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The Just Trap

Posted by Jon Hauptman on May 21st 2026

A figure in outdoor clothing pauses on a cracked stone mountain path to look up at a large glowing orange neon JUST sign with an arrow pointing right. The broken stones of the path are etched with words the sign is hiding: BODY TYPE, CLIMATE, WARDROBE, TRAINING, JOB, BUDGET, EXPERIENCE. A smaller yellow caution sign next to the JUST sign reads IT'S NOT THAT SIMPLE. Dusk sky, atmospheric haze.
AI generated — see our policy

Spend any time in the comments under a concealed carry video and you'll see the same kind of advice, over and over:

  • Just wear a bigger shirt.
  • Just dress around the gun.
  • Just get a fanny pack.
  • Just do it the way I do.

Almost every one of these is offered in good faith. Someone solved a problem for themselves, it worked, and they want to save you the trouble. They're trying to help and be involved.

But the word "just" is doing something that the person saying it doesn't notice. It quietly promises that the hard part is small. And in concealed carry, the hard part is almost never small. It's personal, contextual, and individual.

"Just" isn't a process

A good piece of carry advice is a process — a way of working through your own situation to a solution that fits it. A process doesn't come from a sample-size of one. "Just" skips the process and hands you somebody else's destination. Without a process, it's another round of trial and error.

When a prescription starts with "just," the speaker has collapsed a whole set of variables into a one-liner: body type, daily wardrobe, climate, job, budget, how much training you've had, what you're actually carrying. The "just" answer worked for that person because all of those variables happened to line up for them. It says nothing about whether they line up for you.

Once you notice this, you can't unsee it. It becomes a filter you can run on every piece of carry advice you hear — not only in comment sections, but from instructors, gear reviews, and well-meaning friends at the range.

"Just" is an oversimplification

Take the most common one: just dress around the gun.

It sounds like a plan. But look at what that advice asks. It makes the gun the fixed point of your life and turns everything else into the thing that has to change: bigger shirts, untucked when you'd rather tuck, skipping the outfit the day calls for because it won't hide the gun. Done long enough, that isn't a carry method. It's a slow negotiation you lose a little more of every morning, until the easiest move is to leave the gun at home.

We flip that around: dress around your life, not around your gun. Your life is yours, and the carry setup is what adapts. We didn't come up with that to be a cute slogan. It's a different starting question, and it changes every decision that follows.

Or take just wear a bigger shirt. For some people, in some climates, with some jobs, that genuinely works. But a bigger shirt drapes differently on every body. It reads one way in an office and another on a job site. It's a different thing in a Phoenix August than a Minnesota one. The advice isn't wrong — it's narrow, and the word "just" hides exactly how narrow.

And the purest form: just do it the way I do. The person offering this has one body, one wardrobe, one climate, one job, one set of habits. Their setup is the endpoint of their process. Handed to you as a shortcut, this sample-size of one skips the only part that was ever going to help you: the work.

Knowing "why" is better than knowing "what"

A process doesn't hand you a setup. It hands you the variables and teaches you how they interact, so you can reach a solution that fits your actual life — and adjust it when your life changes. A process teaches you what to look for and how to account for it, so you know why something works and how to adapt it to a changing context.

On the surface, a process looks slower than a prescription. But it's the thing that holds up. And a series of wrong prescriptions without any real diagnosis is a longer, more difficult, more frustrating, and more expensive journey than a guided process. A destination handed to you breaks the first time your circumstances change. A process which you own and understand is a durable tool in your back pocket.

Verify

Here is the tool, and it's yours for every piece of carry advice from here on out: When you hear "just," stop and ask what variables that word is skipping. What is this answer quietly assuming about my body, my wardrobe, my climate, my job, my training, and my tolerance for carrying?

Sometimes the answer holds up. Occasionally, the simple answer is the right one. But you'll know that because you checked — not because someone said "just."

There aren't any shortcuts in concealed carry. We can make the process easier to follow and quicker to learn, but the only one-size-fits-all solution is knowledge, skill, and process.

So what is the process?

We'd never teach people to shoot by recommending that they just try different guns until one of them hits the bullseye for them. We teach them the fundamentals of pistol shooting. And when they know the fundamentals, they can tell if a particular gun helps them or hurts them in putting the fundamentals into practice. "Just get a gun which fits your hands" is technically correct — but within that is an erased process: determine if your grip and trigger control (two fundamentals of pistol shooting) are being helped or hurt by how your hands interact with the gun.

This is why we developed the Basics of Concealment Mechanics and teach this process for free to absolutely everyone. It's everything we've learned from 15 years of making holsters and hundreds of combined years of concealed carry experience across our team. It's as simple as the four rules of safe gun handling and as straightforward as the fundamentals of pistol shooting. The same as those, it takes some work and attention to master and to develop consistency. It feels like more, upfront, than "just" — but it's less total work and cost than the alternative of a few years of trial and error.

Skip the "just." Get the process.

None of it requires a PHLster purchase. It never will.

About the author: Jon Hauptman, owner of PHLster. 15 years of holster making and design experience.

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