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CHAPTER FOUR A Blueprint For Learning The Combat Handgun

I was reading the deposition of a man who was being sued for shooting a contractor who showed up at his house early. He thought the man was a burglar. When asked why he shot him, he replied he didn’t mean to; he intended his shots to warn, he said under oath. Did he aim the gun? No, he just pointed it. Had he been trained with his home defense gun, or even fired it before the day in question? No, he snapped indignantly, it wasn’t like hunting where you needed a training course…

That man ended up paying a great deal of money to the man he shot, to that man’s attorneys and to his own. Firing guns at human beings is not something you want to be ill prepared for in a moment of crisis. How does that preparation begin?

Some states have made training mandatory before issuance of a concealed carry permit. A few have even put together specific courses that must be taken. Two of the best are found in Arizona and Texas. Neither lasts long enough to give you anything close to all you need, but they give a solid foundation.

Match sponsors have the wherewithal to set up more complicated scenarios than most of us can on our own. Here a range officer follows a shooter through a complex stage at the S&W Mid-Winter IDPA Championships, 2002.

There are doubtless people reading this who have been shooting and carrying handguns longer than I, have forgotten more than I know, and could outshoot me on demand. They and I will both, however, be teaching others who are completely new to this discipline, some of whom are going to buy this book for that very reason. Therefore, let’s address this progression beginning at new shooter level.

The Basics

Don’t leave the gun shop without having a professional show you how the gun works. Loading and unloading, manipulation of safety devices, even field stripping. Make sure you have an owner’s manual with it. Once you have it…READ the owner’s manual before going any farther.

If you are new to the gun, don’t go out shooting by yourself. It’s like a new pilot starting solo, or trying to learn to swim all alone. Find someone who knows this stuff.

Focus at first on safety…and keep that focus for as long as you own firearms. We bought a combat handgun to provide safety for ourselves and those we’re responsible for. Whether or not we ever have to draw that gun on a dangerous felon, we know that we will spend the rest of our lives with that gun. Putting it on, wearing it, taking it off…loading it, unloading it, checking and cleaning it…sometimes when we’re distracted or tired or stressed…in proximity to the very people we bought the gun to protect. The price of gun ownership is like the price of liberty: eternal vigilance.

Police Chief Russ Lary tries his hand with his off-duty compact S&W .45 at the IDPA Mid-Winter National Championships, 2001.

Left to right: Cat Ayoob, Peter Dayton, and Mas Ayoob pause between stages at the National Tactical Invitational, 1996. This event has always been a useful training experience.

Shooting under the eye of experienced shooters is a fast track to improved skill. This is an LFI class in progress at Firearms Academy of Seattle.

The author awaits approval of the range officer (back to camera, wearing body armor) before ascending the stairs in Jeff Cooper’s “Playhouse” simulator at Gunsite.

It’s always a good idea to start with a basic handgun safety class. The National Rifle Association has tons of instructors all over the country. Check locally – your gunshop will know where you can get training. This is one reason to buy your gun at a dedicated gunshop instead of a Big Box Monster Mart where today’s gun counter clerk is yesterday’s video section clerk. Another excellent source of information is your local fish and wildlife department, which generally has a list of basic firearms safety instructors as well as hunter safety instructors.

You may not be ready yet to compete, but you’re always ready to learn from the best. Find out from the gunshop what local clubs are running IPSC or IDPA matches. Contact those clubs. See about joining. Ask about safety classes offered by the IPSC and IDPA shooters! These will focus on important elements like drawing and holstering that might get short shrift at a basic firearms safety class. Find out when they’re having matches, and go a few times to watch. Remember to bring ear and eye protection. Watching skilled practitioners handle their handguns gives you excellent early role models.

Be A Joiner

Definitely join a gun club. You’ll like the people, you’ll enjoy yourself, but more importantly, you’ll now be exposed to a whole group of seasoned shooters who have ingrained good safety habits. Never be afraid to ask questions. These folks enjoy sharing a lifestyle they love, and are always ready to help a new shooter get started.

This shooter puts his 1911 to work from behind a realistic barricade during an IDPA match at the Smith & Wesson Academy.

Local police officers experience role-playing training set up by Lethal Force Institute students, who are playing the bad guys and bystanders in this scenario.

Another good thing about joining a club is that on practice nights, there’s usually an opportunity for people to try one another’s guns. Finding out that the Mark II Master Blaster Magnum isn’t nearly as controllable as the gun magazine said it would be is much more painless at the gun club trying a friend’s, than after you’ve shelled out a thousand bucks for your own. This factor alone can more than make up the cost of your membership and range fees.

Formal Training Begins

I truly wish that shooting schools like the many available today existed when I was in my formative years. It would have saved me a lot of wasted time learning as I went. Unfortunately, the boom in concealed carry permits has drawn out of the woodwork a swarm of get-rich-quick artists who smelled a fast buck, took a few courses, and declared themselves professional instructors. As Jeff Cooper once commented on the matter, “There are a great many people teaching things they haven’t learned yet.”

Using a dummy gun, this role-player takes another student hostage in live-action scenario training at LFI.

