Carrying a pistol reload has been a trend for a couple years now, and there are more & more products showing up to facilitate this practice. Not that no one carried a reload until recently, but in the last 2-3 years it has become very common to see normal, everyday CCW people (mainly centered around the Instagram gun community) carrying reloads for full sized double-stack pistols. To serve this growing subset of the gun owning populace, 1791 Gunleather has brought to market the Snagmag. I got one and have carried it enough to be comfortable giving my opinion on it.
One-Line Review
Not great, do not recommend.
In-Depth Review
What is a Snagmag?
The Snagmag is a device that allows a gun carrier to carry a reload in their support side front pocket in a consistent, indexed fashion, so as to facilitate a faster and more reliable reload.
Specs
The carrier’s size is determined by the size of the magazine it is designed for, but all Snagmags are made of a single piece of Kydex (mine measured 0.05″ thick) folded multiple times, with a pocket clip riveted to it. I do like the simple, slim, lightweight construction. There are definitely chunkier and much bulkier ways to carry a reload, so the minimal amount of materials is appreciated. My example weighs 0.78 ounces. For reference, the loaded magazine in my gun weighs 9.9 ounces. The very low weight of the Snagmag is one of it’s selling points in my mind.
How do I Use It?
You place your magazine into the Snagmag, slightly bending the top away from the magazine, allowing it to sit fully in the carrier. This helps to hide the magazine’s baseplate and provides the majority of the carrier’s retention. Place the carrier in your front support-side pocket.
When drawing the magazine out, apply gentle, constant rearward pressure, forcing the ‘hook’ of the Snagmag (see image) to snag the material of the pocket it is in, keeping the carrier in your pocket and the magazine in your hand.
Pros
The device is lightweight, simple, and has no moving parts. Any sort of breakage is highly unlikely. It can be worn in at least two ways that I noticed. I tried it both in my front left (support-side) pocket and in an appendix position, just to the left of my belt buckle.
Cons
The Snagmag is a relatively simple design. The Snagmag sits in the front support-side pocket and holds a loaded magazine in the same spot, facilitating a more reliable reload. At least, in theory. The Pocket clip is surprisingly weak, enough to be an issue. The way the designer got around this is to include a ‘hook’ that snags the pocket’s material upon drawing, keeping the Snagmag in the pocket during reloading. If you don’t apply gentle rearward force during the reload, the holder will come out with the mag. This is an absolute non-starter. There is no reason to mandate a certain technique be developed and cultivated just to cover for a weak pocket clip. And this technique is essential, as too much rearward pressure can get the mag caught on the pocket’s material, fouling your draw, and too little pressure lets the Snagmag come out of the pocket with the mag, also fouling the reload.
I carry appendix, so I decided to try it from the ~11 o’clock position. This wasn’t a bad way to carry and eliminates the rearward pressure requirement. The Snagmag’s clip is high enough that the mag sits at the top of the beltline, but the space between the gun & mag carrier means that you have a pretty good space into which you can still get a positive hold on the magazine. I decided to wear it like this for a day at work. When I got off work I discovered that the magazine had slipped completely out of the carrier and was just sort of floating around, like I had jammed it into my belt without a carrier at all! Needless to say, appendix carrying with a Snagmag is another no-go. To be fair, I don’t think it was ever intended to be worn appendix, so this isn’t really the Snagmag’s fault.
The retention on the magazine isn’t great. If you don’t bend out the top of the Snagmag when inserting a magazine, the baseplate will hit the top and keep it from being retained at all (as shown in the first video). Once you get it properly in the carrier, the Snagmag holds onto the mag tighter than it holds onto the pocket, hence the rearward pressure technique.
The Snagmag is supposed to ‘disguise your spare magazine as a pocket knife’, but I found it to be obvious that I was carrying a mag. Maybe if the clip was a deeper sitting clip it would be less obvious, but the current clip will only pass the kinda of inspection that raw-dogging a mag in your pocket would get past.
The folded construction of the Snagmag means that any sort of twisting motion applied to the carrier will cause it to open up and basically release any sort of grip it had on a magazine. I believe this is what happened during my day carrying it appendix. Such twisting motions aren’t common in a front pocket, but they are very common along the beltline.
Finally, the price. This thing goes for $35 retail. It’s not terribly expensive, but I honestly feel that this is overpriced. Now I don’t pretend to fully understand how involved the manufacture of this device is, nor how much materials for it cost, etc, so the price may be justified. But I would be remiss to not put the price for this thing in the Cons section. $35 sure feels like a lot for a single piece of thin, folded Kydex with a pocket clip riveted on.
Conclusion
I say pass on this guy. The Snagmag is just too finicky to be useful.
You can have a piece of hardware that you need to practice with a lot, but there are certain requirements for me to justify it. It has to give me a level of capability that I do not have without it, and there can’t be a much better option on the market for a reasonable price. In this case, I think neither of those requirements are fulfilled. There are at least two other products that do the same thing but do it better and at a similar cost. Also, how much do I really need to be carrying a backup magazine every day? I’m carrying a double stack 9mm, I got 17+1 on board before I reload, when am I going to need to do that in a real life gun fight? I’ve yet to hear of a single instance where a civilian defender had a mid-gunfight reload. I know that at least one person has looked into any instance of that very thing happening and came up completely empty, so is this possibility something we even need to concern ourselves with?
Honestly, if the clip was stronger and the hook wasn’t necessary, this would be a decent purchase. Maybe if there was something to keep the retention on the magazine during appendix carry, then it wouldn’t even need a stronger clip. If the Snagmag had either of those modifications, I would really like it. But, in its current iteration, I cannot recommend this product.
Stay tuned, as we have a lot of cool stuff in the works here at PGM. Stay ready, and we’ll see you next Friday.
-S_S
Pro-Gun Millennial 