Pistol Handling: The Overhand Method

Consistency is a very important part of your advanced pistol handling. We want to make sure that we're integrating consistently with the firearm. For example, we want to do as much as we can here in the ready position. We don't want to do things out here. We don't wanna do things up here. We want to do them in the ready position here as consistently as we can, because this is where we're ultimately gonna present the firearm to engage a target or it's going to come through that position from the holster or wherever it is that we're storing the gun. We want to be here in that high compressed, ready position. We want to make sure we can do all of our weapons handling skills here. One of the most fundamental weapons handling things that we're going to do is to get the gun into battery, insert a loaded magazine, clear, malfunction, whatever it is, and then get the firearm out of this condition and into battery so that we can actually fire rounds. Well, traditionally, a lot of firearms have slide releases. And as you can see, this Glock has a slide release which is an aftermarket addition to this design. The original design, the Glock has a slide lock lever. And so we see slide releases, slide lock levers or in the case of something like this Walther PPK which has neither a slide release or a slide lock lever. There is no mechanical mechanism to get these slide to go into battery other than to insert a loaded magazine, which of course, this one is not. Insert a loaded magazine and then rack the slot manually. And then of course we de-cock, go off safe and we'd be ready to use this firearm for defense. So what's important to remember is that because firearms are going to be inconsistent we need to have one way to interact with them. Take a look at this Beretta. The Beretta has a very prominent slide release. It's very easy to hit for most people with the thumbs because it comes a great deal far back into the grip area. So because it comes back, it's easy to hit with that thumb. And we see a lot of people get very used to it as a lot of my military students, for example who are issued this firearm get very used to inserting a magazine and hitting that button. Some of them even get used to inserting a magazine and hitting it with their off hand, which is which is really a bad habit because we don't know that we're going to have this available to us. We might be doing one handed reloads, for example where the firearms in the holster, when we insert a magazine and we come out, we need to be able to hit that with our one hand, we need to be able to de-cock of course with our good firing hand, because this hand may be busy after we shot controlling someone or dealing with a situation we need to make sure we're using one hand to manipulate the firearms. So that's one important part of consistency is that we should use one hand to manipulate the firearm whenever possible. Part of that is understanding the friction necessary to rack the slide. So if we want to use our holster or our belt we have a one handed reload and I'm in my holster and I insert the magazine, get my good firing grip on the firearm and then turn around and use your belt. Your belt buckle is a great place to rack the slide, de-cock, and then be ready to go. So again, we can do it with one hand. The important point being, being as consistent as we can using one hand that we know will have on the gun. If we're going to shoot the gun strong handed we know that that hand is going to be on the gun. Using that hand to manipulate the firearm as much as we can and being consistent so that if we always insert that magazine and rack overhand, we know that it's going to work with any firearm. It's going to work even with this 1911, for example, for a lot of people the width of the 1911 grip makes it impossible for them to hit that slide release without adjusting their grip in some way, actually having to turn your hand around the gun to hit the slide release lever. Again, why bother? If we have two hands, we've done our normal reload reach up, rack the slide, safety on, or engage the target at that point. So by using this as simply a slide lock lever and not a slide release what we do is we encourage consistency to insert overhand rack and then either safety de-cock or engage our threat. We want to try to do that whenever we can. So throughout this video you won't be seeing the slide lock lever or the slide release being used. You'll see overhand manipulation which is consistent with our ready position. We can do it in here, close, consistent with malfunction clearing, consistent with everything we want to do to get this firearm back into battery. And of course we don't want to slingshot. We don't want to extend the gun away from our body which we have to. We can't slingshot in here very reliably. People come out here and they think it's very easy or very fast. Well, there's a difference between fast and easy and efficient. Efficient is to be up here and consistent and to go overhand. The last concern I want to address we'll go back to the Beretta. A lot of people are worried about turning on a slide mounted safety, or de-cocker when they go overhand. Well, the trick to that is to keep it in contact with the gun. We're going to insert that magazine in, rotate the hand up ,come up under that wing, under that little ear that's sitting there, and that's going to get us into a position where we can de-cock or we could engage target in single action mode. So staying close to the gun is also more efficient. It keeps us in constant contact. We're not going to hit, come off, and then push down on the top of the gun, which can result in that safety being on, which would actually be a very dangerous situation. So we want to be consistent and careful in our training so that we are ultimately being as efficiently as we can when it comes to our advanced pistol handling.