When you inquire for particulars at a shooting school, request a resume of the person who will be the chief instructor at your course. If he gets indignant and refuses, he’s told you all you need to know. Keep looking. Once you get the resume, do what you would do with any other prospective employee’s resume, and check it out to make sure he’s been where he says he’s been, and has done what he says he’s done. (You’re hiring him to perform a service for you, right? Of course, he’s a prospective employee.)

If in the early stages the prospective instructor is patronizing or condescending, move on. One of the truly great officer survival instructors, Col. Robert Lindsey, makes a profound point to his fellow trainers. “We are not God’s gift to our students,” Lindsey says. “Our students are God’s gift to us.”

Nationally known schools may be more expensive, but they are generally worth it. If a cadre of instructors has been in business for 15 or 20 years, it tells you that there aren’t too many dissatisfied customers. Particularly in the time of the Internet, word gets around. The various gun chat rooms on the ‘Net are also a good source of customer feedback. The best, however, is advice from someone you know and can trust who has already been to the school in question.

Once you get there, be a student. Soak up all you can, paying particular attention to the explanation of why the instructor recommends that a certain thing be done a certain way. Litmus test: If he says, “We do it that way because it is The Doctrine,” add more than a grain of salt to whatever you’re being asked to swallow. Try it the instructor’s way; you’re there to learn what he or she has to teach. You wouldn’t throw karate kicks at a judo dojo; don’t shoot from the Isosceles stance if the instructor is asking you to shoot from the Weaver.

Don’t be afraid to ask for a personal assessment or a little extra help. Any instructor worth his or her title will take it as a compliment that you asked, not as an imposition.

Self-defense training goes beyond shooting. Do you know self-treatment for a gunshot injury if you’re alone and wounded? Paramedic and LFI Staff Instructor Bob Smith demonstrates for a class.

Journeyman Level

You have progressed. You’re into this stuff now. You want to get better. Yes!

Remember at this stage that revelatory, life-changing experiences tend to come one to a customer. After you’ve become a reasonably good shot, further improvement will probably be incremental. In your first few schools in a discipline, you’re trying to absorb it all and wondering if you’re a bad person because you might have missed some small point. As time progresses and you get more courses under your belt, some of what you hear at successive schools will sound familiar. That’s OK. It never hurts to reinforce and validate something positive that you’ve already learned. You’ll be all the more appreciative when you do pick up something new, and all the more insightful when you put that new knowledge to use.

The instructor can’t do it all for you. Skill maintenance is the individual practitioner’s job. Martial artists and physiologists tell us that it takes 3,000 to 7,000 repetitions to create enough-long term muscle memory that you can perform a complex psycho-motor skill, such as drawing and firing a pistol, in the “automatic pilot” mode that trainers call Unconscious Competence. One intense week a year at the gym, and 51 weeks as a couch potato, won’t keep your body in shape. That kind of regimen won’t keep your combat handgun skills in shape, either.

Learn to draw from compromised positions. This officer clears an issue DAO Beretta Model 8040 from a Safariland 070 security holster while seated in vehicle.

By now you should have found at least one gun/holster combination that works well for you. Stay with it for a while. Don’t try to buy skill at the gunshop. Buy ammo or reloading components there instead, to better reinforce and enhance the skills you already have.

Sometimes intense training can hurt. Allan Brummer takes a full power hit of OC pepper foam…

This is a good time to be thinking about some sort of practical shooting/action shooting/combat shooting competition. Doing well gives us motivation to get better. Being exposed to others who’ve been to different schools and shoot with different styles will broaden your horizons and give you new ideas you can put to good use. Sometimes even more importantly, this will introduce you to a new circle of friends and acquaintances who have the same self-defense values as you. Even if the thrill of the competition wears off, the pleasure and value of the friendships you make there will stay with you.

Remember as a journeyman that safety still has to come first. You’re shooting enough now to be a high profile potential victim of the “familiarity breeds contempt” syndrome. Avoid that at all costs. The carpenter is more skilled with a hammer than the home craftsman, but he can still hit his thumb. The reason is that he uses it more, and is that much more exposed to that danger. So it is with us. Remember…eternal vigilance.

Here the author rinses out his teenage daughter’s eyes after she has taken a hit of pepper spray.

…and proves he can “fight through it,” drawing a dummy gun and issuing commands while carrying out tactical movement.

In The Land Of The Experts

When you get really deep into this, and really good at it, improvement comes even more slowly. When Mike Plaxco was the man to beat in combat competition, he told me, “I get slumps just like everybody else. When I do, I change something in my shooting style. It makes me focus again, makes things fresh again, and makes me work at it again.” Good point.

Can you draw weak handed if your dominant hand is taken out? Here the author clears a Glock 22 from Uncle Mike’s duty rig.

Wearing protective gear and using Code Eagle modifications of S&W revolvers that fire only paint pellets, these students act out a car-jacking scenario.

