Streamlight Microstream USB

The video.

 I have been using the Streamlight Microstream USB for years now. I want to talk about it, but I need to give you some context about why I'm talking about it now.

There are a few major market forces I see currently. One is the popularity of the PHLSter Enigma. That seems to have struck a chord and demonstrated how many people want to carry a gun when they're wearing suits, dress clothes, or athletic wear. Being able to conceal a gun and carry it effectively without a monster tactical belt is a real game changer, and obviously that capability has resonated.

I also see Rhett Neumayer running a 22 caliber snub and it being received quite well. It puts a different spin on the old heads screaming about 45 acp and 1911s. Carrying a big full size duty gun is great if and when you can, but it isn't realistic for most people, most of the time. Firearms instructors, cops, and military get the ability to carry guns at work and nobody cares. Those individuals who come from those endeavors will likely advocate for full size weaponry and supporting equipment. But even if you CAN cart around a full bat belt of goodies, it doesn't always mean that you want to.

This is not about the PHLSter Enigma, 22 caliber snub nosed guns, or Rhett Neumayer. It is about finding a compromise that works quite well with an exceptionally small and lightweight package:

The Streamlight Microstream USB.

If size and weight aren't prime concerns, I'd probably steer you towards a Fenix PD36 TAC. But that TAC weighs 5.8 ounces, whereas the Streamlight Microstream USB weighs 1.2 ounces. The Streamlight is so light that you can easily forget that it is clipped to your pocket or waistband. You will never forget that Fenix is in your pocket.

The Streamlight Microstream is for normal people. It is for people that don't work as cops or military, or maybe even for them when not at work. It is a light that fits into any pocket or purse. It is also small and innocuous enough to avoid any negative attention, no matter what venue you are in. 

The Streamlight is still fairly bright for the amount of size it occupies. On low it puts out 50 lumens with a runtime of 3.5 hours, and on high it puts out 250 lumens with a runtime of 1.5 hours. My testing bears out those runtimes, if not the lumens, but Streamlight marketing doesn't tend to embellish numbers. If you will recall, it wasn't too long ago that we were being told that 60 lumens was blinding. While that claim may have been exaggerated, the Streamlight puts out enough usable light to work for tasks as small as looking for your keys, to looking further. While it won't cover football fields in light, I don't think it was ever designed with that in mind.

It will easily illuminate halls and rooms, as well as drawers and under car seats. Even if you aren't going out at night, you are one power outage away from a low light, or even a no light situation. 

In a pinch you can probably press it into a tactical backup, although it wouldn't be my first choice for that application. But in an imperfect world, we have to dance with the partner we brought, and this might be the one. It isn't so small that it gets completely swallowed by my hand, and therefore it is usable.

There are two negatives to this light. The first one is how long it takes to charge, and from zero to full it will take you approximately 4 hours to get a full charge onboard. The second is that this light is splash resistant, not fully waterproof. IPX 4 rating means that I wouldn't dump it into a sink, bathtub, swimming pool, or other body of water. It might survive it, but it wasn't designed to do so. This design has been out for years now, and almost unchanged from the original spec. You can get it in black or FDE, which may be the one update I'm aware of. 

Anyway, for those of you wearing yoga pants, dress pants, or basketball shorts when you go out and about, I think I've found the perfect flashlight for you. This is the flashlight that you carry when you don't want to carry a flashlight.

The Critic

 “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

—Theodore Roosevelt

Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

My video on The Good Samaritan Drill, what many others are calling the "Eli Dicken" drill, got a lot of views and feedback. I would expect no less given the confluence of it running on the heels of a serious event that got national attention, as well as the gracious linking to that video by two well known authors.

Much of that feedback was positive, but I did get a lot that fell into the following categories:

1. You did it wrong, somebody should be shooting at you while people are running around screaming.
2. You did it wrong, you should've been doing some level of PT or other exertion before/during.
3. You did it wrong, you should've done it with (insert whatever gun).

Interestingly enough, for the people telling me that I did it wrong, none of them provided any video or other specifics about what THEY were doing. Of course, anything that garners attention will get all sorts, both positive, negative, and neutral. I suppose neutral is the worst of all if you're trying to get some information out there.

