Jeff Gonzales wrote an article not that long ago called The Folly of the ‘Press Check‘. Interestingly, this was posted in “The Truth About Guns,” arguably an anti-gun propaganda site masquerading as a pro-gun page. In his post, Gonzales condemned the practice of checking a semi-automatic pistol to see if a round is in the chamber.
“Some pick up the habit from watching professional shooters,” he writes. “Others do it ‘to be sure.’ At the risk of seeming harsh… I tell them that armed self-defense is not a game. It’s combat. Why wouldn’t you keep your defensive firearm in the highest possible state of readiness? There are times and places for a weapons check. But it’s not when you strap a firearm onto your body…”
Gonzales claims that the need to check your weapon is a failure of instructors to “encourage and empower students to understand the importance of readiness.” He claims that the result is “students who rely on their teacher to set the conditions for live fire.” He says that once a student “develops proficiency, they must be encouraged to carry operationally ready as often as the curriculum or situation allows. They must be ready to protect life. So that the next time they pull their firearm from their holster — every time they pull their firearm from their holster — there is no doubt.”
Not long after Gonzales wrote his article, The Firearms Blog‘s Frank K. posted a rebuttal. “I’m no Navy SEAL like Mr. Gonzales,” he writes, “but [his] assertion fails my logical tests…. [In] an admin function, why would one not want to verify their readiness? …[R]eadiness includes having the weapon ready to perform and, if one does not have a loaded chamber indicator, the only way to do that is to press check the gun.”
Now, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do a press check. It’s nothing more or less than moving the slide back just far enough to verify that a round is in the chamber. It should be done with the support hand on the rear of the slide, not with the fingers up by the barrel. (The picture of Steven Seagal from the movie Hard to Kill demonstrates a great way to risk blowing off one of your fingers.) But assuming you are performing the press check correctly and safely, what’s the issue here?
Gonzales’ objection seems to be that you should never have to perform a press check because your weapon, when live, should always have a round in the chamber. It should always be ready and thus never have to be checked. But this is a lot like that old tried and true rule of firearms handling: All guns are always loaded. Well, yes, you must assume any gun you pick up is loaded until you verify otherwise. But how would you verify if you never performed a press check?
I’m not sure why anyone would argue against verifying the condition of their firearm unless they assumed this meant you didn’t know because you sometimes carry without a round in the chamber. It’s generally a bad idea to carry chamber-empty and, honestly, if you’re that afraid of your gun you should be carrying a different gun. A semi-automatic pistol, when carried, should be ready to go, and that means with a round in the chamber (and the safety on, where applicable). A user who is afraid to carry, say, a Glock with a round in the chamber shouldn’t be carrying a Glock at all. But none of this precludes checking the gun to make sure there’s a round in the chamber.
No, you need not be checking the weapon obsessively if it hasn’t let your possession. I’m reminded of that old scene in the movie “The Untouchables” when Sean Connery spies one of his men checking his Thompson. “Did you check it already?” he asks, and when the man says he has, Connery tells him, “Then leave it alone.” That’s a good philosophy to follow. Whenever a gun has been out of you sight, even if it’s just been left in your safe overnight, it simply makes sense to check to see if there is a round in the chamber before you put it on your body. This isn’t because the round might magically have vanished overnight, but because you are developing a habit that will operate even when you aren’t consciously thinking about it.
Firearms expert and author Jerry Ahern used to say, even in his fiction works, that firearms should be treated ritualistically. If you always press-check the weapon before you put it in the holster, you will never be surprised if that one-in-a-million set of conditions comes along in which you unloaded the gun and simply forgot to rack the slide the next time. No matter how much you tell yourself that it can’t happen to you, that you would never make that mistake, that your gun absolutely is always loaded and ready to go, you might screw up. And the opposite is also true.
Back when I was a gun owner here in the gulag of New York State, I once took a gun out of storage to begin using it. I NEVER kept my pistols loaded, so my assumption was that the gun was empty. Somehow, I got it into my head that I wanted to dry fire it. Before I pulled the trigger, however, I got to thinking, “I should be checking the chamber before I do this.”
Lo and behold, there was a live round in the gun.
Had I pulled that trigger before checking the weapon, had a dropped the hammer on that “empty” gun, I might well have put a bullet through the wall and into a neighbor’s apartment. Again, I NEVER stored my guns loaded, but I had simply forgotten in this case. It was the ritual, the habit of press-checking the gun, that saved me from making that mistake. It is this ritual that you are ingraining when you practice a press check every time you go to put your gun in its holster.
What is a habit? It’s a pattern of actions that asserts itself without your conscious decision. Habits happen under stress, which is why you don’t want to practice with a firearm in a way that will develop a bad habit in a firefight. The famous case (which I believe was chronicled in Massad Ayoob’s “The Ayoob Files”) in which law enforcement officers were found dead with empty shell casings in their jacket pockets is a great example. On the range, they were dumping empties from their revolvers into their hands and putting the shells in their pockets to keep the range clean. As a result, valuable seconds were lost on the reloads, and while they were attempting to reload, the officers were killed.
In training with firearms, in practicing with firearms, in living with firearms, you should be ingraining good habits and doing so ritualistically. There is therefore a place for the press check in your CCW lifestyle. I see no reason NOT to develop the habit, done by rote and without conscious thought, of verifying that the potentially lethal bullet-launching machine in your waistline is loaded and ready to fire at the press of a trigger.
In other words, only an idiot would argue against the press check. He may be a well-meaning idiot or he may simply be approaching the issue from a different angle… but regardless, he’s wrong.
Check your weapon to verify that a round is chambered. There is no reason not to do so.