You're quite right, PWC, for me to attend a club or range would be very beneficial, but I'm too old to risk my life in this pandemic. So I'm left with engaging with the world through the internet. Sad to say. Havok, sorry to go on about this, but I'm following your excellent demonstration (and I recognize that all this would happen in split seconds of anxiety), but if he sees the round stuck in the barrel, would he take the chance of pulling the trigger?, or just, as you say, convert all his energy to the H2H, possibly with the gun as a hand tool (which I was going to do following the Capn's advise).
Novelist Seeking Help With Guns
- Thread starter Union St
- Start date
- Status
I don't know anyone who would knowingly attempt to pull the trigger with an obstruction of any kind in the barrel. There is really no way to see the bullet though - either the chamber stays closed or the next round jams into the stuck bullet and blocks the view of it.
As you can see in my pictures, the slide is almost closed. Conversely that means the new cartridge is almost fully chambered. It would he very hard for even an experienced shooter to discern that the new cartridge wasn't fully seated if they were somehow able to look in before the slide closed. For my test I locked the slide open and manually inserted the new cartridge after sticking the first bullet. Then I released the slide so it could pick up momentum similar to how it would if it were cycling after firing. Even with me doing this knowingly I still fiddled with the new round a bit to make it wasn't fully seated. That's just how close to normal it looks.
If it were me in the situation you describe, I would likely attempt to rack another round in the chamber after the first failure (keeping in mind it would be highly unlikely I realized it was a squib). When that failed I would immediately move to close the distance to my target. In real life, since I'm not actually an assassin, I may be more likely to retreat if I could safely do so.
As you can see in my pictures, the slide is almost closed. Conversely that means the new cartridge is almost fully chambered. It would he very hard for even an experienced shooter to discern that the new cartridge wasn't fully seated if they were somehow able to look in before the slide closed. For my test I locked the slide open and manually inserted the new cartridge after sticking the first bullet. Then I released the slide so it could pick up momentum similar to how it would if it were cycling after firing. Even with me doing this knowingly I still fiddled with the new round a bit to make it wasn't fully seated. That's just how close to normal it looks.
If it were me in the situation you describe, I would likely attempt to rack another round in the chamber after the first failure (keeping in mind it would be highly unlikely I realized it was a squib). When that failed I would immediately move to close the distance to my target. In real life, since I'm not actually an assassin, I may be more likely to retreat if I could safely do so.
CapnMac
Member
And, this is middling critical.
In a nigh stress situation in the full flood of an adrenaline dump, there is scant little attention for anything outside of that narrow range of focus. A person could go right past pink elephants or tigers in tutus and not notice.
Foveal vision is spooky. It's like looking down a glass tube--the vision is very clear at the mouth of the tube, but very blurry everywhere else. It's visible, but the adrenaline is basically dumping all input from the periphery. You go from normal vision to super sharp in the center, to around 20/100 everywhere else. (The term comes from the fovea, the area where light directly impacts the retina, it spans about 30-35º of a person's "normal" vision--scientists are still undecided on the actual biomechanics of it, but it's a well documented thing.)
So, you don't really have a lot of time for conscious thought, it's more about training and reflexes.
Your training means you expect the gun to come up and go Bang! It doesn't, so it's down to the reflexes and training as to what comes next. If trained (or experienced to reflex) the slide rack will be nearly unconscious. If/when the there's no second Bang! then things change. Either focus shifts from Threat to Gun (poor outcomes); or focus remains on Threat, and Next tool is gone for (better outcomes).
Which could be just using the gun as a bludgeon. Back in the 60s two handed shooting was not "the thing" so very much. So the left (or offside) hand is likely empty. Bun not going off twice being Bad, the gun hand might come forward as the support hand goes for a backup weapon like a knife. This will not include much overt thinking beyond "Knife!"
- Status
