We see this happen all the time in training. Drawing from concealment, under pressure with the threat at bad breath distance, and you get a handfull of your shirt as well as the gun. So what do you do?
In the first video we were going to let the gun go dry to simulate a malfunction when I inadvertently got my shirt entangled with the slide (exactly what we were training for)
The gun fires once and then stops. The response is to immediately strike with the pistol to scramble the BGs OODA loop. Identify the problem and if it can be fixed quickly, move off line and get the gun back into action. In this case the slide was closed with no obstruction so a TRB fixes it quickly.
So now we take that same scenario, but now we have a catastrophic malfunction of the gun, something that will take more than a couple of seconds to fix. The quicker response now is to transition to another weapon. In this case it will be a knife.
The gun fires once and stops. Immediately strike the BG. I see the action open with an obstruction and know this will take too much time to fix. In this video we experimented with moving the pistol to the support hand and then drawing the knife. This seemed slow and it would be nice to be able to use that hand to defend or control the BG.
So in the second video I simply drop the pistol to the ground. This gave me both hands to work with and seemed the better response.
In the last video we try a technique that I read about on warriortalk. If your gun is completely entangled in your shirt, they advise you to shoot through it and then thrust forward ripping the gun past the shirt.
We tried this with three different shooters, three different guns and two calibers. We couldn't get it to work even once.
What we learned- The gun will fire through he shirt. How many times? Who knows. We emptied entire mags and other times only got off a couple of shots before the gun malfunctioned. And then it was a matter of moving off line, disentangling the gun from your shirt and fixing the malfunction.
- Shawn
