Empty mag...if your trigger is dead and your gun is not making loud noises anymore, the overwhelming majority of the time it's because you ran out of ammo.
Tapping and racking will not help. You need to reload. People who type more than they shoot - well, that's probably all of us, but people who shoot more in theory than in actual practise won't understand what I'm saying here because it sounds obvious. But under serious stress, nothing is obvious.
The fact is if your gun stops working, you probably need to reload it. If you default to one solution to all your stoppage issues, you will not fix this issue. You need to engage your brain and determine what's caused the stoppage, because it might be a tap-rack situation, but it probably isn't, and at that point tapping and racking is just wasting time.
Thankfully I'm not someone who really has to worry about the time it takes. But for people who do need to worry, it's critical.
If you've shot to slidelock, and you need to keep shooting, you are in serious ####, so any time you waste is not cool at all.
Of course like so much of what gets talked about here, this is really only significant to those of us who are betting our lives on our guns (i.e. not me). But if that what we're talking about, then that's how it goes. A dead gun in a gun fight is probably empty and just needs more bang pills, and tapping and racking it once or a hundred times won't help you. You will ONLY get by it if you get your brain running enough to recognize what's gone wrong.
And I can say that even just under the slight pressure of having a bunch of guys around you moving and shooting, even if you're all shooting in the same general direction, a LOT of people empty mags in about a quarter the time they think they're going to. I actually saw some very competent people recently shaken up a little by having guys moving and shooting around them in a team drill, and you could see from their actions that they were mistaking empty guns for malfunctioning guns.
I would guess that in an actual gun fight, people reach the end of their first mag in what feels like about three trigger presses, so I am doubtful that very many people would correctly predict just when their mag is going to run out. And even if they do, there's only one way they've done it: keeping their brain engaged and diagnosing the cause of the stoppage.
Otherwise, they'd be standing (well, hopefully crouching behind cover, or running) there tapping and racking like a robot. Which I am sure some of us have seen.
