I use a series of three progressive immediate actions:
1. Tap, Roll & Rack, Recover.
2. If the pistol fails to fire then I perform a Combat Reload.
3. If the "spent" magazine fails to eject (detected by the inability to insert the fresh magazine into the magazine well) then I put the fresh magazine between the ring and pinky fingers of my firing hand, lock the slide open, rip the "spent" magazine from the pistol, rack, rack, rack, and finish the Combat Reload (seat, roll & rack, recover).
#1 addresses the most common causes of a stoppage.
#2 will get the gun up and running quicker if the magazine is simply depleted.
#3 will solve a double feed induced by tap, roll & rack, recover.
Last edited by Shawn Dodson; 07-22-2018 at 10:57 PM.
That's a good question.
If you consider force-on-force training with a mix of getting hit with paintballs, and other stimulis input from some insanely loud AK47 blanks and flash bangs thrown at you, as well as role playing actors getting thrown into the mix as stress, then quite often.
I was first exposed to this failure clearance regimen in the USMC, where it was taught as standard (atleast to my group)....so I can include any and all training I did in the USMC in my answer as well. My current agency teaches to always conduct immediate action no matter what, and personally I hate it. I have not had the same level of success of clearing most dead-trigger malfunctions with immediate action as people are reporting here. Completely the opposite, actually.
"Are you ready? Okay. Let's roll."- Last words of Todd Beamer
What does it look like when you perform immediate action?
Is "a monkey fucking a football" the correct answer?
For a simple click no bang I don't roll.
When I was trying the whole immediate action for dead triggers thing, it was a tap rack roll. Something might fall out, but the problem was that something else was already half way wanting to go in the begin with (hence the initial fialure), and so it'd need a remedial action anyway.
This is with the exception of one training day where I was handed a 19M as a loaner gun, and it so dirty that it wouldn't go into battery everytime...until oil got up to the line, I just do a tap on the back of the slide since we all knew it just needed lube.
On M4s? Forget it.
Last edited by TGS; 07-23-2018 at 05:39 AM.
"Are you ready? Okay. Let's roll."- Last words of Todd Beamer
Try incorporating the inverted roll into your immediate action - seriously. I wasn't initially trained to do it, but at some point I began doing it. It is much more effective in clearing malfunctions than the usual TAP RACK BANG.
I think there's an interesting side discussion on pistol and M4 malfunction clearance. They're the same... yet different. lol
I think part of my experience might also be colored by the fact that our weapons are fairly well maintained, and IME failures are rare. Most of my malfunction clearances are with UTM guns, which I think (I have no numbers to support) tend to get fubar'd worse than real guns/ammo.
"Are you ready? Okay. Let's roll."- Last words of Todd Beamer