But to speak to the specifics, I'm not going to do any drill where people are shooting at me with real guns, certainly not on purpose. And if we want to involve stacking tasks like other people moving, incoming fire, etc., then that is a good candidate for sims training or similar. And I participate in that on occasion, but you won't see me post it on any social media that I have. Some things are for me and the people I'm training, not for broader consumption.

If you want to PT and mix shooting in, I think that is a solid idea if properly structured. Watch some of JJ Racaza's videos for that. Nobody wants to see middle aged fat me doing PT, and that isn't the focus of my social media. There are several very solid experts on that, and I'm not going to try to emulate them.

For anybody telling me I should've used a little crappy pistol to shoot this drill, I got news for you. I don't carry a little crappy pistol. I carry one of the following 3 guns almost exclusively: Glock 17, Glock 19, Glock 45. And all 3 of 'em have optics on them. Any one of those is more than capable of the accuracy I produced in the video. Maybe instead of criticizing my pistol choices, they should re-think their own. I'm not saying that you have to carry a full size gun everywhere, but if you do and you have to use it, life will be a little easier than trying to score hits on a moving target at distance with a snubby.

I'm not saying I'm the fastest or the most accurate, because I am certainly neither of those. But what I am saying is that I'm going to go out and DO things. And while any feedback is useful in some way, shape, or form, what I really hope is that people reading this and/or watching my video will go out and practice some more. There are a very small percentage of people who do some amazing things with firearms, but those men and women are the minority. For the rest of us, some more work wouldn't hurt.

Police Shotguns: a lament

Shotguns fall further and further from favor with police agencies these days. It seems like more and more agencies are phasing them out entirely, relegating them to special use needs, or just not doing any real training or updating of their guns and policies.

I could throw bricks up in my glass house and blame the police administrators, but at the end of the day they're usually confronted with choices that are always a compromise. Right now the current batch of police candidates are typically not gun people, and many aren't military veterans. That means that a lot of police recruits will have no real firearms experience prior to arriving at the academy. 

Making things worse on the training front is that budgets aren't unlimited, so when you tell the administrator that the recruit needs training on multiple weapon systems, the usual retort is "why?" In the era of "defund the police" and inflation crushing fixed budgets, administrators are looking for more and more places and ways to cut costs.

Lastly for the agencies that do keep shotguns around, the incentive to outfit those shotguns with modern advances such as stocks of the correct length, good side saddles, lights, and optics just isn't there. If you tell the Captain that all of your shotguns need another $300 worth of items each, you'll likely get told about the outlay of similar expense for the patrol rifles. And if the patrol rifle has all of those goodies, why would you bother with the shotgun?

So when an administrator starts looking at time, money, ability to train/retain, and makes decisions, a lot of times the shotgun is the loser in that decision tree. A lot of agencies want to simplify as much as they can, where they can. 

It is a sad thing for sure, though. There are some times and places where the shotgun is king in the police world. The number one thing that comes to mind is high risk vehicle stops/takedowns. Shotguns have amazing penetration power when it comes to vehicle use, and shotgun rounds tend to go much straighter though things like windshield glass, as compared to pistol or rifle rounds. 

Even setting aside vehicle stops, shotguns have an 80-85% "one shot stop" percentage, at least the last time I checked. This is better than any pistol or rifle that is currently fielded by modern law enforcement agencies. When it comes to long gun employment, the shotgun definitely has some disadvantages, but stopping power is not one of them.

During my police career I've watched the shotgun go from something required at the Academy to an afterthought. Many of the agencies in this area don't issue or authorize shotguns for patrol any more. I wonder if one day there won't be any call for police shotgun training in this area due to them being completely gone from general use. If that does happen, it'll be a sad day.

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Items that I like and recommend, a curated store.

The Items I Like And Recommend

 Most of these will be Amazon Affiliate Links. Please note that as an Amazon Affiliate, I receive a small commission from qualified purchases.

