As you train at the range (you are training at least semi-regularly with your self-defense firearms, right?) you’ll see improvement in your accuracy and gun handling. You’ll also likely see improvement in your speed, which is a great thing when we’re talking about situations where seconds count, like competition or home- and self-defense. As long as you don’t sacrifice too much accuracy to obtain it, faster is better.
To that end, here’s a helpful tip that will, once you master it, go a long way to improving your speed and your overall readiness: Learn how to work the gun with your off-side hand. Now, I’m not talking about shooting with your non-dominant hand, although that’s a smart thing to train, also. I’m talking about shooting the way you normally do, but using your off-side hand to do all the loading, unloading and manipulating.
This is easy and natural with handguns because they don’t take much strength to hold and they don’t snug into your shoulder on one side—in fact, you’re probably already using your off-side hand to run your pistol. When the slide locks back on an empty chamber, you hit the mag release with your shooting hand and use your off hand to grab a fresh mag, load the gun and run the slide.
Not so with a shotgun or an AR. Think about it. When we have fired a few rounds and need to reload our shotgun at the range, what do most of us do? We support the gun with our off-side hand, typically bringing it all the way off our shoulder and balanced somewhere around waist height. We reach into our pouch or our shell carrier with our dominant hand and load the gun, and then we shift the gun’s weight back into our dominant hand and get it back into position to shoot.
An AR is a little in-between—some of us naturally tend to load with our off-hand like we would a pistol, but because of the weight of the gun and because we just favor our dominant hand, many of us do the same shifting-position thing and load the gun with our shooting hand.
So what’s the problem with this? Well, at a casual range session, nothing. But in a defensive scenario, shifting the gun so you can load with your dominant hand presents a couple of problems.
For one thing, it is slow. All of that moving the gun around takes time—you must take it off your face, bring it down, shift the weight of it, load, and move everything back into place.
Secondly, it puts you at a disadvantage because the gun is totally out of commission for the entire loading process. It’s way off your shoulder and probably pointed at the ground, maybe turned on its side so you can access it better. There’s no way you could get an immediate shot off if the threat you’re facing required it.
However, if you have learned to load your gun with your weak hand, you can keep the gun on your strong side during the process, still tucked into your shoulder or maybe slightly below it. You can keep it pointed at the threat at all times with your hand around the grip (but obviously with your finger out of the trigger guard). If you’re not totally empty, you could fire a shot from this position if you really had to. If you develop enough strength, you can even keep the gun snug into your shoulder with your face remaining on the stock at all times. It’s easy to see why this would be much faster than bringing the gun down, switching hands, and switching back again.
Shotguns and ARs are heavy enough that many women struggle to support the gun in a firing position with one hand while the other is reaching for ammo. I’m in this category, so what I have learned to do is to bring the buttstock down just below my shoulder, sort of tucking it a little under my armpit and using my right elbow to snug the gun into my side. That helps support the weight while keeping the gun pointed at the target the entire time, and my right hand maintains its firing grip in case I need to shoot.
I’ll be honest with you: Loading with your off-hand feels really weird when you first try it, particularly with shotguns. My left hand is just not used to being called into duty for stuff like this, and I was really fumbly the first time I attempted to load a shotgun without switching hands. I kept forgetting I was supposed to be doing it, for one thing—my right hand would naturally come off the gun and reach toward my waist, only to remember my shell pouch was on the other side of my belt. I dropped shells a lot because my left hand just doesn’t have the smooth dexterity that my right hand does. I clumsily flipped shells out of my pouch. I fumbled and missed the magazine tube and dropped shells into the dirt. I grabbed AR magazines hastily and forgot which way I had to rotate my hand to get them in the right position for loading. It was awkward and uncomfortable, and I kept cheating with my right hand while my instructor wasn’t looking.
Several classes and a lot of practice later, I’ve accepted and embraced the practice of weak-handed loading, and it’s made a real difference in my speed. If you’re a brand-new shooter, try doing this from the beginning before you have ingrained habits you must unravel. If you’ve been shooting a long time, like I have, be prepared for a learning curve—but stick with it. In a defensive situation, loading with your off-hand allows you to maintain a position you can shoot from and greatly reduces the amount of vulnerable down time when nanoseconds count.
