KaiserB wrote:Immediate action should be taken in the event of either a hangfire or misfire. Either can be caused by an ammunition defect or by a faulty firing mechanism. Any failure to fire must be considered a hangfire until that possibility is eliminated....
That section comes almost verbatim from chapter 4 of the Army's Field Manual
FM 23-31, issued 1994. The only change in text is in line c.(1): Instead of reading "Keep the weapon pointed downrange..." the original reads, "Keep the M203 pointed downrange..." Because FM 23-31 deals with the 40mm grenade launcher.
I'd sure be willing to give an M203 a full 30 seconds.
And it certainly isn't a bad procedure for safe hangun or rifle handling...particularly for newer shooters, or for situations where you're doing slow-fire at the range.
The only problem I have with it is a message I've had beaten into me: Under the extreme stress of life-or-death encounter, you will not rise to the occasion. You will fall to the lowest common denominator: the level of your training.
Witness the famous 1986 FBI shootout in Miami against Matix and Platt. The story goes that at least one of the agents--don't know which (might have been Orrantia), but it wasn't Grogan or Dove, the two officers killed--had been trained to take the empty shells from his revolver and stack them on a railing: the law of the range officer where he trained becasue it made it easier to collect the spent brass. After the smoke cleared, it was found that he had actually, unconsciously, taken the time to stack his spent brass on the ground when he reloaded his revolver. (I can't substantiate this, and it may be urban legend; but it makes a good, illustrative story.)
Hangfires with quality, modern, commercial ammo are extremely rare, and when it happens, the delay from firing pin/striker impact to discharge is seldom more than one second. I admit that I've heard of delays of over a minute, but never seen one.
As Target1911 pointed out, in action-shooting competition or combat/defensive training--or a real-world emergency encounter--it's tap-rack-bang. You really don't know what caused the "click" instead of the "bang," and remediation has to be immediate to get back into the fight. That's one important reason to use old or milsurp ammo for plinking, not serious training.
Yep, there's some inherent danger in immediately clearing the stoppage because there is a remote possibility it
could be a hangfire. But there, again, is where proper training comes into play: if you handle the slide of that pistol correctly, and do it the same way every single time whether you're unloading the gun to clean it or urgently clearing a stoppage, your face will never be near the ejection port, and you'll never have your hand over it.
Safety first, always. Bullseye shooting or slow-fire, always keep the muzzle safely downrange and wait...just in case. If someone is new shooter, I'd recommend not even trying to figure out what happened: keep your gun pointed safely, finger off the trigger, and raise your hand or signal a range officer for assistance. For those with an advanced level of training and experience, in competition or defensive training exercises you're probably not going to stop and wait 30 seconds...unless you're shootin' a grenade launcher.
Just MHO, as always.