We’re not going to preach here, but there are a great many people in this country who need to know these things, and not all of them can afford to travel to shooting schools to learn them. There comes a time when giving back is almost a moral obligation, like courtesy on the road. Consider teaching. Helping at a course at your local club, or volunteering to help someone who has once trained you, is a good place to start.

Have you learned how to return fire from disadvantaged positions if wounded? Here, LFI-II students go through one of several such drills.

Ambush waiting! The Beamhit system uses guns modified to non-lethal function and vests to carry the sensors which register only stopping hits.

When you teach something, it forces you to see the forest for the trees. I can remember taking classes in things I didn’t care about, but needed the course credit for. It was as if my mind was a tape recorder that held the information long enough to play it back on the final exam, and then erased the tape once the chore was done. That wasn’t “life learning,” and I regret it now. There were times when I took a class just for myself, saw something I liked, kept it, but didn’t really get into the details of why I did it that way. If we don’t understand why we’re doing what we’re doing, even if it works for us, we don’t truly command the skill. I regret those learning experiences now, too.

I learned that I didn’t really command a body of knowledge until I had been certified to teach it. “Hey, wait a minute, people are going to be asking me why we do it this way, and why we don’t use technique X instead? I have to explain that? Hey, Coach, brief me on that one more time…”

Teaching not only ensures that we have it down, it puts the final imprimatur of understanding on our own performance in that discipline, sharpening us like the double-stamping of a coin. Since the inception of ASLET, the American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers, I’ve been chair of its firearms committee. ASLET’s motto is qui doscet, disket. Translated loosely from the Latin: “He who teaches, learns.” Thousands of my brethren and I have learned the truth of that through ASLET and similar organizations such as IALEFI, the International Association of Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors.

Make sure your self-defense training is not confined to just the gun. OC pepper spray requires training to use to its best advantage.

On qualification day at an LFI-I class, the instructor’s target…

You’re not comfortable with public speaking or perhaps some other element of formal teaching? That’s fine, but if you look around there will be people in your family, your neighborhood, your workplace or somewhere else in your ambit who are interested in acquiring a defensive handgun or have already done so, and desperately need to know these things. Take those people to the range. Be patient. Be supportive. Give them what you wanted to get when you began in this discipline.

If nothing else, you’ll make a good deposit in the karma bank and you won’t come back as a dung beetle.

Final Thoughts

Read on the topic. Watch the new generation of combat shooting videos. It’s one thing to read about it, and another to actually see masterful speed shooting in action. One thing videos can do that even experience cannot is deliver instant replay in slow motion, showing subtleties of technique frame by frame.

…has become the traditional award for the most-improved shooter. The staff, whose collective vote determines the recipient, signs it. Here John Strayer waits his turn to sign as Steve Denney pens some words of encouragement to the winning student.

Learn from your mistakes. Losing a match or a having bad day at the gun class doesn’t mean you’re a bad person and you need therapy. Winning gives you warm fuzzy strokes, and it also gives you positive reinforcement, validating that you’re doing it right. But losing is where you learn. Think about it: How many of life’s lessons did you learn by messing something up? Sometimes, that’s the strongest reinforcement of the learning experience. On days when you win, you can say to yourself, “A day well spent. I’m on the right track.” On days when you lose, you can say to yourself, “A day well spent. I’ve learned a lesson, and I will not repeat the mistake I made today.” Sometimes, the “instructional days” are a lot more valuable than the “positive reinforcement days.”

Training should give you fallbacks for worst-case scenarios. Here, author drills on weak-hand-only with his Glock 22.

It has been said that experience is the collected aggregate of our mistakes. But wisdom, said Otto von Bismarck, is learning from the collected aggregate of the mistakes of others. That’s why we read and study and reach out beyond our own experiences.

Don’t assume that statistics are right, and you’ll only be in a gunfight at point-blank range. Here bodyguard Lars Lipke deploys his HK P7M13 at 50 yards, from standing position…

How do you best practice? This way: Stop practicing! This doesn’t mean that you don’t shoot or drill in your movement patterns or perform repetitions of tactical skills. It means that if before you practiced, now you train!

Practice can easily turn into just hosing bullets downrange. Often, you wind up reinforcing bad habits instead of enforcing good ones. Training, on the other hand, is purpose-oriented. Where practice can easily degenerate into “just going through the motions,” training sharpens and fine-tunes every motion. If practice was going to be a couple of hundred rounds downrange, training might be as little as 50 rounds, but all fired with purpose. You, the box of ammo, and the electronic timer (one of the best investments you can make in your own skill development) head to the range. Instead of creating 200 pieces of once-fired brass, your goal is 50 draws to the shot. Each will be done in a frame of time that satisfies you and results in a good hit, or you’ll analyze the reason why not and correct what’s going wrong.

Shoot in competition. It hones the edge. A gun club that’s enthusiastic about IDPA or IPSC (see the chapter on Combat Competition) will be able to set up complicated and challenging scenarios that you or I might not have the time or the money to construct. You’ll get to watch top shooters in action and pick up subtle lessons from how they handle various tactical problems.

