Читать книгу Gun Digest's Speed Reloading the Revolver Concealed Carry eShort - Grant Cunningham - Страница 3

Flatten your right hand and swiftly strike the ejector rod one time with your palm. This accelerates the brass and tends to throw it clear of the cylinder, even with short ejector rods. Velocity is more important than force, and it’s important that you only strike the ejector rod one time. If there are any cases that fail to clear the cylinder, multiple ejections will not clear them but do significantly raise the risk of a case-under-extractor jam. This technique virtually eliminates the risk of such a jam. If there are cases that don’t clear, you can pick them out without danger of a jam.

One of the major criticisms of the double action revolver is that it’s hard to reload efficiently. With an autoloading pistol the empty magazine is ejected and the replacement rounds are contained in a large, easy to handle package that goes into the gun in one smooth motion. The revolver, on the other hand, has to be partially disassembled, the old cases ejected, the new rounds inserted into their individual holes, and then the gun reassembled. It’s a tedious task, of that there is no doubt!

It’s also a time-consuming job that requires a large amount of manual dexterity to perform. Reloading the revolver efficiently, especially under stress, is not the easiest task in the world. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, nor does it mean that it can’t be done efficiently. There are ways to make the revolver reload easier and faster, and that’s what this chapter is all about.

The worst case scenario for reloading the revolver in a timely manner has to be during self-defense. Since my personal shooting interest these days is primarily for self-defense, the reload techniques I use are optimized for the demands of that situation. Those demands are very different than those of pure competition; as you’ll see, more efficient does not always mean faster.

Circumstances that affect our technique

Why focus on the defensive reload? Because the self-defense incident is the most demanding of the very things that are required to get the wheelgun up and operating: fine motor skills. They are greatly hampered or diminished during a defensive encounter, and they make efficient revolver reloads more difficult.

Ideally we’d have a reload technique that doesn’t require any fine motor coordination at all, but that’s not a practical goal. The revolver by its very design requires close interaction with our fingers, just at a time when the strength, dexterity, and tactile sensation of those digits is compromised by the event. We can’t eliminate the requirement for fine motor skills because the demands of the gun’s design won’t let us.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t seek to minimize dependence on those fine skills as much as possible. The less we rely on small muscle groups and precise control, the more chances for error we eliminate. That’s why an ideal defensive reloading technique minimizes, to the greatest degree possible, the reliance on fine motor movements and dexterity. Again, we can’t eliminate them entirely because we still have to interact with a mechanical device, but the more we reduce our reliance on those skills the more efficient we’ll be.

Proponents of competition-based techniques aren’t fond of this approach, pointing out that operating the trigger is a fine motor skill as well – and we don’t worry about that! While largely true, the trigger finger action is still relatively primitive (a simple grasp) compared to the subtle manipulations required to put rounds into the cylinder’s chambers. It’s also something that we can’t work around.

We can work around the manipulations used in reloading. By focusing on large muscle groups and coarse motor movements whenever possible, we make the revolver reload more stress resistant, less prone to failure, and more efficient under the worst conditions.

The defensive reload is fast, but its main benefit is that it’s designed to work with the body’s natural reactions in a life-or-death struggle. By minimizing the need for fine motor control and dexterity, a good defensive reload makes it far less likely that the shooter is going to stall the reload and prolong his or her exposure to danger. It can certainly be used competitively, and many people do, me included.

A serious competition shooter, however, may desire a different technique optimized for that job. By relying more on fine motor skills and weak hand manipulation, it’s possible to make the reload process just a bit faster. Doing this means that the reload technique has a few more points of possible failure, but because competition doesn’t have the same deleterious effect on motor control and coordination as a violent attack, the reload technique can cut many corners and still be viable. If you flub a reload in a match, you’re out nothing but pride.

The reverse is not true, because the demands on motor control and concentration in a defensive encounter can lead to a botched reload, and a botched reload can lead to serious consequences. For this reason I recommend that you use the defense-oriented Universal Revolver Reload technique if you carry a revolver primarily for self-defense. If you’re primarily a competitor, and you have a properly equipped gun, you’ll be able to shave a few tenths of a second off your time by using the slightly faster Competition Reload.

