One-Handed Reloads with Appendix Carry

This is not a situation that you want to find yourself in, but it's certainly possible and maybe even plausible depending on your lifestyle and your fragility, uh, how likely it is that you could end up being injured. Now this is not the time to learn how to run your gun one-handed. One handed shooting is something that most people practice. Most people learn whatever technique aspects they need to learn very early in their preparation for the use of a defensive firearm. One handed reloads or one-handed malfunction clearing, however, is usually considered an advanced skill.

Today's defensive guns and ammunition are very reliable. You have a good shooting platform behind. You learning how to clear a gun isn't something that you need to consider a fundamental skill, and even reloading, while it's something that almost everybody does learn as a fundamental skill, it's very rarely needed in defensive gun uses. So it may be something that while you learned how to reload your gun, hopefully you learned how to reload your gun without looking, you may not have gone as far as to learn one-handed reloads and again. When your arms in a sling, now is not the time to do it.

So hopefully if you find yourself in this situation you have previously learned and hopefully occasionally practiced your one-handed reloading skills. What you want to do if you find yourself in a sling, if you know you have some surgery coming up or once you've had that injury or that surgery and you're immobilized, if you get a chance to go practice and refresh those skills, it's going to be a good idea. Because this is different from being injured in a fight, in other words, if I started a defensive incident with two hands, I get injured and I lose the use of my support hand, all of my gear, of course, is gonna be staged as it normally would. Now there's a balancing act here. If you're gonna be in a sling or you're gonna lose the use of your support arm for an extended period of time, you really should consider going to the range and maybe changing your setup.

So normally I would carry my full length spare magazine on the weak side so that when I bring my gun back in to reload my weak hand can access it more easily. Of course that's gonna be more difficult, not impossible, but more difficult for me to reach with my strong hand only. So what I might do is change my set up a little bit. I might start carrying. My spare magazine on my strong side.

Now if you use uh what's called a sidecar with your appendix carry holster, if you actually carry with your magazine inside your waistband center carry center line carry, then it's not gonna be as big a deal as reaching into a pocket or reaching all the way over to your hip. So you'd probably just stick with what you're doing because there is some value to the consistency. In other words, if I've practiced for years and, and I personally have practiced for years reaching across my body one way or another to try to get to that spare magazine. So switching to my strong side well in the middle of the fight, if I come back, start my technique holster and reach for that magazine and then have to remember or realize or recognize that the magazine is over here because I haven't practiced from this position, that's a problem. So practicing from this side is what we're gonna be working on today.

So we'll go through all of the the points of the one-handed reload and again remember this is something that if we know it's coming, it's not a surprise. Didn't happen in the middle of the fight. We might want to adjust our gear set up. I'll go ahead actually and I think I need to chamber around. You're gonna see when I chamber around what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the front of this Gideon optic to push down.

I'm pointing the gun ahead of me. I'm pushing down. We always say that whenever you're loading making ready to shoot, this is the chance to practice your reload. So I'm gonna push down on top of my holster. My muzzle is pointed away from me.

I get a full rack. I can come up here. I can see and I can feel the loaded chamber indicator and know that my magazine has done the job of putting around in a place where the slide can get to it and push it into the chamber, and I'm gonna go ahead and start my drill. So when I start my drill. As soon as I feel a slide lock, I'm gonna start to bring the gun in, drop the magazine out.

At this point, I would go back to my holster normally and you've probably seen this a lot in other training videos, maybe even here at PDN. One of the things you usually see is that we've got an outside the waistband holster and it's very easy to find if you watch military or law enforcement guys practicing this. It's very easy to find the holster. You may not have as easy a time, especially under duress, trying to get a gun back into an appendix carry holster between your body and of course you're inside the waistband and you've got clothing outside of it. So we need to think about some alternatives.

Well, if I follow. My body back I can find my open jeans type pocket in the back and that's gonna be good enough to hold the gun. Come back up here, find that magazine, make sure that it's oriented by feel in the right direction. Find the magazine well with the thumb, insert, come back up, and now again I can either use my belt or in this case I'll use my holster to rack and I can come back to the ready or re-engage. Go back to the holster.

Of course, at this point, I'm gonna use my thumb to hook, make sure the holster is clear of audio cords for my mic as well as the shirt, and I can get back in and I can run that drill again. Practicing for one-handed reloads, learning how to do one-handed reloads is something you should do long before you have an injury or an incapacitation during a fight. And remember, we normally wouldn't say carry magazines, for example, on both sides. Most people aren't going to do that. There's not a justification for it.

But if you are going to be immobilized significantly, if you're gonna have a significant, uh, temporary disability, then you are going to think about changing your setup. If you change your set up, make sure you get to the range and practice in that set up.