Transitioning to Backup Gun

We talk a lot about developing the skills for reloads, whether there are emergency reloads, slide lock reloads, or preparation reloads to get ready for the next fight that might come once we depleted our primary magazine. But lots of you may carry backup guns. If you carry a backup gun and all you ever train for is reloads, you're missing an important part of your skill development, the transition from a primary gun to a backup gun. And quite frankly, this is something that's very often completely missing from people's training regimens. One of the reasons this completely missing is because people don't want to drop their gun. Certainly, that's understandable. But in a real fight, you're gonna wanna get rid of that useless gun and transition to your backup gun as quickly and as efficiently as you can. And that's quite simply going to mean the 'Drop It'. Now, if you train out on a grass field or in soft dirt, dropping your gun really isn't that big of a deal. Of course, when you're done training, you want to make sure that your gun is in good operating condition, you certainly want to pick it back up, clean it off, fire some rounds through it, make sure that you haven't done any damage to it before you rely on it for personal or home defense. But in this case, on this hard concrete floor, all I've done, is lay down some old target backers as a little bit of a cushion for when I dropped my primary firearm. Training in context is incredibly important. If you're not willing to train by practicing to drop your gun when you transition to your backup firearm, you're really not getting a 100% relationship between the situation of realizing this gun is no longer a viable defensive option, and you need to go to your backup gun. Training to that stimulus so that you have the proper trained response is very important. Now of course here it's staged, we know that there's going to be a time when I reach slide lock, and I'm gonna then go to my 38-caliber revolver that I'm carrying in a belly band as my backup firearm. In the real world, this malfunction or this slide lock isn't going to be planned, it isn't gonna be choreographed. So you can make this drill more interesting, by having this as a standard drill inside of all of your training. Anytime that you reach, slide lock, or more importantly, and maybe more realistically, anytime you reach a malfunction, you're gonna transition to your backup gun. Now in this case, for this drill, I'm not wearing any spare magazines. I'm carrying this Glock with one magazine in it, and I'm carrying the backup gun. So when I reach slide lock, or if I get a malfunction, I'm instantly gonna transition to my backup gun. And as I said, drop my primary firearm which is what I want to train to do. That transition is what you're gonna wanna do if you end up in a situation where your primary gun has reached slide lock and, or had a malfunction and you carry a backup gun that you're willing to use for personal defense. I'm gonna set it up, we'll do it again. Okay, I reloaded my magazine. Of course with a partial magazine, there's no reason to have to dump a full magazine at this drill, and I replaced my backup gun into the belly band into my carry method for that gun. Again, when I reached slide lock, I'm gonna transition to my backup firearm. This probably isn't a drill that you're gonna practice hundreds and hundreds of times or even dozens of times but if you carry a backup gun, it's important to understand the relationship between the stimulus of a primary gun that doesn't work and the learned response of dropping it and going for the backup gun to protect yourself or others.