Car mounted Kahr (courtesy magna-arm.com)

The puns kinda write themselves. Baby you can drive my Kahr. Thief magnet. Keep on rackin’. My problem with using a Magna-Arm in a car: what happens if you get pulled over by a cop (as happened to me the other day). Are you seriously going to reach down and retrieve the gun and put it in the glove box while the cop’s got you in his tractor beam? If not, what? My problem with Magna-Arm generally: where the hell did I put my reading glasses? Oh you found them. Where were they? A gun should either be on your person or in a safe. Preferably both.

34 COMMENTS

  1. I could be wrong, but wouldn’t prolonged exposure to the magnet eventually magnetize the metal components of the firearm?

    Could be an issue if you drop you gun on the ground and then pick it up to find out that a some loose piece of metal from the ground got stuck between the sights so you couldn’t see them.

    • In my experience, it would magnetize a portion of the slide, not the entire thing. Could it become an issue? It might.

    • If it does somehow become magnetized from contact with the magna arm, hitting the ground will disrupt the magnetic field and cause it to collapse. You can check this effect by magnetizing a screwdriver. Afterwards just hit it on your bench and it won’t be magnetic anymore.

  2. In Texas it would have to be concealed. I use the Grassburr Leatherworks mount with a covering case. My concealed carry weapon is inaccessible when I’m driving (I’m sitting on it) so I keep my Beretta 92FS under the steering column. Always available, always concealed, and a larger weapon than the one I carry.

    https://grassburr.com/catalog/mountable-holsters

  3. Your problem is getting stoped by a cop but not the exposed trigger?

    I was stopped a week and a half ago amd had my gun open between the center console and my seat in a propper holster. He didnt ask and I wasnt required but informed him anyways, no problem. I know some cops can be @&&holes but Im not paranoid about them as a whole. Then again, I actually work with enough of them on a daily basis to know there is such a thing as good cops.

        • My wife and I got stopped last sunday at 11 pm coming from airport. I was in a rental and didn’t have my lights on properly so my tail lights were out. I informed the deputy I had a carry permit but was not in possession of my weapon . . . . he ran my license and came back and spent 10 min talking to me and my wife about concealed carry off-duty weapons, how to get his gf to go shooting etc. No ticket. In fact, I have been stopped 4 times in 2 yrs now (3 for excessive speeding, ie 20+) and NEVER gotten a ticket. . . . in Missouri, they appreciate being told we have a carry permit and whether or not we have a weapon, as the law does not require it.

    • The point is, really, that you work your whole life to build something for yourself and your family, go to great pains to reasonably protect it and them from criminals, and ONE interaction with a not good cop can destroy all of that in a matter of minutes.

      We really shouldn’t have to protect ourselves from the police, but realistically a bad one can take much more from you than the most determined thief.

    • Well seeing that it is mounted to plastic in the picture I’m gonna make a crazy guess and say a word you might not understand. That word is BOLT. Not like lightning, they are pieces of metal that can be nearly any size and have these little grooves called threads cut into their sides. Paired with another thing called a NUT (not like the squirrel food) these metal thingies can hold just about anything together. If you look real hard, you’ll find them all over an automobile.

  4. “Are you seriously going to reach down and retrieve the gun and put it in the glove box while the cop’s got you in his tractor beam?”

    Why would you need to if it’s legal for the gun to be there? Just act normally and tell the cop what’s up when he walks up to your door.

    “A gun should either be on your person or in a safe. Preferably both.”

    While I tend to be against off-body carry, this is taking it a bit far (and it doesn’t make sense, you want me to wear a safe?). Being able to access a firearm while seated in a vehicle can be a big deal to some people, especially those who spend a lot of time driving around, and many carry methods make it hard to access your handgun while seated. So relocating your carry gun, or keeping a second gun for the purpose, to an easy to access location makes a lot of sense. A magnet or mounted holster is certainly better than just tossing your gun on the seat next to you…

    That said, I don’t like the magnet idea. I myself have a cheap holster mounted in my car with velcro, works great for keeping a handgun accessible when I’m driving.

  5. Bad idea!

    The first hard bump you drive over, and the gun is somewhere on the floor around your feet. Where is it? Is it behind the brake pedal preventing you from fully applying the brake? Or is the trigger caught on something, such that it will fire when you accidentally touch it? Or did it slide back under the seat where you can’t reach it (again maybe snagging the trigger against something under there)?

    Use a steering-column-mounted or transmission-tunnel-mounted holster, with good retention features.

    • If it utilizes rare earth magnets, it would have such a grip that you could rack the slide retrieving it. Don’t ask how I know this.

  6. I have an open able center console between the seats so, I bolted a strip of metal into it that is just the right size to hold a Fobus paddle holster. The strap acts like a belt holding the paddle in place. I keep a 38 snubbie in the safe holstered and ready to drop in whenever I go anywhere.

  7. Well I know that my jeeps suspension would never let this work so that rules it out for me.
    BUT I disagree with you on this RF there is nothing wrong with this if your vehicle wont shake it loose. Anyone that would grab the gun and do something bad with it shouldnt be allowed in your vehicle in the first place.

    • Unless you are doing Baja/Paris-Dakar driving, you won’t have a problem. These are not your refrigerator door magnets.

  8. So you got pulled over by the police, eh? Care to talk about it? Get a ticket? I’m a nurse and only asking as a professional in case you were unduly traumatized by getting caught in your personal crime spree.

  9. In Texas you are required to have the gun concealed on your person or concealed somewhere in the car. You are not allowed to have the gun in plain sight.

  10. In North Carolina you can open carry or conceal with a CHP. There is no mandatory concealed statue.

  11. Since drawing from a belt-holster while seated in a car, with seatbelt on, could be problematical, this actually looks like a decent option. As for the police scenario, if it’s legal and you’re legal, no need to “reach” for anything, just inform the officer while keeping your hands on the wheel. You know… exactly how you’re supposed to conduct yourself in any traffic stop. As far as security, when you get to your destination, the gun comes off the magnet and goes back in your holster. What’s the issue here? You sound like an Anti, trying to come up with unlikely doomsday scenarios.

  12. “A gun should either be on your person or in a safe. Preferably both.”

    Um, a gun cannot be in two places at once, and I don’t fit in my safe.

  13. In Delaware, if I’m open carrying (for which no permit is required), it’s the opposite of Texas. It must be in plain sight. If it was in my holster on my hip, that would probably be considered concealed while I’m in the car, and illegal without a concealed carry permit (which takes at least a few months to get in DE nowadays). If I put it in the glove box, that’d also be illegal without a CC permit.

    Generally most folks who OC in Delaware secure it to their dashboard or keep in in their passenger’s seat. This magnet product could theoretically work if it was secured on the dash, although it wouldn’t work for us if it was down that low near the feet (as it is in the picture).

    In short, “on your person or in a safe” doesn’t work for me when I’m in the car OC-ing in DE (unless it’s in a safe in my trunk, in which case it’s not very useful to me).

    FWIW, that’s not an endorsement of this magnet. Just saying that some folks might find it helps them comply with the law.

  14. I call shenanigans. Brad Kozack gave a pretty positive review of this back in 2011, back in the beginning of TTAG. SHENANIGANS!

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