How to Load a Pistol for Cowboy Action Shooting

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Bob Wolf for Expert Village and I'm here in St. George, Utah. Now I'm going to load my pistols, now muzzle direction is important because I don't want to, we treat every gun like it is always loaded. So I don't want to point my gun at anybody, so I'm going to make sure that when I pull it out it is pointing into the berm here. I bring it open, it's a single action revolver which means, you pull the trigger, nothing happens. You have to cock it to fire it. Six shots, we only load five for safety, alright, we always have the hammer down on an empty chamber. The reason for that is back actually in the old west, a lot of the Colts, if they loaded a sixth round in there and they squatted down the gun could fall out, the hammer would get hit on the gun and the round would go off and a lot of people got hurt that way. So we avoid that because there are still some people that shoot original Colts. But this is a safety precaution that we use so we only load five. So I'm loading one, two, three, four, five, I'm going to bring it around, so it's on the empty chamber and then I'm going to show it to the safety officer. He says I'm good. Pull out my other pistol, do the same thing - one, two, three, four and five, same thing - I'm going to bring it around to my empty, show the safety officer. He says I'm good to go. Then I can re-holster both pistols. Now, I don't go up to shoot until I'm called. I cannot leave the loading table with loaded guns, so I just advance down next shooter, next shooter and when it's my turn to go and they call me up to shoot, then I go shoot."