Lock Picking in WROL

Last weekend I was helping the wife at her mother’s house. We couldn’t find the keys to get into her mother’s shed. After looking for the keys for more than an hour I remembered I had my lock picking set in the truck. I retrieved the set from the truck and went back to the shed. I was looking through the picking tools trying to decide which tool would work the best. I have a set of Jingle keys from Southord so decided to try my luck with one of them. I try to use a tension wrench when I use the jingle keys. To me is just makes it easier. With the tension wrench in place and the jingle key in hand, I commenced to raking the lock. Within 5 to 10 seconds the lock was open. Another win on a simple lock!

Having the ability to lock pick may come in even more handy in a WROL situation.

Imagine you and your tribe are out on patrol doing some recon. The area you need to get to has a locked gate that you cannot get over or under without an extreme amount of effort. If it’s like most gates locked it will be with a standard Masterlock. If just one of your team members has lockpicking skills and his kit with him the team could quietly enter the area through the gate after he picked the lock and lock it up behind them. No one would ever know they were there.

I could give hundreds of examples of its use but you get the idea.

Along with lock picks there are a bunch of bypass tools out there that make gaining entry easier. Sometimes when it’s too difficult to pick a lock you may want to try your hand with bypass tools.

I picked up the book Tactical Lock Picking last week and it goes into detail about picking locks and bypass tools. It’s definitely a book I would recommend adding to your tactical library

As a beginner you really only need a few tools. One simple lock picking set off Amazon will work for most of a newbies needs. Just realize those are fairly cheap picks and you may break them. Once you get your set you will probably find you only use one or two picks. I know when I first started I mainly only used one. That one pick that got me past most locks was the standard rake pick.

I’m not going to go into how to pick locks. There are plenty of YouTube videos, books, articles, and classes but I would encourage you and some of your tribesmen to learn the art of picking and bypassing. Then collect the needed tools for the most common jobs you expect to encounter. I would also encourage you to keep a small set on your persons as part of your EDC. I keep a Bogota set in my wallet. It has come in handy more than once.