because human nature being what it is, when someone is on the range for 8 hours and they are dehydrated/sunburned/cold/frustrated/etc paying attention to reholstering is not something they are inclined to do.

To give a flavor of this, Todd taught a class where the temperature was 40 degrees. Students showed up with jackets, most of them having a draw string right about the same height as their holster. Todd spent 10 minutes explaining the problem with draw strings and holstering using a SIRT gun.

It took a student actually reholstering their 1911 wth a bunch of jacket and a drawstring plus one of those retainer doohickeys sitting RIGHT on the trigger to make the students pay attention. Todd called it out, pointed out exactly how precarious the situation was and told the class matter-of-factly "If you had been carrying a Glock instead of this 1911 you would have shot yourself, dude."

The students with Glocks in the class immediately cut the draw strings out of their jackets.

I know a police officer who took a chunk out of his right buttocks when holstering his department issued .40 caliber Glock 22 in a department mandated plain-clothes holster. The holster's snap was small enough to fit inside the trigger guard of the pistol. He was doing surveillance on a fugitive who spotted another officer watching the location and ran. The spotted officer caught up to the guy and it turned into a physical fight. The second officer had to reholster to go hands on and the snap went inside the trigger guard of his Glock and BOOM. He ruined a pair of jeans, his boxers, and got a nasty powder burn.

Accidents while reholstering happen, folks:



Striker fired guns with no manual safety have a very low margin of error. If you fuck up with one, you get a loud noise and a hole where you probably didn't want one. DA guns have a larger margin for error. To grasp the concept, consider the takedown of a Glock 17 and a Beretta M9. If you fail to clear the chamber before you attempt to disassemble a Glock when you go to take it apart you get a gunshot. With the M9 you discover that the gun is loaded when you remove the barrel from the slide and the live round flops out. The Glock has a much smaller margin of error than the M9 when it comes to disassembly. The smaller margin of error is there when it comes to the trigger, too.

The SCD is aimed at giving you another layer of safety between you and a gunshot wound. Humans err, and if you spend enough time on the range weird shit like someone else's flashlight lanyard winding up in YOUR holster happens. Having the ability to prevent a gunshot should something like that occur is quite nice.


3. Sylvan mentioned repetition, but this bears further examination. If you are serious about developing skill with a pistol, you will be performing tens of thousands of draws and reholsters. In the course of a single 5 day handgun class I took some years ago I performed more than 1,000 draws from the holster, which necessitated more than 1,000 reholsters. The vast majority of those with a loaded weapon.

I now carry AIWB because it allows me to more effectively conceal more gun more of the time. I was very "safe" when I reholstered anyway (it's how I avoided a gunshot as I mentioned earlier) but I was moreso when I transitioned to AIWB carry. I was always careful to reholster slowly and deliberately.

Except for that one time when I wasn't. When I was sunburned, tired, dehydrated, and frustrated with my own performance at a little event I was at and I caught myself shoving an M&P down the front of my pants in a real hurry. I had done more than 100 draws that day...and on the last one of the day I fucked up the reholster. Thankfully nothing went wrong because I was lucky. I didn't have any obstructions in the holster. I didn't have my finger on the trigger. But I also had not made absolutely certain of either of those things before I shoved a gun with no manual safety and about a 6 pound trigger pull in the holster.

I immediately retired the M&P and purchased guns with hammers because I realized that my exposure level was now well into the outlier part of the curve and that it was simply a matter of time before I fucked it up again. I bought guns that gave me a larger margin of error (P30) because I knew that I was going to be reholstering a loaded handgun in close proximity to my femoral artery and genetalia tens of thousands more times in my life.

I'm a pretty well trained guy. I was far better trained than most when I fucked up a reholster. I'd probably logged more formal hours of instruction and independent hours of practice than just about anybody talking about "booger hook" when I fucked up a reholster.

I'm pretty sure if I can fuck it up, so can just about anyone else.

And if I'm not high speed enough, I can readily point to other people who are even higher speed who have fucked it up, too.


4. The SCD does not negatively impact the function of the weapon in any way. It is made in the United States out of quality steel. It is made of stronger material than the factory back plate. It has three parts:

* a backplate made out of high strength steel (hardened with the same process Glock and other companies use to harden their slides and barrels) that is exactly the same size and shape of the        factory back plate. It leaves no area exposed that isn't exposed by the factory back plate.

