how do you change your pistol mags?

How do you change your mags?

  • i press the mag release with my strong hand.

    Votes: 149 90.9%

  • i press the mag release with my support hand.

    Votes: 11 6.7%

  • i only have one mag, is there a need for more?

    Votes: 4 2.4%
  • Total voters
    164
TDC depends upon the gun as well... For me its fastest and easiest to use shooting hand to dump a USP mag.. for some with smaller hands it could be a problem. My grip doesnt really change either. I dump my mag with my weak hand already half way to the gun with a new mag...
 
I'm short on pics but I'll take some this weekend and post. For now here's a description.

Using a leading thumbs grip. Your support hand(assuming a right handed shooter) will slide back towards your body while rotating so your left thumb can access the mag release. With a firm press(that means pressing the release all the way in) the mag should fall clear. After a firm press your left hand sweeps the front of the mag well ensuring the spent magazine fell free. After the sweep your left hand begins its movement to your belt for your fresh magazine. All this is done with your gun drawn back in to your body so your elbows are resting along your ribs. This is done for several reasons. First, if your firearm isn't in use you need to reload, clear a malfunction, or move to cover. All of which does not require your pistol to be extended. Second, by keeping both arms an equal distance from your torso your hands must meet in the middle for the reload. Its like clapping, you really can't miss. With your pistol tucked in you can see whats going on with regards to the state of your pistol. You have an unobstructed view of the pistol for reloads, malfunction drills or threat scans. Your dominant hand does nothing but retract the pistol to your torso(a position called ready gun) and maintain muzzle control in the direction of the threat(s). The reload described is an emergency reload. It can be done from slide lock or not. For a tactical reload where you retain your partial mag. The only difference is the order in which you operate. Move to ready gun. Retrieve fresh magazine, holding it between your fingers. Release partial mag with left thumb and catch mag with remaining fingers. Insert the fresh mag and seat it with your palm. Store the partial mag in a pocket, not in the mag carrier.

Why waste time waiting until you had a mag in hand....

Depending on the stage one could engage the target(s) dominant hand only while reaching for a fresh mag and executing a tactical reload. This would save time and better ones score.

I've already posted my views about IPSC but I'll post a refresher here. IPSC is supposed to be practical. It is not. The gear, the guns, the stages, the rules, none of them are practical. IPSC is a sport. A sport where lots of shooting and lots of competitors compete for trophies and bragging rights. Nothing wrong with that. It is a game.

The skills I was taught were not designed with the shooting sports in mind. They are real skills designed to provide the individual with simple, solid techniques that could very well save your life or the lives of others. This being said, the skills can be used for competitive shooting. Minimizing movement and conserving time is beneficial in both arenas.

TDC
 
TDC said:
I'm short on pics but I'll take some this weekend and post. For now here's a description.

Using a leading thumbs grip. Your support hand(assuming a right handed shooter) will slide back towards your body while rotating so your left thumb can access the mag release. With a firm press(that means pressing the release all the way in) the mag should fall clear. After a firm press your left hand sweeps the front of the mag well ensuring the spent magazine fell free. After the sweep your left hand begins its movement to your belt for your fresh magazine. All this is done with your gun drawn back in to your body so your elbows are resting along your ribs. This is done for several reasons. First, if your firearm isn't in use you need to reload, clear a malfunction, or move to cover. All of which does not require your pistol to be extended. Second, by keeping both arms an equal distance from your torso your hands must meet in the middle for the reload. Its like clapping, you really can't miss. With your pistol tucked in you can see whats going on with regards to the state of your pistol. You have an unobstructed view of the pistol for reloads, malfunction drills or threat scans. Your dominant hand does nothing but retract the pistol to your torso(a position called ready gun) and maintain muzzle control in the direction of the threat(s). The reload described is an emergency reload. It can be done from slide lock or not. For a tactical reload where you retain your partial mag. The only difference is the order in which you operate. Move to ready gun. Retrieve fresh magazine, holding it between your fingers. Release partial mag with left thumb and catch mag with remaining fingers. Insert the fresh mag and seat it with your palm. Store the partial mag in a pocket, not in the mag carrier.

Why waste time waiting until you had a mag in hand....

Depending on the stage one could engage the target(s) dominant hand only while reaching for a fresh mag and executing a tactical reload. This would save time and better ones score.

I've already posted my views about IPSC but I'll post a refresher here. IPSC is supposed to be practical. It is not. The gear, the guns, the stages, the rules, none of them are practical. IPSC is a sport. A sport where lots of shooting and lots of competitors compete for trophies and bragging rights. Nothing wrong with that. It is a game.

The skills I was taught were not designed with the shooting sports in mind. They are real skills designed to provide the individual with simple, solid techniques that could very well save your life or the lives of others. This being said, the skills can be used for competitive shooting. Minimizing movement and conserving time is beneficial in both arenas.