If there’s no competition near you, or not as much as you like, shoot with a buddy or a loved one. Personally, I find I put forth my best effort against someone who shoots about the same as I do. When I shoot against world champions, it’s exciting, but I know I’m not really going to beat them. When I shoot against someone who’s had a lot less opportunity to develop skill, I’m not challenged. Someone who’s at the same level seems to bring out the greatest internal effort.

Go ahead and side-bet with each other. That’s a good thing, too. It conditions you to the reality that every time you pull that trigger, something rides on the outcome. You’ll pay for a bad shot and be rewarded for a good one. Soon, shooting under pressure becomes the norm.

Your partner is not as good a shot as you are? Pick a course of fire and each of you go through it a couple of times and determine an average score. Subtract the one from the other, and give the difference to the lower scoring shooter as a handicap.

…and from the more effective Chapman Rollover Prone.

Learn to make tactical movement as thoroughly ingrained as stance and trigger press. Here Justine Ayoob, 15, performs a tactical reload while moving behind cover at the New England Regional IDPA championships.

Let’s say it’s a course of fire with 300 points possible. You average 299 and the partner averages 230. Give the partner 69 bonus points as a handicap. Now he or she is challenged: beating you is within striking distance, where before it seemed hopeless. This will encourage the partner to really focus and put forth his or her best effort. Before, you weren’t challenged, but now you know that the newer shooter with the faster learning curve only has to get a little better to beat you. You, in turn, are now motivated to shoot a perfect score, the only thing that will keep you from losing the bet.

At Lethal Force Institute, we have the instructors shoot what we call a pace-setter drill on the last day. Just before the students shoot their final qualification test, the staff will shoot the same course of fire as a demonstration. This does several good things. First, it lets the students see what’s expected of them. Second, watching us do it helps them “set their internal clock” which in turn helps them make the times required for each string of fire. Third, it gives them a mental image of what they are supposed to be doing.

“Simunitions” has ushered in a new dimension in reality-based training. This Glock has been factory modified to fire only the Simunitions paint pellet rounds.

Be able to shoot effectively from non-standard positions. National IDPA champ Ted Yost shows his form with a “cover crouch,” which gets him down behind the rear of a car faster than conventional kneeling.

Bob Lindsey, the master police officer survival instructor, noted in the 1980s that a number of cops who were losing fights would suddenly see in their mind’s eye an image of an instructor performing a technique. They would act out that image, make it work, and prevail. He called it “modeling.” This is the main reason we do the pace-setter drill. Until then, I had followed the advice I’d been given in firearms instructor school. “Don’t shoot in front of the students,” I had been told. “If you’re as good as you’re supposed to be, it will make some of them despair of ever reaching your level. And if you blow it, you lose your credibility.”

That had made sense. If a student asked me back then, “When do we get to see you shoot,” my standard answer was, “When you go to Bianchi Cup or Second Chance. You’re not here to see how well I can shoot. You’re here to see how well you can shoot.”

Lindsey’s research changed my opinion on that. It was after hearing Bob’s presentation on modeling that we started the pace-setter drills at LFI. Since we’ve been doing it, the scores of the students have gone up, and fewer of the students have had problems getting all their shots into the target before the cease-fire signal.

One thing we added was an incentive. Whatever score I shoot, if the student ties me he or she gets an autographed dollar bill with the inscription, “You tied me at my own game.” If the student beats me, it’s an autographed $5 bill that says, “You beat me at my own game.” It’s the cheapest investment I can make in their shooting skill, and it pushes them to do their best. It’s natural for a student to want to exceed the instructor…and frankly, accomplishing that is the highest compliment a student can pay to a dedicated teacher.

My favorite award to give out is “most improved shooter.” This award is the instructor’s target, signed by all the staff. Often, the student who has accelerated “from zero to 50” has accomplished more than the already-skilled student who came to class at 100 miles an hour and was only able to get about 5 miles an hour faster.

In the end, it’s up to you. Your skill development will be proportional to how much time you’re prepared to spend training yourself, and acquiring training from others. Getting good training is cost-effective, because despite tuition and travel expense, it saves you re-inventing the wheel. Yes, it takes a lot of years to get a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, but it would take you a helluva lot longer to figure out nuclear physics by yourself. Shooting isn’t nuclear physics, but you don’t need years in the university to learn it either. A few well-chosen weeks, backed up by your own commitment to a training regimen of live fire when you can and dry fire the rest of the time, will be the best investment in skill development you can make.

I do this for a living, as a full-time teacher and part-time cop, part-time writer, and part-time everything else. I’m supposed to have “arrived.” But it’s never wise to kid oneself. This sort of thing, at its greatest depth, is a life-study. As soon as you think you’ve “arrived,” you stop moving forward. That’s why I budget a minimum of a week a year for myself to take training from others. It keeps me sharp, and keeps the mind open. The old saying is true: Minds, like parachutes, work best when they’re open.

The Heart Of The Beast:Mastering Trigger Control

Agreed: What kind of bullet we’re firing doesn’t matter unless the bullet hits the target.

Agreed: The bullet doesn’t have to just hit, it has to hit something vital.

