I suppose the side-cockers do have an advangage for firing prone- but, unlike the barrel-cockers, there is a huge temptation to just use the right hand to load the pellet and not worry about holding the lever back while your fingers are in there. The geometry makes it awkward to do anything else, though some reportedly use elbows on the lever, and some use dowels or such to prop the chamber open. The thought doesn't bother everyone.... but there's an awful lot of force on the catch that's keeping the mechanism from lopping off your fingers at that point.<br><br>From an engineering standpoint, though, the thought of having the receiver attached to the barrel by no more than a hinge, as it is in the break-barrels, seems sort of silly. Not too bad when the sights are on the barrel, but scopes mount to the receiver. The problem seems to be mostly theoretical, though, and that big open breech-end being nicely presented certainly would seem to make loading easier and faster.<br><br>In practice, you probably just get used to whatever.<br><br>I haven't even fired one of the Benjamin-Sheridan PP rifles, the ones that take 14 pumps to get up to full pressure.. but, on another forum, they (or rather the semi-custom "steroid" version) were the overwhelming recommendation for a survival scenario that involved travel on foot, apparently largely because of their light weight. Fourteen pumps is probably fine for hunting, but I can only imagine that it gets very tiresome for practice.