TDC
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great stuff - thanks! Makes a lot of sense.
 
USP,

Are you using your trigger finger or your dominant hand thumb to release the mag? For pistols with the ambi release under the trigger guard, the trigger finger release works well for some. I can't get it to work without completely destroying my grip. The problems associated with fat fingers.

TDC
 
held a HK p30 yesterday, great grip and nice trigger and slide. Mag release is slighter longer
 
TDC may have some points, but I still think most people will dump their mag and load a new one (firing hand releasing the mag, support bringing up the fresh mag). If you are in a situation where you can logically think about keeping your spent mag that MAY have ammo left in, fine, do the support hand releasing the mag. When the bullets are flying, the only thing I'd be thinking about is staying low and getting a fresh mag in ASAP. TDC's point of putting the spent mag in a pocket as opposed to a mag carrier-I can just see someone desperately trying to stuff the thing in a pocket at night, looking down as they are doing so, and then getting smoked.
 
TDC said:
...Why is there such hype over the 10 rd AR mags? Because people see the advantage of having 10 rounds over 5... TDC
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Depending on the circumstances, the larger magazine may be an advantage. But isn't a lot of the interest because of the possibility of doing an end run around the magazine capacity regulations? Forbidden fruit?
 
You know, if people spent more time at the range learning how to properly place shots on target instead of arguing what to do with an empty (or part empty) mag, there'd be some damn good shooters out there....carry on.
 
Here's an exerpt of an article from Handguns magazine by Michael Bane: (I think his arguments have a lot of merit)

Tactical Reload: Trick or Reality?


MEET YOUR INNER MONKEY
We are truly the children of the ancient killer apes, blessed with an "operating system" that has quite literally given us the world. Our operating system, that set of software routines and their associated actions intended to keep us alive, was designed for a very different world than the one we live in now. Our original predators had really big teeth and us on the dinner menu, and our primary stopping-power issues revolved around the best hardwood for bludgeons. Despite a change of milieu, our Inner Monkey--IM, for short--is still peeking around the corners of our mind, looking for sabre-tooths and dire wolves, and we have the appropriate set of hard-wired reactions for just such problems.

For example, when threatened, we focus on the threat, our IM jumping up and down and pointing at the thing that wants to kills us. In this case, focus means much more than "pay close attention to." A whole series of mental and physical reactions crank up; all our senses narrow down, focusing on the threat. (You know about tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, the "slowing" of time effect, etc., right? If you carry a gun, you'd better.) We lose fine motor control as a whole pharmacy of drugs is launched into our bloodstream to better prepare us to either run like hell or attack.

Ralph Mroz, author of Defensive Shooting for Real-Life Encounters and one of the most thoughtful commentators on the current state of self-defense training, calls this the "startle effect." We monkeys startle. Which leads us to the first rule of training for high-stress decision-making: You can't beat the operating system, the IM. Not ever.

At its best, the tactical reload is a Rube Goldberg collection of fine motor movements. Don't believe me? In the course of your average day, how many things do you catch by grabbing with your palm and last two fingers? Or with your palm, forefinger and middle finger? The short answer is none.

Tell yourself over and over again that you're going to catch a ball using only your palm and a couple of fingers, practice as much as you want, then have someone throw a Nerf ball at your face, really hard. Your IM overrides your conscious thought, and you catch the ball with your entire hand because that's what the hand is designed to do, and it's what we've been doing for the last million years or so.

The more any action runs counter to our design parameters, the more we have to think about that action in order to accomplish it. The common answer to this is practice more; heck, there are even people who juggle running chain saws, so anything is possible. Two points here from my experience: In training for dangerous, potentially lethal situations, one of the biggest challenges was to never train an action that went directly against our IM because that training would fail under stress. Instead, we learned to break down an activity into its component parts, break down those component parts even further to their fundamental actions, then train from the ground up. Fundamental actions can be defined as "things monkeys do."

A quick, simple example: I did some dives on deep wrecks, outside the bounds of recreational scuba. Several of those wrecks were covered with old fishing nets, making them death traps for both sea life and visiting divers. So the prudent diver always carried a knife, which the prudent diver practiced getting to from constrained positions.

And was that knife a big, honking thing strapped to my ankle like in James Bond movies? Nope, my knives were small, razor-sharp blades designed to cut webbing and zip-tied to my scuba harness just below shoulder level. A reflex, high-stress reaction--crossing my arms over my chest--puts both hands on the knives.

The major reason that speed reloads have been taken to amazing levels--sub-one-second reloads!--by top competitors is that the speed reload is built on a "monkey" movement of bringing the hands together. Try it: Close your eyes, and attempt to applaud. Wow! If you're like most primates, you were able to do it the first time. The speed reload builds on that fundamental movement.