Agreed: The bullet doesn’t have to just hit something vital, it has to hit something so immediately vital that the person can no longer continue to attack.

Agreed: We’ll have a very short time frame in which to accomplish this.

Agreed: As much as we might rather have a rifle, a shotgun, or a submachinegun to deal with this problem, the tool we’re most likely to have with us is a handgun.

If we can agree that all these things are predicates to stopping a deadly fight with a combat handgun, then we are agreed that accuracy is extremely important. It’s like high school Logic 101: If A is true and B is true, then AB must be true.

A lot of things will impact our ability to deliver accurate shots rapidly while under stress. Will you use a one-hand or two-hand hold on the gun? Two-hand is more accurate, but one-hand is sometimes more expedient. Will you use Weaver or Isosceles stance? There are times when it can matter, but they are relatively rare. Any basic marksmanship instructor will tell you that once you’ve brought your gun on target, there is one key element to making the shot fly true: You must pull the trigger in such a way that the gun is not jerked off target.

Trigger control need not sacrifice speed. Here, Marty Hayes is firing four rounds in a fraction of a second from a prototype Spectre pistol. Note two .45 ACP casings in mid-air above the gun, a third below, and the muzzle flash of the fourth round.

We know that because the bullet flies in a relatively straight path, any deviation of the sight alignment is magnified in direct geometric progression. If your trigger pull jerks the muzzle off target by the tiniest fraction of an inch, the shot may hit in the white of the target, but not the black of the center scoring area at 25 yards. “Hah,” say the clueless. “That’s a target shooter talking! Those increments don’t matter in a close-range gunfight!”

Ya think? Then, consider this.

You and I start the fight at the distance of only one yard, 36 inches torso to torso. You have drawn to shoot from the hip so I can’t reach your gun. Let’s assume further that your pointing skills are perfect today and your gun is dead center on my torso. You now jerk your trigger, moving the gun muzzle a mere inch to your strong-hand side. Only one yard away, your shot will miss my main body mass. It might go through the “love handle” and give me a .45 caliber suction lipectomy, or it might even hit my arm if it’s hanging to the side, but it won’t do anything to effectively stop me from harming you.

That’s why, in real world combat shooting and not just match shooting, trigger control is so important. The trigger is the heart of the beast! If you don’t control the trigger, you don’t control even what should have been the most perfectly aligned shot!

S&W’s wide, serrated “target trigger” is the best type for single-action target shooting, but the worst choice for double-action combat shooting.

How can we hope to control the trigger under extreme stress? By being trained and conditioned to do it beforehand. Is it easy? No, and that’s why we’ve devoted a whole chapter to the concept.

Understanding The Mission

Too much combat handgun training has been borrowed from the world of target shooting. While some of the concepts survive the translation from range to street, some don’t. One that doesn’t is the targeteer’s concept of trigger activation.

We are told that we should contact the trigger with the tip or the pad of the trigger finger. When asked why, we are told that this is the most sensitive portion of the finger and therefore the part most suited to this dextrous task. That makes sense as far as it goes, but let’s analyze the target shooter’s task versus the defensive shooter’s.

In bull’s-eye pistol matches, the core event is shot with the .22 caliber. You have, let’s say, a High Standard .22 match pistol. It weighs 48 ounces, more if you have it scoped, and it has a crisp 2-pound trigger pull that needs to move only a hair’s breadth. The gun is loaded with standard velocity (read: low velocity) .22 Long Rifle, which kicks with about as much force as a mouse burp. In this course of shooting events, “rapid fire” is defined as five shots in 10 seconds. All well and good.

But let’s put ourselves somewhere else, perhaps a darkened parking lot. Our 260-pound assailant, Mongo, is coming at us with a tire iron. We are armed with a baby Glock, the G33 model that weighs only about 19 ounces. Its New York trigger gives us a pull weight of almost eight pounds over 3/8 of an inch. The power of its .357 SIG cartridge is that of some .357 Magnum revolver rounds, generating significant recoil. For us, “rapid-fire” has just become five rounds in one second, before Mongo reaches us with the tire iron.

Let’s see, we have a few things to think about: a 3-pound gun with a 2-pound trigger, versus a 1-1/4-pound gun with an 8-pound trigger. We have 1/10 of an inch of movement versus 3/8 of an inch. We have almost no recoil versus sharply noticeable and palpable recoil. We have five shots in 10 seconds versus five shots in one second. Have the mission parameters changed for the trigger finger?

Obviously, the answer is yes. We’re going to need a stronger finger, a finger with more leverage, to achieve the necessary results.

Placement And Fit

You’ll find that you have much more control of a longer, heavier combat trigger pull if you contact the trigger with the palmar surface of the distal joint of the index finger. It is at this point that the digit has the most leverage to draw the trigger rearward with the most speed and the least effort.

At LFI, we developed a simple test to allow you to see and feel this for yourself. Open this book and set it down where you can read it with your hands free. Take your non-dominant hand, turn its palm away from you, and extend the index finger. Stiffen it up: this finger is going to be a trigger with a heavy pull.

