Should You Carry With A Round In The Chamber? (You Decide)

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This video is for educational purposes.

00:00 Basic considerations before you carry.
00:46 Is it safe to carry with a round in the chamber?
02:36 Legality varies by location.
02:58 Muscle memory: How you train is how you will react.
03:47 Chambering a round takes extra time.
06:45 Mike’s summary.

There are four factors you need to think about — hard — before deciding to carry your pistol with an empty chamber.

1. Time
Racking a slide only takes tenths of a second with practice. That doesn’t sound like much — until you add up how much you are already behind the curve. Your brain takes a quarter of a second or more to see and process a threat. With practice, you might draw a concealed firearm and get an aimed shot off in 1.5 to 2 seconds. You’re already several seconds behind the timeline of your attacker because he or she planned his or her actions in advance and started the festivities. Do you want to add time to your minimum response when your life is on the line?

2. Motor Skills
When the human body moves from a normal state of everyday relaxation to the “I’m about to die!” state, things like coordination go downhill fast. Racking a slide isn’t a fine motor skill like needle-pointing the Mona Lisa. But in a moment of adrenaline-dump stress, performing the action rapidly and flawlessly will not be easy.

3. The Number of Hands You Have
Unless you resort to some method that requires even more manual dexterity, racking a slide requires two hands. What makes you think you’ll have two hands available during phase one of an armed encounter? Your support hand may be occupied fighting off your attacker, holding or moving a child, opening or closing a door, calling for help … or a million other possible activities. Assuming you’ll have both hands available to operate your pistol is kind of like assuming that nothing bad can happen if you avoid rough areas. Again, you don’t get to make these decisions; they are forced upon you.

4. Modern Pistol Safety Features
Modern carry pistols are almost always designed to be carried with a round in the chamber. Check with your manufacturer to be sure, but it’s a rare defensive pistol that’s not designed with drop safeties and other internal and external features to prevent negligent discharges. Even the ubiquitous Glock that has no visible safety devices is chock full of internal design features to prevent firing until you deliberately press the trigger. Millions of police officers across the country rely on this type of engineering daily.

Carrying your pistol without a round in the chamber may sound comforting, but be sure to think long and hard about how that strategy might play out in a violent self-defense encounter. There are too many tragic cases of armed citizens who have been killed or wounded by their attacker because they could not mount an armed defensive strategy quickly enough. If you’re so inclined to search, you’ll find stories of victims desperately trying to load their gun while being attacked and sometimes killed. There are good reasons every police officer in the country carries his or her firearm loaded and ready to go.