The choice is yours, and I hope I’ve laid out the criteria for your decision.

In addition, I’ll show you a defensive reload technique for left-handed shooters. In a later chapter you’ll also see techniques for one-handed reloads, both strong and weak hand.

If you’ve been around the revolver world for very long, you’ve probably noticed that there is a wide range of opinion on, and variety in, revolver reload techniques. You can find people who will argue incessantly about the ‘best’ way to perform a reload. I respect other’s opinions, but I believe these techniques to be the ‘best in class’ for the reasons you’ll see.

Using the palm of your left hand, strike the ejector rod once only.

Defensive reloading: the Universal Revolver Reload

As I mentioned, it’s possible to mess up a revolver reload, particularly under threatening stress. There are a couple of points in the process where a reload can be significantly delayed or even completely stalled improper technique or ignorance of the dynamics involved. The Universal Revolver Reload, or URR, is designed to avoid those failure points to the greatest degree possible.

One failure point occurs during the ejection of spent casings. If the stroke of the ejector is longer than the case of the rounds being shot, it’s easy to end up with the dreaded case-under-extractor jam. Another failure point occurs during insertion of a speedloader, where it’s not uncommon for a live round to bind in the loader and prevent the cylinder from closing.

The URR is designed specifically to prevent both of these. By reducing the reliance on fine motor control, the URR minimizes these stress-induced failure points during the reloading process. It’s as fast as most other techniques, but I believe it to be more reliable when the hands experience the body’s natural reactions to a threat stimulus: lowered strength, flexibility, and feeling in the extremities.

As the cylinder unlatches, the fingers of your left hand will naturally apply pressure to open the cylinder. Remember that it’s the movement of the gun against your fingers that does the work. As the muzzle comes to the vertical position, just let the gun rotate onto the middle fingers of your left hand, thus pushing the cylinder fully open. Grasp the cylinder between your thumb and fingers to immobilize it, and remove your right hand from the grip. The gun will now be hanging vertically on the left hand fingers. Up to this point you’ve used primarily large muscle groups and gross motor movements, which are very resistant to degradation during the body’s natural response to a threat.

Truly universal

It’s called “universal” because it’s usable with no modification, or even conscious thought, on all major types of revolvers: Smith & Wesson, Ruger, and Colt. It even works with the oddball Dan Wesson revolver!

Because of the different ways in which these brands unlatch their cylinders, you can find reload techniques that will work well with one but require modification (and a mind-set change) for use on other guns. The URR works without change; if you own more than one brand of revolver, the URR is tailor made for you.

Let’s take a look at the procedure.

Safety first: Always practice reloading with dummy ammunition, like the primer-less rounds shown here. DO NOT PRACTICE WITH LIVE AMMUNITION UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Save the live rounds for the actual shooting application on the range!

The basis of the URR is a common, large-muscle-group motor movement, one you’ve no doubt done many times in your life. Pretend you’re holding a basketball in your hands, left hand on the bottom and right hand on the top. How do you reverse the position of your hands without removing them from the ball?

Simple - you just rotate your wrists and let the ball rotate in your hands. It’s a simple, gross motor movement primarily involving the large muscles of the forearm. This action is the basis of the Universal Revolver Reload.

The URR uses the weak (left) hand to simply hold the gun, while the more dextrous strong hand performs the tasks that require fine motor control. There are those who suggest that it’s more efficient to keep the revolver in the shooting hand while reloading, but they ignore the real effects of the body’s natural reactions in a lethal encounter.

If you’re like most people you have a strong hand and a weak hand. Your weak hand is probably significantly less able to do precise work than your strong hand. Even those whose hands are very close in ability find that when they need the precision, they use their strong hand. We know that fine motor control degrades under stress, and asking your weak hand to do a fine task under such conditions is probably not the best way to get it done efficiently. A reload technique that has the strongest, most experienced hand relegated to merely cradling the empty gun while delegating the most delicate parts of the operation to the hand least suited to doing them is probably not a recipe for success!