Now, with the index finger of your shooting hand, try to pull that “trigger” back, using the tip of your trigger finger. You’ll have to use great effort – enough effort to probably distract you from focusing on much else – and when the finger does start to give, it will move in fits and starts.

S&W’s “Ranger” trigger has smooth surface so the finger can glide across it during fast double-action work without pulling the muzzle off target.

Now try it again, making contact with the pad of your trigger finger. The pad is defined as the center of the digit, where the whorl of the fingerprint would be. You won’t feel much difference.

Now, for the third and final portion of the test. With your “finger/trigger” still rigid, place your trigger finger at the same spot. Make contact with the crease where the distal phalange of the finger meets the median phalange, as shown in accompanying photos. Now, just roll the stiffened finger back against its force. Feel a huge difference? This is why the old-time double-action revolver shooters called this portion of the trigger finger the “power crease.” It is here that we gain maximum leverage.

Of course, for this to work the gun must fit your hand. In the early 1990s, when gearing up to produce their Sigma pistol, Smith & Wesson paid some six figures for a “human engineering” study of the hands of shooters. It turned out my own hand fit exactly their profile of “average adult male hand.” Not surprisingly, I found the Sigma to fit my hand perfectly.

In the old days, shooters tried to “stage” double-action revolvers, especially Colts like this snub Python. Today’s more knowledgeable shooters use a straight-through trigger pull. Note the distal joint contact on the trigger.

Gaston Glock did much the same. However, he went on the assumption that the shooter of an automatic pistol would be using the pad of the finger. When I grasp the Glock properly in every other respect, my finger comes to the trigger at the pad. To make it land naturally at the distal joint, I need the grip-shape slimmed and re-shaped, as done by Robar (21438 N. 7th Ave, Suite E, Phoenix, AZ 85027) or Dane Burns (700 NW Gilman Blvd, Suite 116, Issaquah, WA 98027). On a K-frame S&W revolver whose rear grip strap has not been covered with grip material, my trigger finger falls into the perfect position. Ditto the double-action-only S&W autos, and ditto also the Browning Hi-Power with standard trigger and the 1911 with a short to medium trigger.

This is the hand of a petite female on a gun that’s too big for her, a Model 625 from S&W Performance Center. Note that she has been forced to use the “h-grip,” in which the hand and forearm are in the shape of lower case letter h. One can get better trigger reach with this method, but at the expense of weakened recoil control.

Proper grasp means that the web of the hand is high on the back of the grip-frame, to minimize muzzle jump and stabilize an auto’s frame against the recoiling slide. The web should feel as if it is pressing up into the grip tang on the auto, and should be at the very apex of the grip frame of the revolver. The long bones of the forearm should be directly in line with the barrel of the gun. This properly aligns skeleto-muscular support structure not only with the handgun’s recoil path, but also with the direction of the trigger pull. The trigger finger, we mustn’t forget, is an extension of the arm.

Although the Glock was designed to be shot using the pad of the trigger finger; the author finds he has better control in extreme rapid fire with his finger deeper into the trigger guard.

Many prefer the short-reach trigger on a 1911, particularly those with small hands or those who use distal joint contact on the trigger as the author does. This is a 10mm Colt Delta Elite customized by Mark Morris.

When the gun doesn’t fit and the finger can barely reach the trigger, it will tend to pull the whole gun inboard. That is, a right-handed shooter will tend to pull the shot to the left. If the gun is too small for the hand and the finger goes into the trigger guard past the distal joint, the angle of the finger’s flexion during the pull will tend to yank the shot outboard, i.e., to a right-handed shooter’s right.

This is why gun fit is critical. The key dimension of determining the fit of the gun to the hand is “trigger reach.” On the gun, it is measured from the center of the backstrap where the web of the hand would sit, to the center of the trigger. On the hand, it is measured from the point of trigger contact (distal joint suggested) to the center of the web of the hand in line with the radius and ulna bones of the forearm.

Avoid if possible the expedient hand position called the “h-grip,” intended for adapting a too-small hand to a too-large handgun. In it, the hand is turned so that, with the hand at the side, hand and forearm would resemble a lower case letter “h.” This brings the backstrap of the gun to the base joint of the thumb and brings the index finger forward far enough for proper placement on the trigger.

While this can work with a .22 or something else with light loads, it’s a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul. What is gained in getting the trigger forward is lost by a weakened hand grasp on the gun. Recoil now goes directly into the proximal joint of the thumb. Doctors tell me that this is a quick short-cut to developing artificially-induced arthritis in that joint. Such a grip was one of the “remedial” techniques employed by FBI instructors in the late 1970s for small-handed female agent recruits firing +P ammunition. It not only failed to work, it beat up their hands. It was one reason that in the landmark case of Christine Hansen, et. al. v. FBI we won reinstatement and compensation for a number of female agents who had been fired because they couldn’t qualify with the old-fashioned bad techniques. The same court ordered FBI to “revise and update its obsolete and sexist firearms training.”

