If you’ve been following Concealed Nation for awhile, you’ll notice we harp a lot on training to deal with gun jams. It’s not necessarily because we hope that happens or because we don’t think any concealed carrier can’t work through them but for beginners and advanced concealed carriers alike, there is always a bit of nervousness when it comes to that moment of truth.
The moment of truth is a bit like Murphy’s Law. Anything that can happen, will happen. And some of those possibilities are unpleasant — like a double feed.
This video is a nice short one that addresses specifically what we need to look for in a double-feed. That’s when there’s a failure to eject the previous round and thus the next round is blocked from entering the chamber.
Not catastrophic by any means when in a safe training environment but it has the potential to seriously hurt us in a real world scenario.
The basics of dealing with a double-feed include simply pulling the receiver to the rear, ejecting the magazine, and then racking the slide to allow the spent casing to eject. Once the spent casing is ejected, reinsert magazine and proceed to party.
A lost detail in this is the necessity to take cover and concealment.
Reducing the target silhouette — the available area your opponent has to shoot you — is essential to surviving an engagement. This video addresses that point and goes on to stress the importance of taking any available cover prior to dealing with the double-feed and re-engaging the target.
Okay, so how do you simulate a double-feed in a training environment?
The easiest way is to load a spent casing into the chamber and insert a magazine. This will automatically cause a double-feed to occur. It can be easily corrected and, most importantly, you don’t lose any live rounds in the exchange.
In this training video, the instructor practices this by taking a knee before he corrects the double-feed. The frightening reality is that if you are in an uncovered, open position less than 20 feet from your opponent and a double-feed occurs, your only basic choice is to hope to make it to the prone position before correcting this feed. Otherwise, your best bet is to make all haste to get to cover. If a concealed carrier catches a double-feed and doesn’t take cover and his opponent is armed at a range of 20 feet, there’s not a lot of room to avoid getting shot.
The basics of a good double-feed drill include:
- Detect the double-feed has occurred by visual inspection.
- Rack the upper receiver to the rear.
- Eject magazine.
- Rack the slide forward and then back to jostle the chambered spent casing out.
- Once the spent casing is out, reinsert magazine.
- Take aim on target and fire.
Incorporated into this should be some way to take cover or reduce target silhouette. Anything is better than nothing in this type of scenario.
This video from Polenar Tactical goes a little more indepth into handling this sort of scenario from a one-handed perspective. We generally caution immediately going into these sorts of advanced handgun exercises because there’s a lot of room to make a grievous error.
Mixing things up by putting handicaps on yourself — such as using only one hand — creates a bit more of a challenge but if it can be done in a safe, controlled environment with the proper amount of consideration for safety, it may prove useful in the off-chance it’s required.
Be safe and train how you intend to fight.