Firearms Stack Exchange Archive

Disadvantages of a full magazine disengaging the slide lock

Recently, at the range, a friend of mine showed me his Taurus .40 semiauto, a pistol that appeared pretty normal with the exception of one very interesting feature:

When a loaded magazine is inserted on an open slide, the slide will release, chambering the first round.

This seemed to be a very useful feature, since it eliminates the last movement in the reloading process (either fiddling with the slide release or reaching up to the slide with your off hand for the grab-n-tug), which made me wonder why none of the many other high-quality handguns that I’ve fired feature anything similar. The only thing I can think of is that there must be some significant disadvantage to this design that I haven’t figured out yet.

What disadvantages are there to a pistol design that automatically releases the slide when a full magazine is inserted?

Answer 665

What you are describing is “autoforwarding” where the aggressive insertion of a magazine into a pistol results in the slide stop being defeated and the slide going forward during a slide lock reload.

While a number of handguns may exhibit this behavior, I know of NONE that advertise this as a feature. Usually, this autoforward is a result of a confluence of events and manipulations that relieve the spring tension of the slide against the slide stop, the stop lowers and slide moves forward. Guns that have a relatively weak recoil spring due to wear or design, geometry of the slide stop and slide relief surface, position of the handgun, amount of force used to insert the magazine, and the cleanliness of the operating parts can have an impact to whether a handgun will autoforward or not.

Due to this confluence of events, I don’t see using or expecting a handgun to autoforward as a viable technique during a slide lock reload. Rather, I see it as a “freebie.”

Couple of major problems with the technique:

  1. It isn’t reliable. Changing any of the above conditions above will have a direct impact if the slide will autoforward. 99 out of 100 isn’t good enough. Defeating the slide stop manually or overhand gripping the slide to defeat the slide stop has proven 100% reliable on a significant number of handgun platforms and I trust those techniques significantly more.
  2. What do you do when it doesn’t happen? I have seen many shooters who have grown used to this autoforward go into brain fade when it fails. They would continually slap the floorplate of the now-seated magazine trying to get the slide to autoforward when the simple task of manually defeating the slide stop or overhand gripping the gun would get it up and running in a shorter period of time.
  3. Timing. I have seen (and experienced) handguns autoforward before the magazine is fully seated and locked resulting in the slide going forward on an empty chamber.

Answer 656

I can come up with two downsides:

  1. The main one is that if you wanted to reload quietly, as in a combat or defensive situation, this would make that pretty hard to do.
  2. Admittedly a catch-22, but if you use more than one weapon you now have two different batteries of arms to train with since other pistols will require you to drop the slide yourself.

Answer 657

Actually, slamming a magazine home just right will disengage the slide lock on most semi-auto pistols, sending the slide forward and chambering a round. The problem is I don’t know of any pistol that truly does this reliably, so you can get it to work 100% of the time.

The way I teach students to do this is to insert the magazine and rack the slide. This is a nice, big, gross motor skill movement that works regardless of the condition of the pistol, whether the slide is locked back, forward on an empty chamber, or forward on a live round.

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