HOW DOES MY GUN WORK?

I have had a lot of students ask me how their handgun works, or what does it do when I press the trigger. I have met several people that have been shooting for years and don’t understand what the gun does when it fires. That’s not entirely a bad thing, I’ve been driving a car for decades and would in no way consider myself a mechanic, being able to explain what my transmission is doing as I am driving, but I know the basics of how the car works. That is what I will try to impart today (how the gun works, not my car).

Every firearm, whether it is a handgun, rifle or shotgun goes through an eight-step process when it fires. We refer to it as the “Cycle of Operations”. Each gun follows these eight steps in the same order. We will look at it from the handgun perspective.

• Feeding: The slide is pushed forward by the recoil spring, which pushes a cartridge from the magazine and loads it into the chamber
• Chambering: The cartridge is loaded into the chamber
• Locking: The action locks, which can occur during the last part of the slide’s forward motion and ends when the slide is fully forward or “in battery”
• Firing: The trigger releases the hammer or striker, which fires the cartridge
• Unlocking: The chamber unlocks as the slide begins to move to the rear
• Extraction: The cartridge case is pulled from the chamber by the extractor
• Ejection: The spent cartridge case is thrown out of the ejection port by an ejector. This is usually when the slide is all the way to the rear
• Cocking: The hammer or striker is cocked at the end of the slide’s travel. This is when your trigger is reset and ready to fire

If one of these steps is skipped or does not fully occur, we get some type of malfunction that will need to be fixed. Knowing these steps can help you when diagnosing the cause of some malfunctions. For instance, if the slide did not travel all the way to the rear and did not eject the spent cartridge, the cycle has been broken at the extraction point in the loop. Now we can start to diagnose why we had that malfunction. Malfunctions and how to clear them will be addressed in a later post.

Below is a link to a video graphic that I have used in the past that show what all of the internal parts of the handgun are doing throughout the cycle of operations. I hope this helps you understand how the guns operate. Thank you to Range USA for the video.

See you on the Range 11/27/2024