Handling Pistol Failures Guide

At some point or another, you will learn the meaning of the phrase “failure to fire”. Murphy’s Law says it will be at the worst possible moment. Fortunately, it’s an easy issue to overcome. There’s really only one method you will even need to learn to fix it (well, one and a half. We’ll get to that in a moment).

When you’re dealing with a semi-automatic pistol, there are a lot of moving parts with tight tolerances and if any of them are off enough, the gun will mess up. Reasons for failures can range from poor technique to bad bullets and broken gun. As far as bad ammo goes, think about it for a moment: ammo manufacturers churn out millions and millions of bullets. Complete and absolute perfection is impossible. Even if they’re able to maintain 99.99% functionality across the line, that still leaves 100 bad bullets for every million produced. Could be anything from not enough powder to a wonky casing to an incorrectly set bullet.

Then take into consideration how many moving parts are in your pistol and how many of those are churned out daily at a factory. When your gun fires, there’s a delicate dance that has to happen correctly in order for it to continue working. One thing goes wrong and…oops…gun don’t work no more.

Knowing how to deal with a failures and deal with it quickly can be a lifesaver.

No matter what the problem is, most of them are fixed with the Tap & Rack. It’s very easy to practice and should be practiced to the point that it’s almost automatic. First thing to keep in mind is to always keep the gun pointed down range as you do this. Also, and this is very important, keep your finger off the trigger as you perform the maneuver.

As the name implies, it’s pretty much just 2 steps:

1. Tap (slap) the bottom of the magazine as hard as you comfortably can.
2. Rack the slide.

A lot of problems can be caused by an improperly seated magazine. I’ve also had some magazines get gummed up to the point that the bullets get kind of stuck. If the bullet isn’t pressed hard against the feeder, it won’t be able to pull another bullet. Slapping the magazine makes sure it’s seated and can potentially break loose any jam up in the magazine itself.

The racking step accomplishes quite a few other fixes as well. First, if it’s just a faulty bullet, racking gets it out of the way. It’ll clear up any stove piping and also unjam a double feed. Sometimes it might take racking a couple of times to clear the issue.

Don’t worry though, these guns aren’t made of glass or flimsy plastic (well, the polymer guns are made of plastic but they’re anything but flimsy). These things are engineered to take some wicked abuse. Heck, they’re containing a pretty large explosion every time you pull the trigger. When you rack the slide, you want to do it with every bit of force necessary to clear that problem. If my life is on the line, I will do everything I can to get it working again. If there is a clear threat and I had the time I’d even beat on it with a hammer if I thought it would fix it.

Short of the gun just falling apart in your hands, there’s really only a couple of problems you’re going to run into at a given moment: a bad bullet, a failure to feed, a failure to eject and a failure to extract. Now, each one is essentially fixed with a tap and rack but there can be a slight variation depending. Let’s take a look at each one in depth.

This is one simple…the bullet sucks. It’s either bad primer, wet powder, bad powder or whatever. The end result is that you’ve pulled the trigger and the bullet didn’t go “bang”. If you’re at the range or another situation where time permits, wait 3 seconds THEN tap and rack. There’s a phenomenon called “slow burn” which means the powder isn’t lighting up as quickly as it should. It’s rare but usually happens with old or poorly stored ammo. By waiting to a count of three before tapping and racking, you’re making sure that the bullet doesn’t explode AFTER you’ve removed it. If you’re in a life or death defensive situation, just tap and rack and don’t worry about it. You’ve got more important things to deal with in that case.

Believe it or not, this one happens a lot: Your magazine isn’t seated correctly (or it’s not working correctly). Slap the mag to make sure it’s seated then rack to load a new round. I used to have a gun where the bullets would get stuck in the magazine. A quick slap dislodged them and I was good to go.

For whatever reason, sometime the spent brass doesn’t get launched from the chamber. It’s either a bad ejector (a little metal piece that kicks the brass out when the slide moves back) or a bad grip technique or any other reason. Regardless, the bullet just isn’t going anywhere. The most obvious sign is the dreaded “stovepipe”. This is where the spent casing gets stuck on its way out. It looks like a chimney or smoke stack sticking out of the gun, hence the name. How do you fix it? Tap and Rack! The action knocks the spent casing loose and you can continue.

 

 

 

 

There’s this little tab on your gun that grabs the rim of your spent brass. As your slide moves back, this tab (with the creative name of “extractor”) pulls the casing out of the chamber and hits it against the ejector so that the casing can be gracefully ejected from the gun. Sometimes, the extractor can slip off the rim. This causes a double feed. In this situation, there’s a slight modification to the tap and rack. Instinctively, you should do the tap and rack and as soon as you rack you’ll notice the problem. It’s just not going to have the movement that it normally would. In this case, drop the magazine, rack it three or four times to pull the bullet then reload and rack. If the problem keeps happening, you might have a bad extractor. Seek out a gunsmith in your area to take a look at it.

It’s easy to practice this maneuver. Just make sure your gun is safe and then tap and rack it. If you have some dummy rounds, you can recreate the failures to practice clearing them. No matter what, practice until it’s automatic.