* there is a pin that acts as the hinge. This pin is also made out of quality steel even though it does not actually bear any real load because it is designed not to. In the dozen or so SCD pre-production prototypes out there that saw literally hundreds of thousands of rounds plus whatever evil Craig Douglas could do to them, not a single one has experienced a failure.

* then there is the only part that moves, the part that actually blocks the striker. It, too, is made out of high strength hardened steel. It is curved to provide complete coverage of the striker channel blocking any ingress by foreign material whatever the position of the block happens to be. The clearance between the actual bit that blocks the striker and the relief in the static steel striker plate it is attached to is about the width of a human hair. The block itself fits into the striker channel with designed clearances only slightly larger than the width of a human hair. Nothing is getting into the gun with the SCD installed that wasn't getting in because of the factory backplate.

One of the reasons this took so long to come to market was the effort involved in finding a manufacturer who could reliably produce to the tolerances the designers required on this. They spent money on production that was essentially flushed down the toilet by companies who made product that was not within the specified tolerances they set out for the device. And do you know what they did with those sub-standard devices they spent money to make? Threw them in the garbage.



5. Because of the way the part is designed, there is no actual pressure being applied on anything but the static back plate that is retaining the striker and extractor spring. This part is, as I have mentioned, stronger than the Glock factory back plate. The pin carries no load. The block itself only carries load when you are deliberately applying pressure. If for some reason it breaks, what happens is that the rearward movement of the striker during the trigger pull will simply push the block itself out of the way and the gun will function properly with no impact on the effort required to pull the trigger.

As has been mentioned by 1911sForever, who actually has one of these devices, long before they were publicly announced several of these were installed on the sims guns Craig Douglass uses in his ECQC curriculum. The course involves literally fighting over weapons in dust, gravel, mud, and dirt. In the HUNDREDS of evolutions he conducted with his SCD equipped sims guns, there was not a single failure of the SCD. In fact, the vast majority of the students involved didn't even realize the guns had the devices installed on them.

I have tried everything I know to make the SCD fail in some way, including trying to gum it up enough with mud and dirt to the point where it blocks the trigger pull. I have never been able to achieve that goal. I went so far as to put a bunch of layers of gorilla tape on the back of the gun to tape down the unit so it wouldn't let the trigger cycle properly. I had to apply more force but the thing still worked.

I even gobbed on fucking super glue to try and make the thing stop working. That made the trigger pull really heavy and I bent the trigger bar a bit, but the thing still worked.

So if you plan on dunking your gun in super glue you probably don't want to have an SCD installed on it. Then again, if you dunk your gun in superglue you are going to have problems elsewhere on the gun anyway so it's probably a moot point.


So to summarize for the TL/DR crowd:

1. No, I didn't make this. Friends of mine who are smarter than me did. I like it and I've spent my own money buying them because they're awesome.
2. The SCD allows you to block the striker of the Glock the same way you'd block the hammer of a DA gun, which is really nice since there are a bunch of unintentional discharges when people try to holster a gun.
3. If you are a human being, you are capable of fucking up your reholster. I've done it. I can point to others who have done it. Having this device on your Glock means that if you fuck up reholstering or if Murphy fucks you instead, you don't end up with a gunshot wound. Simple as that.
4. The SCD is made better and stronger than the factory back plate, has the exact same footprint as the factory back plate, and with clearances that have about a human hair's worth of space between the parts. No extra shit is getting into the gun with the SCD installed.
5. The SCD has been tested in the absolute worst case scenarios that you're going to find and has still never caused a problem. I've done the stupidest shit I can think of to these things with no problems whatsoever. If I'd found them to cause problems I wouldn't fucking have them on my Glocks.

Whenever someone brings up the idea that perhaps the Glock has a low margin for error and that perhaps the human beings handling these weapons are not as "safe" as they believe themselves to be, it turns into a bit of a shit show.

The SCD hits on both of these areas so it's inevitable.

Lots of people do like the idea. When that NRA article hit social media orders jumped 10x normal, and now the initial production run is almost completely sold out. Tau has a few left on hand and a few blemished units (cosmetic defects only) and that's it until they can get another production run going.