I ran my R9S Stealth through a short, timed off-duty qualification course of fire today.
It's all based on 5 shot series (naturally, with the J frames in mind) quite close ranges (contact out to 7 yards), all presentations from the holster, low light, hands on your chest, and with relatively quick intervals.
I used the 147g Federal Hydra Shok that I carry.
The pup ran flawlessly,
even when I screwed up.
At one point the drill was: 5 rounds in however many seconds. Whatever it was struck me as a "long-short" interval. Those of you who have done this before will know what I mean. When you hear, "Three rounds, three seconds" that's just kind of a "normal" shooting pace. When you hear, "Three rounds, two seconds" you know you need draw cleanly and shoot a bit faster. And when you hear "Three rounds, six seconds" you know, even if you've lost count of your magazine, that you're in for a malfunction drill or a reload.
-And in fact, today I had. This was after my duty qual. I admit to being tired and a little distracted. I really didn't know what I had left in the box.
So when I say, "long-short" to me it meant, "Something is going to happen here, they gave me too much time to fire five rounds, but not enough time to do anything really crazy."
Fired one round, and empty. Okay, reload. Did the two-handed-flip-thing I do with the heel release. No problem. Found and fed the new magazine. No problem. Back on target, squeeze.
Click.W.T.F.?!
Ran the malfunction drill, the "rack" portion of which of course solved my problem. By then I knew that I had precious little time remaining. They had given enough for a magazine reload, but not with a heel release magazine in mind, and certainly not for the mistake I had made. With the clock ticking loudly in my head I squeezed a four shot string boomboomboomboom.
In the end I didn't end up dropping a single round, max points. What I had done obviously, was forget to rack the slide after loading the new magazine. I think it's because the slide wasn't locked back, so it looked like a combat reload and muscle memory treated it as such. A major screw up that I got away with thanks in part to the R9's reliabilty. It fed my 147g ammo, it ran straight out of my pocket having not been fired in months, it fired fast strings, all without a hiccup.
So that's my story.