Med Gear:

Finger Cut Kit

Vetbond/Dermabond

Basic First Aid Kit

Bleed Stop Kit

Dark Angel Medical DARK Kit

North American Rescue CAT Gen 7 Tourniquet

Tac Med Solutions SOFT-TW Tourniquet

Knives and Multi-tools:

Benchmade Bailout

Civivi Cogent Button Lock Knife

Gerber Gear Dime Multitool

Smith & Wesson Extreme Ops Knife (cheap and still usable)

KA-BAR TDI Investigator

Victorinox Fibrox Chef's Knife

Sharpening Items:

Worksharp Knife & Tool Sharpener

Edge Pro Apex 4 Knife Sharpener Kit

Beavercraft Strop

Support Items (many different items):

Mechanix 0.5 Specialty Gloves 

Anker Portable Charger

Gooloo Car Jump Starter

Tactical Pen that doesn't look like a tactical pen

Fenix PD36TAC Flashlight (bright, durable, awesome!)

Streamlight Microstream USB (for when you want a smaller pocket friendly light)

Hand Grip Exercisers

3M Half Face Respirator

Multi-gas/Multi-vapor cartridges for 3M Half Face Respirator

Ranger Bands

POM OC Spray

Arrest My Vest Odor Defeating Spray (nobody likes stinky cop)

Hazard 4 EVAC Plan B Sling Bag

Security of the "other than physical" sort

 So current events seem to have a whole new batch of people out there worrying about information/operation/electronic security. Here's a good start from the EFF.

So, if you're curious or serious or somewhere in between, welcome to the fold. I'll give you some easy methods to secure your information and communication, and I'll give you some more difficult ones, and you can figure out what you're willing to do.

Firstly, if you want to completely remove the ability of people to snoop in on your communications and behaviors, you're going to have to do something that you don't want to do. You already know it, but I'm going to tell you anyway. You'll need to take your smartphone, turn it off, and dump it in a drawer away from wherever you are. If you have any voice operated devices or apps, those need to go. Alexa or any similar device is just an eavesdropping device that you've brought into your house. Any other device such as a TV with that sort of functionality built in, same issue. Make 'em go away. On top of that, you're going to have to switch to cash transactions. Any time you're in public, wear a hoodie and your covid mask. If you drive any toll roads and use a fast pass or similar, you'll want to avoid that. Any conversations that you want to be actually private need to be held in an open space with no electronic items on your person or the person you are talking to.

Now those steps that I just outlined are pretty hard in the modern world, but not impossible. That said, if you don't want to do all of that, there are steps you can take that are easier.

Pull out that smartphone. Turn off all the tracking. All of it. Delete any app that you aren't using. Any app that you're using that can be accessed through a browser, delete that app and only use the browser. While you're at it, use a browser like Duck Duck Go, it'll be better than the default browser on your smartphone. If you want to do anything even remotely close to private messaging on this phone, use Burner and Signal apps. Use Burner to generate a disposable number and then use that number for Signal. No other messaging app on that phone is to be even remotely trusted. Do any browsing through a VPN like Mullvad. You need a VPN that doesn't log your activity and are based in another country. Mullvad checks that box.

If you want another layer of separation, get a true burner phone, one you paid cash for, or use a gift card to purchase it that you paid cash for. Use that burner for any messaging that you want to be private. 

Also, any time you don't need to use your phone, don't. Turn that bitch off and throw it in a Faraday bag, like this one.

Anything you purchase needs to be in person, and use cash. Wear your hoodie and mask when you're in public, but especially when buying things. Anytime you are even remotely near civilization, you're being recorded on video, and quite possibly, audio. So whenever you're out and about, wear your facial recognition obscuring stuff, ala hoodie and mask. Nobody is going to look at you funny by doing those things now. Three years ago you might've created a stir, but no longer. And I suspect that your ability to wear your "hazmat gear" will probably continue for years before anybody really notices or cares.

Your number one enemy is you when it comes to infosec/opssec/comssec. Remember that you have the right to remain silent, fucking do it. The more people that know a secret, the less likely that said secret will remain secret. If you honestly are worried about a piece of info, then keep that info tight and keep your mouth shut.