This is why the URR has the weak hand doing the simple tasks and the strong hand doing the complex ones.

Remember to let the gun do the work by rotating into your hands. You don’t have to consciously search for the release catch or forcibly push the cylinder open or stick your fingers into the frame window. The natural movement of the gun in your hands will do that for you.

Speedloader technique

A speedloader is the most efficient way to recharge your revolver, but poor technique can slow the reload significantly.

I recommend that you carry only four rounds in your strips, starting at the tab end and loading two rounds, a space, and two more rounds, with the leftover space at the other end. This gives you a handling tab at each end and one in the middle.

Once the strip has been retrieved, insert two rounds into adjacent chambers and ‘peel’ the strip off the case heads, allowing them to drop into the cylinder.

SpeedStrip technique

The SpeedStrip (and the other similar products) are convenient to carry, but slower and more dependent on fine motor skills in use. To compensate I have a specific way of configuring and using them.

Now drop the strip and close the cylinder. Back in business!

Controversy?

There is an argument made for changing the SpeedStrip reload technique so that the left hand does the actual recharge of the cylinder. The premise is that it’s faster to load two rounds from a strip and immediately start shooting again, and using the left hand to do this allows you to retain the unused ammunition for the next reload. Taken at its face this appears to be a valid argument.

As the rounds enter the chambers, release them by whatever method your speedloader brand requires. If you’re using a Safariland or SL Variant, simply push the body of the speedloader toward the cylinder and the rounds will release.

My position goes back to the body’s natural reactions – the reduction in blood flow to the extremities, which makes our hands weaker, less flexible, and with less tactile sensation. Asking the weak hand, the one least suited to performing a fine motor skill, to do so under those conditions and with the least efficient tool is not ideal.

Yes, it’s slightly faster to load two rounds and get back in the fight. If that’s what you need to do, load two rounds and drop the strip. Of course you’re now left with only two rounds in the gun and the rest of your spare ammo on the ground. The solution?

Carry two strips! Two are as easy to carry as one and give you double the ammo load. In my mind it makes no sense to sacrifice overall efficiency to accommodate one minor occurrence that’s easily dealt with in other ways. That’s why I continue to advocate for reloading with the strong hand, no matter how momentarily fashionable other techniques may be.

Left-handed defensive reload

Most of my left-handed students have found the following to be workable. Like the right-handed URR, it uses the most experienced hand to do the important tasks and leaves the weak hand holding the gun. As noted, I believe this is the rational way to do things.

You’ll notice the commonalities with the Universal Revolver Reload: using large muscle groups to the greatest degree, using the most agile hand to do the critical job of charging the cylinder, and letting the gun do the work wherever possible. Like the URR, this method is designed to avoid the critical stall points in the reload process and make the reload more efficient in critical situations.

Carrying ammunition in a pocket, either with a speedloader or a Speed Strip, can wear bullet noses and cause hollowpoints to close, making them ineffective.

Ammunition carriers

Speedloaders, SpeedStrips, and other ammunition carry/reload products all have pluses and minuses. Some are easier to carry while others are more efficient to use. I’ve found uses for all of them.

The speedloader

The speedloader is distinguished by its shape: it is cylindrical (or nearly so), so that the pattern of the rounds that it carries matches the cylinder it fits. The speedloader holds a full charge of ammunition for the cylinder, and inserts all of the rounds at one time into their chambers. There is some method of retaining the rounds in the loader that can be released or defeated so that the rounds are free to drop completely into their chambers.

The origin of the speedloader is still a bit murky. The earliest speedloaders that were workable (actually produced and sold) came to market in the first decade of the twentieth century. Originally made for the innovative Webley break-top revolvers, the Prideaux and Watson speedloaders appear to be the first of the modern loading devices.

Despite their long history, speedloaders didn’t come into widespread use until American police agencies started adopting them en masse in the 1970s. Today the speedloader is a vital revolver accessory, and remains by far the most efficient method to recharge an empty wheelgun.

The big advantage to the speedloader is that it indexes and releases all of the rounds at once. This makes them easier and faster to use than any of the alternatives.