Reloading a Pistol in Critical Incidents

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. When we encounter a slide lock situation in the middle of a dynamic critical incident, we're gonna want to get the gun back in operation as quickly as we can. This is our worst case scenario, okay. This isn't just deciding to reload, this isn't we're reloading for the next shooting drill. This is we're in the middle of someone trying to hurt us or someone we care about.

And now we want to be able to respond with lethal force but our gun has run out and we have a spare magazine, okay. The situation we're going to be in is that we've recognized a threat, we've drawn our firearm, we've presented, taken a shot, taken multiple shots, whatever situation has gotten us to that now the gun is locked back. We've reached slide lock in the middle of a critical incident. We're gonna take our left hand off the gun immediately. Do what we need to do to get our right thumb in line with the magazine release, drop that magazine as the gun comes back to the ready position.

We're gonna reach back down, as we're moving offline, continuing that movement, to our spare magazine and get it up to the magazine well. Now I know a lot of you traditionally will carry your extra magazines with the bullets facing forward. That's fine. You want to be consistent. If that's the way you've trained for 15, 5, 10 weeks, years, months, whatever it is, stay that way, okay.

Your elbow is gonna be a little further out from your body as the magazine comes out, you're gonna flip it up into the gun, okay. What I do personally is keep that magazine with the bullets pointed backwards. As the magazine comes up, your elbow's closer to the body, the magazine rotates into the gun. We reach up and over, grab the back of the slide and go into the ready position to assess whether or not we still need to shoot, okay. In that position, we're very strong, we have a lot of coordination.

We also have retention in case we're in a crowd, or a crowded situation, where someone's trying to come after the gun while we're reloading. Maybe it's the threat getting closer, maybe it's somebody else who's trying to help the threat or doesn't understand what's going on. We wanna keep that gun in close and not have it floating around out here. We certainly don't wanna be putting it up here and pointing it in a bunch of different directions that once we get it loaded, now our presentation is inconsistent. Once the gun's loaded, we want it to be consistent with the presentation we have from in close.

So again, we've shot, for a slide lock, hand comes off the gun, we change our position, we come up. If we need to shoot right away, as we grab the slide, we can actually pull the gun out, extend and take that shot one handed. If we need to shoot that fast, okay. There's nothing wrong with that if we're in the middle of a dynamic critical incident. Questions about that?

Outstanding. Everybody back on line, Mike your weapon is loaded. Remember when you are out of rounds, you wanna still present a plausible threat. I want you to rack the slide, get the gun back into battery. And you're presenting a plausible threat.

You've got to drop the empty magazine, that's part of the drill. The empty magazine should be dropped every time you reach slide lock. Up. Up. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.