Distal joint contact works well even for single-action autos. Even when the pull weight is relatively light, “leverage equals power, and power controls the pistol.” This placement of the finger eliminates the old shibboleth of double-action first shot pistols that said one had to change finger position between the double-action first round and the single-action follow-up shots. Place the distal joint on the trigger for the first heavy pull, keep it there for subsequent shots, and all will be well.

With DA-to-SA pistol, like this Beretta 92G, placing finger at distal joint will give good control with both types of trigger pull.

Rolling Pace

From here on, it’s a matter of pace. Learn trigger control as you would develop any other physical skill. Remember what I call “Chapman’s Dictum”: Smoothness is 5/6 of speed. Crawl before you walk, and walk before you run.

Start slowly. Do lots of dry fire. Watch the sights as they sit silhouetted against a safe backstop. Do not let the sights move out of alignment at any point in the trigger stroke, particularly when the trigger releases and the “shot breaks.” Then, gradually, accelerate the pace.

Generations of combat shooters can tell you: accuracy first, speed second will develop fast and accurate shooting skills much more quickly than a curriculum of speed first and accuracy second. If you stay with it for several thousand repetitions, you will find that you can roll the trigger back as fast as your finger will go, without jerking your sights off target. Put another way, we can learn to hit as fast as we were missing before.

Proper trigger finger placement for DA work with K-frame S&W .357.

Trigger control is all the more important with more difficult tasks like one-handed double-action work with a light gun, such as this Colt Magnum Carry .357 snub.

The key to trigger manipulation under stress is to distribute the trigger pressure. A sudden 4-pound jerk will inevitably pull a 2-pound gun off target. Smooth, evenly distributed trigger pressure done at the same speed will fire the gun just as quickly, but without moving the alignment of bore to target. The key words here are smooth and even.

Generations of shooters and gunfighters have learned to talk themselves through the perfect shot. They chant it to themselves like a mantra. “Front sight! Squeeze the trigger. Squee-e-eze…” One instructor says “squeeze,” another says “press”; this writer uses “roll.” To me, the word “roll” connotes the smooth, even, uninterrupted pressure that I want. The word doesn’t matter so much as the concept.

Don’t try to “stage” or “trigger-cock” the pistol. This is fine motor intensive, and our fine motor skills go down the drain when we’re in danger and our body instinctively reacts. Such skills just won’t be with you in a fight. Learn from the beginning to keep the stroke smooth and even, executed in a single stage.

A smooth double-action trigger stroke is bringing the next .357 round under the hammer of this S&W Bodyguard.

A workable solution. This Colt Python has a serrated trigger, usually undesirable for double-action work, but the ridges between the serration grooves have been polished glass smooth, solving the problem.

A word on “surprise trigger break.” Marksmanship instructors tell us to let the trigger go off by surprise so we don’t anticipate the final release and jerk the gun. However, if you say in court that the shot went off by surprise, it sounds to anyone without your training as if you didn’t mean for it to go off. That can turn a justifiable, intentional shooting into a negligent act of manslaughter. We don’t begin pressing the trigger back – we don’t even touch the trigger – until the intent to immediately fire has been justifiably formulated! The only surprise should be in what fraction of an instant the deliberate shot discharges.

Trigger Mechanicals

A light trigger pull is, more than anything else, a crutch for bad trigger technique. It is also “plaintiff’s counsel’s guaranteed employment act” in the civil liability sense. On a defense gun, you don’t need a light trigger pull, you need a smooth trigger pull.

The surface of the trigger should be glassy smooth, with rounded edges. Grooves, serrations, or checkering on the trigger will trap the flesh of the finger and translate any lateral finger movement to undesirable lateral gun movement. As the finger moves back, it may change its exact contact point with the trigger very slightly, and if that happens, we want the finger to be moving smoothly and easily across the frontal surface of the trigger. On revolver triggers in particular, it’s also a good idea to round off the rear edges of the trigger, to keep the flesh of the finger from being pinched between the trigger and the back of the trigger guard at the end of each firing stroke.

Note S&W’s internally adjustable trigger stop, coming down into trigger guard at a point behind the trigger. Because there is a remote chance it can come out of adjustment and block the trigger…

…it is usually removed from a duty gun, as it has been from author’s S&W Model 66.

Here’s a true combat trigger stop. It is welded in place. It can’t move and cause problems, yet it cures aim-disturbing trigger overtravel. Installed on author’s S&W Model 25-5, in .45 Colt, by Al Greco.

Beware of “backlash.” This is the movement that occurs in the instant between when the sear releases, and when the rear of the trigger comes to a stop. Because spring pressure resisting the finger has just been released, there is a tendency for the finger to snap back against the rear of the trigger guard, possibly jerking the muzzle off target. An “anti-backlash device” or “trigger stop” is a good idea, if it is constructed in such a way that it cannot come out of adjustment, move forward, and block the trigger from firing. This problem was known to occur in the old “built-in” trigger stops of Smith & Wesson’s target and combat-target revolvers (K-38, Combat Magnum, etc.) and it got to the point where departments ordering such guns would specify that the trigger stop device be left out entirely. A good pistolsmith can weld up a stop on the back of the trigger or the back of the trigger guard, then grind or file it to a point where the trigger will always be operational.

