Beyond the Click: Essential Gun Handling Skills

When you are on the range practicing with your pistol and you hear a click when you pull the trigger, but there is no bang (the gun did not fire), do you instinctively know what to do?

That is called a Type 1 malfunction or failure to feed. And besides being able to hit what you are aiming at in a respectable amount of time the second most important thing is to have a functioning gun. 

Type I malfunctions are fixed by tapping the magazine into the pistol grip to make sure it is seated then racking the slide while turning the gun so that the ejection port is facing the ground to get the gun back into battery. Racking the slide does one of two things: 1. it will rack a new round into the chamber or 2. clear a dud round then chamber a new round. The net result is that the gun will be back in battery with a new round in the chamber. Type 1 malfunctions occur because of a failure to load the gun in the first place, failure of seating the magazine into the magazine well properly or having a dud round in the chamber. 

Type 2 malfunction, also known as stovepipe, is when a round or empty casing is protruding from the ejection port

Alternatively some call this a failure to eject. This happens when the casing from a spent round is extracted, but fails to clear the ejection port, hence failure to eject. It is visible in the ejection port. Fixing this malfunction is exactly the same as the Type 1 malfunction. Tap the magazine into the pistol grip then rack the slide while turning the gun so that the ejection port is facing the ground. This will clear the protruding casing and chamber a new round. The gun is back into battery and will fire. 

Type 1 and type 2 malfunctions are fairly quick to fix and with practice you should be able to recognize the malfunction, run through the malfunction drill and get the gun back up to fire another round in 2-3 seconds. 

Type 3 malfunctions, also known as double feed or failure to extract, is when there is a round in the chamber or an empty casing in the chamber and a round being stripped off the magazine onto the loading ramp stuck against the round or casing in the chamber.

Hence, double feed, two rounds trying to get into the single chamber. This is the most complicated of the malfunctions to fix. If this happens in a gunfight, your first concern should be to get to cover. Then work on fixing the malfunction. 

The fix for a type 3 malfunction is to lock the slide back, strip the magazine, rack the slide 2-3 times, then reinsert the magazine or insert a new magazine, rack the slide and you are back in battery and ready to fire. If this happens repeatedly you may have a bad extractor. If occasionally it may be a bad magazine. Occasionally tap-rack-rolling the type 2 malfunction can cause a type 3 malfunction. 

So, there you have the fixes for the most common types of pistol malfunctions. Guns are mechanical tools and as such are subject to mechanical failures. Learning and practicing the various malfunctions will allow you to get the gun back up and running. Treat each malfunction as a learning opportunity and just work through them. You’ll eventually get the process of identifying and fixing the malfunction to motor memory. 

And lastly, if you plan on using the pistol for self-defense, run a couple of hundred rounds of the self-defense ammo you plan on using through the gun to make sure it feeds properly. Different types of ammunition work better in some guns versus others. 

Remember to train hard, train smart and train often.