ATLDave said:
I suppose that depends on whether you think a couple tenths of a second are negligible. They are not in competition. I suppose people might disagree about whether they are in a gunfight.
If you "slingshot " -- which you aren't advocating, here -- you
MUST move the gun away from your point of aim -- and it will take more time than a couple of extra fractions of a second
to get the gun/sights aligned again. (Funny, but nobody ever seems to mention THAT sort of lost time!)
In the competitive shooting I've done or observed, darn few of the shooters use the slingshot, but some WILL use a hand-over technique. If you use a "hand over the slide" technique you still have to move your hand UP to move the slide back and
that HAS to take MORE than using your strong-hand thumb (or several fingers of the off-hand) on the slide stop/release lever. The time it takes to push the slide back and reposition the hand for the next shot is NOT negligible, and it will likely take a bitlonger than just using the strong-hand thumb or the fingers of the off-hand to press the slide stop/release lever.
Using a hand-over technique or pressing the slide stop/release will allow you to keep the gun up at eye-level and relatively on target. Most of the best shooters I've watched (i.e., most accurate and fastest) do keep the gun up and pointed in the right direction and at or close to eye level. (I try to do that, it's a goal, but I'm not one of the best shooters.) If you can use your thumb without shifting the gun, you've got the best option, but not all hands and all guns (for a given person's hand) works well that way...
And since we're talking competition, many competitive shooters have guns that automatically slam the slide shut if the mag is inserted with sufficient force. More than one of them will tweak their guns so that the slide slamming shut isn't an accidental/serendipitous action, either.