Old school carrying a revolver

I came across this article in American Handgunner magazine...........some old school thinking on carrying / concealing ..........some of you may remember those days or do so today..........I miss my smith snubby........he brings up some good points.......!!
Old Guys Tricks
Don’t Confuse Concealability with Carryability
Guns smaller than “full-size”— usually referred to as “compact” or “mini” — are primarily carried because they are more convenient to carry than full-size guns. You might counter they are carried mostly because they conceal better than full-size handguns. But really, with very few exceptions, you can conceal just about any size handgun effectively if you put some thought and effort into it.
So the concealability factor is really, fundamentally, a convenience factor. The extra concealability a small gun offers is really just one form of convenience it offers. I’m not trying to be a semantic jerk here. Almost anyone can conceal almost any normal full-size handgun. Way back when I was my adult height but weighed maybe 155 pounds soaking wet, I routinely concealed the 4″ L-frame S&W 686 which was my duty gun at the time. With factory stocks, no less. It can be done. In fact, it wasn’t difficult.
Nonetheless, concealability is certainly a valid concern. I’m officially an old guy now, but in order to get to be an old guy I first had to have been a young snot. In those days I just shook my head in consternation at the old guys who carried 2″ snub-nosed revolvers — with oversized stocks. I understood the big stocks helped to shoot the little gun better, but those silly old men were missing the entire point. Small guns concealed better — that’s why you carried them — but it was the stocks which were the most difficult part of the gun to conceal. They were usually what printed through your clothing. How could they be so stupid?
Well, guess who turned out to be stupid?


A 2″ snubby with oversized stocks hits the sweet spot, despite the seeming incongruity
of those two elements. Note the large stocks, even in a straight-drop Bobby Macs
holster, don’t take much away from the gun’s concealability.
The Payoff
Iwas conflating the separate factors of concealabilty with carryability. There are characteristics of a gun making it easy (or difficult) to conceal, and there are characteristics of a gun making it easy or difficult to carry. There’s some overlap between these two characteristics, but they are separate things. The short barrel of a small gun, such as a snubby, does far more to make the gun easy and convenient to carry than it does to make it more concealable.
And while oversized stocks do make the gun a little harder to conceal, the decrease in concealabilty is much less than the increase in carryability the short barrel offers. And, of course, the oversize stocks also help to mitigate the decreased shootability inherent in a small vs. a large gun. In short, you can still easily conceal the gun while using bigger stocks. And those bigger stocks make the gun several levels easier to shoot.
So those dim-witted old guys were actually finding the sweet spot maximizing the effectiveness of the package they carried while minimizing its disadvantages. In mathematical terms they were finding the optimal solution to a linear programming problem. Not so dumb, after all.