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Obligatory argument from Bill Blowers about the tap being a waste of time.
Like reloads, Bill argued that stoppages and malfunctions are very rare when shooting a quality gun with quality ammo, duty ammo invariably is. Bill has a somewhat unorthodox view in that he does not see the tap in tap-rack-bang as being strictly necessary, but rather, would prefer to simply just rack for most attempts to clear a simple stoppage. He argued that for most modern double-stack pistols, the magazine being unseated during a string of fire, while still being retained in the magwell, is extremely uncommon, unlike the 1911, where the metal single stack magazine with a minimalistic baseplate could be difficult to seat, and may not fall out of the magwell even when unseated. Thus, while a tap may be warranted and executed if the shooter has a stoppage very early after a magazine change, if one has already successfully fired several shots, the tap is almost certainly an extraneous action, as the magazine was clearly seated correctly in order to have fired multiple shots. On the other hand, if the magazine had somehow indeed somehow come unseated, it would almost certainly have totally fallen out, which again renders the tap useless. Bill notes that he came up with this idea after trying to teach a fresh recruit the tap-rack-bang, and the recruit kept clearing the induced stoppages with simply a rack; while Bill initially was extremely frustrated, after some pondering, he decided that the recruit had a point when she pointed out that the racking was indeed working just fine to clear these stoppages. Yet, due to all these years of training the tap-rack-bang, Bill will still occasionally catch himself doing a tap inadvertently. He also notes that if one is uncomfortable with abandoning the tap, it’s no skin off his back, and that he would not force folks to use it, but merely asked the students to give it a shot during class.
Still, Bill argues that if one gets a stoppage during an actual gunfight, getting the gun back into action will be paramount, as is the speed in which it can be brought back to bear, and for the vast majority of common stoppages, a simple rack will suffice. To illustrate the time difference, Bill tried both a tap-rack-bang, and a simple rack, and came away with a time of 1.33 seconds versus 0.64, which is between two to three extra shots, going off his typical splits.
From an unpublished AAR of mine.