True,but the pistol represents a spare weapon in case yours breaks or takes a hit that makes it inoperatable. Everybody has their own idea about what's best,but I carried a 4 inch model 10 S&W loaded with tracers in my left shirt pocket,over my heart. The butt was all that stuck out,and I had a lanyard cord tied to that that went around my neck. I even had cause to use it once to suppress fire as I hauled butt away from a ambush site with what I thought was a malfunctioning M-16. I discovered later that the only thing wrong with the M-16 was that I must have tried to load a mag in it backwards or upside down. All I knew at that time was that the click I heard when I dropped the hammer on a empty chamber was the loudest noise I had ever heard in my life,and I needed to get the hell out of Dodge right NOW. I was the only one left on the ambush site where we ambushed a couple of companies of NVA,and I had been providing covering fire so everybody else could retreat once the NVA started to get their stuff together and return fire. NOT the right time to set down and field strip your weapon,or even look to see if the magazine you jammed up there at about 3,000 mph was actually still in the rifle. Nope,it was clearly time to panic.
The scariest sound in the world is click when one expects to hear bang.