The merit or mistake of magazine retention is often discussed in the defensive shooting world. Magazine retention means that when you are using a semi-automatic pistol, the cartridges are held in a magazine that’s inserted into the handle of the pistol. If, during a gunfight, you run out of ammunition, you need to replace the empty magazine with a full magazine. A pistol will have some kind of button or lever to release the empty magazine. “Retention” means that you keep the empty magazine, put it someplace on you and then put a full magazine in the pistol and continue the fight. If you’re not retaining the magazine, you just let it fall out of the pistol onto the ground while reaching for a full magazine.

I was a big believer in letting the magazine drop to who cares where. I also carried a 1911 45 ACP pistol, so I had eight rounds of ammunition in the magazine and one in the chamber. I also had one spare magazine. The thinking of the time was that one or two hits with a 45 caliber handgun would completely incapacitate the bad guy, so even if there were several bad guys, it was unlikely that I would run out of ammunition anyway. The spare magazine was only in case the magazine in the gun failed to work properly for some reason. And, once I had dispatched a couple of bad guys, I could then, at my leisure, dump my partially full magazine on the ground and replace it with the completely full spare magazine. This procedure is called a proactive reload, which I’ll address in my next post.

These days I have 16 rounds in my pistol and two spare 15 round magazines. Given that, why would I care what happens to an empty or partially full magazine? Maybe I would not. Since maybe isn’t good enough, I practice holding on to that empty magazine somehow. If I can’t, then at least I tried. A Marine veteran of the Iraq war told me that he was trained to make an effort to retain magazines, so he tried to do so and usually succeeded. If you train to keep the magazine, it’s more than likely you’ll do what you have trained when you get to the fight part. I take the empty magazine and stick it in my left front pocket, grab a full magazine (which is carried right next to that pocket’s opening) and get it back to the gun. If I drop the empty, I am not about to go hunting for it. I rarely drop one, so practicing helps.

But, it must be faster to dump the empty out and reload? Yes, I’d think it would be. Wouldn’t that save you in a gunfight? It might, though nobody can find any proof that it has done so, and a noted firearms instructor has been looking for proof for quite a while (yes, that would be Mr. Suarez). So, why keep the magazine anyway? From a purely logical perspective, the firearm must have the magazine and ammunition to function, so if you dump the magazine on the ground, you just threw away part of the gun. That is a part that you might need later if you come up with more ammunition. And, if you’ve done a proactive reload, you are also throwing away whatever ammunition was remaining in the magazine. You may very well need that ammunition later, when you discover that the bad guy has friends. Full credit goes to Mr. Suarez, not me, for this line of thinking. As I said earlier, I always threw the magazine away, but this reasoning made me realize there was really no reason not to retain the magazine – or at least make a good attempt to do so. Retaining the magazine does not overrule keeping the gun running, of course.

I bring this up as something to consider when you are practicing your shooting techniques. If you make part of that practice a method for keeping the magazines, it’s more likely you will end up retaining them when involved in an altercation that has gone to guns. Gunfights tend to use up a lot of ammunition, I believe because there is a much greater likelihood of multiple attackers and the usual, though often disagreed with, likelihood that a pistol of whatever caliber is not going to knock down bad guys with one shot each. If you end up using all your spare magazines, dumping them on the ground, and then must get yourself to even more ammunition, you are going to get there with a single shot pistol.