Why You Need to Carry a Flashlight Every Day
Flashlights and Weapon lights are necessary equipment for home defense, law enforcement duties, and tactical operations.
Carried every day, a quality tactical flashlight, can provide great utility and safety in ordinary aspects of life. If a tactical flashlight is not already part of your everyday gear, you are missing some tremendous benefits and may be putting yourself at unnecessary risk.
The most obvious benefit of carrying a flashlight every day is basic utility.
Those who always have a torch handy know how often they actually get used. Looking for lost keys, checking under the couch for something, inspecting fine details of an object up close, reading small print in a dimly lit room, etc. all are much easier with a handheld flashlight. Switching to low mode is important for these tasks as the full output from a modern tactical flashlight can be overwhelming and even blinding. (This blinding ability might just be the feature that saves your life, but more on that later.)
A quality tactical flashlight, carried daily, can truly keep you safe and alive.
In a poorly lit environment, a quick scan with a flashlight allows rapid assessment of potential threats or problems nearby. Is someone lurking beside that building? Is that an animal under the bushes? Is that antifreeze under my car? Is there a person in my car? Without a flashlight, dangers may loom without you even knowing. With a proper flashlight, hazards and threats can be identified and appropriate precautions may be taken.
Most criminals seek their victims at night or in the darkness.
They like to use the element of surprise and catch their victims off-guard. If a would-be assailant sees you assessing your surroundings with a good bright flashlight, they know that you will not be an easy victim and will likely back off. You have shown them that you are aware just by using your tactical flashlight to survey the scene.
Your flashlight may serve to positively identify, address, or command a threatening adversary.
If seeing your tactical awareness does not deter an assailant, shining your light directly at their eyes will let them know for sure that you know they are there. The beam intensity of your tactical flashlight will effectively blind them, especially if their eyes are already adjusted to the dark, providing you with an immediate tactical advantage to further assess the threat and initiate countermeasures. Keeping the beam focused on the threat and adding verbal questions or commands like, “Who are you?” “Why are you here?” “What are you doing?” “Leave immediately!” will put your foe on notice that he has been recognized and is being closely monitored.
A quality tactical flashlight, especially when equipped with a crenellated bezel, may be used as an impact weapon.
Of course, to be an effective weapon, a tactical flashlight must be tough enough to deliver repeated hard blows without breaking. This makes a solid acrylic optical lens and fully-potted electronics absolutely essential features.
Unlike a deadly weapon, a tactical flashlight may be deployed when a threat is uncertain. If you hear a strange sound, catch a glimpse of something odd, or simply have a creepy feeling, you can deploy a tactical flashlight with confidence and without fear of brandishing a deadly weapon.
Modern advancements give us the advantage of never being left in the dark.
A few years ago, the idea of carrying a high-output flashlight was impractical if not laughable. Old D-Cell flashlights were large, heavy, and produced a minimal amount of light. Technology has brought about tremendous advancements in flashlight capability. Pocket-sized LED flashlights now produce much more illumination than old incandescent models while weighing less than a single D-Cell battery.
Shed some light on the situation! It’s time to carry a tactical flashlight every day.