Slide Stop Vs. Racking The Slide

First off, using the slide stop to put a pistol back into battery after reloading is a technique that has been taught since, at least, Vietnam. It’s been proven effective in military, LE, and civilian combat situations. Yet many instructors and writers SWEAR that it is a bad technique.

So, why is it so controversial and why do so many respected instructors say it’s not reliable?

  1. Most shooters do it wrong. They either use their shooting thumb or try to “s l I d e” their support hand thumb along the frame rather than pushing their hand down and in THROUGH the slide stop, using their thumb as the point of contact with the gun. Done correctly, the technique works reliably with mud, blood, cold fingers, and gloves.
  2. Prima donna guns have issues. A lot of guns look pretty but don’t run well. They have problems in all stages of shooting and they NEED the extra 1/8 – 1/4 of an inch of slide travel when returning to battery to operate reliably.
  3. Efficient teaching vs. most effective teaching. When you’ve got a line of 10-20 students, instructors need to teach techniques that will work for everyone, not 10 different techniques that will work best for the 10 particular models of guns that are there. As an instructor, I agree with this 100%, but when you want to MASTER your gun, you want to use the techniques that are most effective for you and your gun. It’s like learning to drive A car vs. learning to drive YOUR car.
  4. It’s a technique that’s just for SEALs, Green Berets, and other operators with unlimited budgets.Again, a popular but misguided line of thinking. You only need an unlimited training budget if you’re using pre-historic, old school training techniques. With advanced training techniques, like what we teach, you can become a VERY advanced shooter with an incredibly small ammo budget.
  5. The slide stop technique is a fine motor skill and will fail under stress. This is an incredibly popular argument, but it has very little basis in fact. First off, hitting the slide stop is no more of a fine motor skill than pressing the trigger, hitting the mag release, isolating the trigger finger from the rest of the hand, or disengaging retention on a holster. If one fails, wouldn’t all of them fail? Why pick on the slide stop?

Second, fine motor skills succeed or fail in extreme stress situations based on several factors…the 2 main ones being the number of times that you’ve executed a skill before and whether or not you freak out and lose control or have gone through a process to keep your cool in stressful situations.

That’s one of the reasons why retired Navy SEAL, Larry Yatch created the Concealed Carry Masters Course…He don’t want to just tell you how to do stuff and that you should blindly listen to him because he is a SEAL and looks cool in flip flops and sunglasses.