Bartholomew Roberts
Member
On mag changes, there are basically two schools of thought that I have seen. One is that you need to get your rifle back in the fight and you can worry about retrieving empty magazines when the fight is over. The second is that a rifle without working magazines is useless and you must learn to retain your magazines.
In my limited experience, it seems many instructors teaching from an LEO or self-defense perspective prefer a fast reload where you worry about the empty magazines later. Many military trainers on the other hand, seem to emphasize mag retention more, most likely due to the different constraints each faces.
A few stories illustrating each side, some from personal experience and some I've heard secondhand.
Shooting a force-on-force scenario, I run the magazine dry with an armed assailant less than seven yards away. There is no time for mag retention - I drop the mag on the ground as I run while reaching for the spare.
In timed shooting, speed reload beats mag retention every time even among shooters who train and practice mag retention.
Shooter is running a course of fire and drops his 9mm mag on the deck. At the end of the course when he retrieves it, it is full of sand and non-functional. He can't return it to function before his next run.
Contractors get involved in a gunfight in Asia. They are each armed only with a pistol and two magazines. As they are pulling back to the vehicle to leave, they are held up as one of the contractors is making weird hand gestures and neither shooting or moving. He has dropped his mag on the deck and it has disappeared into the muck. He is trying to fish it out of the muck because they are in a weapons-restrictive country and will not get any more magazines. In the meantime, he isn't firing, he isn't moving and his compatriots are running out of ammo. Eventually he abandons the lost mag. If that sounds far-fetched for the average LEO or citizen, just remember Katrina... very similar environment.
Clearly, there isn't one solution that works well in every circumstance. However, since we tend to do what we are trained to do, the question is which should we be training for? Which is the better default solution?
In my limited experience, it seems many instructors teaching from an LEO or self-defense perspective prefer a fast reload where you worry about the empty magazines later. Many military trainers on the other hand, seem to emphasize mag retention more, most likely due to the different constraints each faces.
A few stories illustrating each side, some from personal experience and some I've heard secondhand.
Shooting a force-on-force scenario, I run the magazine dry with an armed assailant less than seven yards away. There is no time for mag retention - I drop the mag on the ground as I run while reaching for the spare.
In timed shooting, speed reload beats mag retention every time even among shooters who train and practice mag retention.
Shooter is running a course of fire and drops his 9mm mag on the deck. At the end of the course when he retrieves it, it is full of sand and non-functional. He can't return it to function before his next run.
Contractors get involved in a gunfight in Asia. They are each armed only with a pistol and two magazines. As they are pulling back to the vehicle to leave, they are held up as one of the contractors is making weird hand gestures and neither shooting or moving. He has dropped his mag on the deck and it has disappeared into the muck. He is trying to fish it out of the muck because they are in a weapons-restrictive country and will not get any more magazines. In the meantime, he isn't firing, he isn't moving and his compatriots are running out of ammo. Eventually he abandons the lost mag. If that sounds far-fetched for the average LEO or citizen, just remember Katrina... very similar environment.
Clearly, there isn't one solution that works well in every circumstance. However, since we tend to do what we are trained to do, the question is which should we be training for? Which is the better default solution?