BUT WAIT, IT GETS WORSE
OK, the tactical reload is a bio-mechanically unsound technique, utilizing a nonfundamental series of fine motor movements that are virtually guaranteed to fail under high-stress conditions. But the tactical reload has even more problems. For a start, as Walt Rauch notes in his excellent book, the tactical reload probably won't work if you have small hands or are using a double-stack magazine.

That's right. It's a technique designed for guys with big hands who shoot manly 1911 single stacks, which pretty much describes all the "world-class instructors" who teach the technique. What it doesn't describe is women. Which brings us to the last three nails in the tactical reload's coffin:

1) It is slow, sometimes achingly so. At the very time when you want your gun refilled as fast as possible, you're fumbling around trying to remember which fingers catch what. On Brian Enos' excellent Internet forum, good shooters have reported their baseline times on a tactical reload are in the two- to three-second region when "everything goes right." Yeah, that happens a lot! Compare that to a one-second speed reload, the basics of which can be taught in less than five minutes.

2) The tactical reload is now responsible for the bulk of firearms malfunctions at IDPA matches. Failure to properly seat the magazine can leave you with a gun that doesn't go bang and a magazine on the ground, something of a worst-case scenario in one of those pesky real-world situations. When we started seriously competing in IPSC matches in the early 1980s we learned very quickly to slam the magazine in place (those plastic magazine bases used to be called "slam pads" for exactly that reason).

"Are we teaching a technique that leads to malfunctions at a time when the person can least afford them?" he asked. I saw numerous failures to seat, including magazines dropping onto the ground. I also saw even more shooters taking extra time to make sure the magazine was seated after a tactical reload, pushing the average reload time into the five- to 10-second arena.

3) Because the tactical reload is based on nonfundamental fine motor movements, it requires more mental attention to have any hope of accomplishing it in an expedited manner. That means during the course of the reload, the shooter's focus is off the threat. Setting aside the issue of whether this is even possible given that a million years of evolution and a screaming IM demand that our attention stay on what's trying to kill us, you've now turned your attention away from your attacker for at least a couple of seconds. We know from the Tueller Drill that a determined attacker can cover 21 feet--seven yards--in 1.5 seconds. We also know that the overwhelming majority of civilian gunfights happen inside seven yards. While you're behind cover playing with your gun, your assailant is moving, getting into a better position to whack you. In the five seconds it's likely to take you to reload, your assailant could relocate his or her whole family into the neighborhood and probably erect a tent. Five seconds is forever.

I had occasion to spend some time with an Israeli security specialist, military sniper and top firearms instructor a few months back. He was conversant with the shooting sports, and although his name can't appear in this article, I think his comments are germane.

"We stopped teaching tactical reloads," he told me, "because the people who tried to do them kept getting killed."

So what do you do if you're trapped in Condition Black and you have a chance to reload? Speed reload the gun! Drop the partially used magazine on the ground, ram the full magazine in hard, and continue with what you were doing as quickly as possible. If you're kneeling behind cover when you do the reload and there's time, by all means pick up--another fundamental monkey move--the partially charged magazine, and stuff it somewhere.

And if you're worried about not having enough ammunition in a firefight--even though no civilian gunfight that I could find reference to has been decided on round count--do what my Israeli friend suggests: "Carry more magazines."




Veteran handgun competitor and author Michael Bane is host of the television series Shooting Gallery on The Outdoor Channel. He's also the managing consultant for the National Shooting Sports Foundation's media education program.
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I agree 100%. Personally I hate tactical reloads. They're a pain in the ass and do indeed eat up plenty of mental capacity and time. Another technique which I prefer, is to drop the partial mag to the ground, speed reload with a fresh one and retrieve the partial IF you have appropriate time and cover to do so.

The article Dragoon posted and the points it illustrates are the very reason why we as shooters carry multiple magazines. Obviously for competition we carry far more than the average LEO or armed citizen based on the nature of the scenario. Nevertheless carry spare ammo. As much as you can effectively conceal. This consumption of mental and physical(fine motor skills) abilities that tactical reloads consumes also demonstrates the advantage high capacity autos over revolvers. Aligning one large stick into one large hole takes far less effort than aligning 6 separate points with six holes.

The important point in all of this is training. Nothing we do with firearms is pre programmed. It is all a learned response. Study hard...

TDC
 
And if you're worried about not having enough ammunition in a firefight--even though no civilian gunfight that I could find reference to has been decided on round count--do what my Israeli friend suggests: "Carry more magazines."

exactly. I have this magazine some where, probably in pieces and torn up from coffee stains and general wear and tear.

Excellent article.
 
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