Reinventing the wheel

You have by now probably seen the video of the USPSA shooter that uses the inertia of the slide to chamber a round in his Glock with one hand.  If not, the Firearm Blog has the video.  Sebastian also hauls out his nerd card and does the math to work out the physics of the Glock Trick (which is not a trick).

It is a very cool trick, and it can be replicated; however from a competition standpoint it’s just that – a cute stunt.  I doubt very much that by doing the slide with one hand, you save any time over coming over the top of the gun and racking the slide in a traditional controlled manner.  Yes, it looks cool, but it also increases your chances of something bad happening.  Being a safety officer, I don’t exactly have to stretch my imagination to see someone trying this trick and muzzling themselves, having an ND, or straight up dropping their gun.

I’m not saying that I don’t think it’s a cool video, because it is.  My problem is that it’s not practical.  It falls squarely under the reinventing the wheel because if (and this is a big if) you save any time doing it, I doubt very much that you couldn’t shave that same amount of time by practicing your loading technique until it was smooth and then practicing your strong hand shooting to get better at that.

Which ultimately is the moral of the story – instead of burning valuable practice time learning neat tricks like this, that time would be better spent becoming a better shooter.  Worried about your ability to load your gun?  Practice with snap caps.  Trying to shave some time on strong hand only stages?  Practice shooting strong hand only.  Neat tricks are not a substitute for good shooting skills, no matter how rad they look on YouTube.

Update: Apparently, great minds think alike.  3 minutes after I published this post, Tam published her thoughts on the matter.

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