Power stance in action. Dave Sevigny, National IDPA champion, shows winning form with a Glock 34 at the New England Regional Championships.

Smaller people need the power stance more than big bruisers. Justine Ayoob is 15 in this photo as she wins High Novice in the enhanced service pistol class at the New England Regional IDPA championships. Note power stance as she delivers head-shots with a Novak Custom Browning 9mm.

Lost Secrets Of Combat Handgun Shooting

Evolution of doctrine is a strange thing. Sometimes, we do something after we’ve forgotten why we started doing it. Sometimes, we forget to do things we should be doing.

There are secrets the Old Masters of combat handgunning knew, secrets that have been lost to most because they weren’t incorporated into this or that “doctrine.” Just because they are lost doesn’t mean they don’t still work. Let’s look at a few of them.

Lost Secret #1: The Power Stance

In true combat handgun training, as opposed to recreational shooting, you are preparing for a fight. This means you should be in a fighting stance. Balance and mobility can never be compromised in a fight. Accordingly, your primary shooting stance should be a fighting stance.

A high-hand grasp is best taken with the gun still in the holster, as shown here pulling a Para-Ordnance .45 from Alessi CQC holster.

When the body has to become a fighting machine, the legs and feet become its foundation. You can expect to be receiving impacts: a wound to the shoulder, a bullet slamming to a stop in your body armor, and certainly the recoil of your own powerful, rapidly fired defensive weapon. Any of these can drive you backward and off-balance if you are not stabilized to absorb them and keep fighting.

The feet should be at least shoulder-width apart, and probably wider. Whether you’re throwing a punch or extending a firearm, you’re creating outboard weight, and your body has to compensate for that by widening its foundation or you’ll lose your balance.

We have long known that humans in danger tend to crouch. It’s not just a homo sapiens thing, it’s an erect biped thing. The same behavior is observed in primates, and in bears when they’re upright on their hind legs. In his classic book “Shoot to Live,” Fairbairn observed how men just on their way to a dangerous raid tended to crouch significantly. Decades before Fairbairn had noticed it, Dr. Walter Cannon at Harvard Medical School had predicted this. Cannon was the first to attempt to medically quantify the phenomenon called “fight or flight response” as it occurs in the human. While we know now that Cannon may have been incorrect on some hypothesized details, such as the exact role that blood sugar plays in the equation, we also know that on the bottom line he was right on all counts.

A high-hand grasp on a Kimber Gold Match .45; note the “ripple of flesh” at the web of the hand.

When threatened with deadly danger, the erect bipedal mammal will turn and face that danger, if only to observe and quantify it before fleeing. Its torso will square with the thing that threatens it. One leg will “quarter” rearward. This is seen today in the boxer’s stance, the karate practitioner’s front stance, the Weaver stance of pistol shooters, and the “police interview stance” taught at every law enforcement academy.

The head will come forward and down, and the shoulders will seem to hunch up to protect it. The knees will flex, lowering the center of body gravity, and the hips will come back, coiling the body for sudden and strenuous movement. The feet will be at least shoulder-width apart laterally. The hands or paws will rise to somewhere between waist and face level.

This, and not the exaggerated “squat” of the ancient FBI training films, is the true and instinctive “combat crouch.” The body is balanced forward, rearward, left and right, its weight forward to both absorb and deliver impact.

There is no good reason for the combat shooter not to stand like this. Indeed, there is every reason for him or her to do it.

A key element of the power stance as we teach it at Lethal Force Institute is the application of the drive leg. In the martial arts, you generate power in a punch by putting your whole body behind it. Whichever leg is to the rear is the drive leg. Beginning with the knee slightly flexed, the practitioner digs either the heel or the ball of the foot into the ground, straightening the leg. This begins a powerful turn of the hips. The hips are the center of body gravity and the point from which body strength can most effectively be generated. The punch and extending arm go forward along with the hip. The forward leg has become the weight-bearing limb; it needs to be more sharply flexed than the rear leg because as force is delivered forward, it will be carrying well over half of the body’s weight.

Lost Secret #2: The High-Hand Grasp

It’s amazing how many people come out of shooting schools and police academies not knowing the most efficient way to hold a handgun. The primary hand’s grasp, which some instructors call “Master Grip,” needs to be able to stand by itself. In a shooting match that calls for a two-handed stage, we know we’ll always be able to achieve the two-fisted grasp. In the swirling, unpredictable movement that occurs in close-range fights, however, we can never be sure that the second hand will be able to get to its destination and reinforce the first. It might be needed to push someone out of the way, to ward off the opponent’s weapon, or simply to keep our balance. That’s why the initial grasp of the handgun with the dominant hand must be suitable for strong control of one-handed as well as two-handed fire.

The hand should be all the way up the backstrap of the grip-frame. With the auto, the web of the hand should be so high that it is not only in contact with the underside of the grip tang, but pressed against it so firmly that it seems to shore up a ripple of flesh. On the revolver, the web of the hand should be at the highest point of the grip-frame’s backstrap. There is only one, easily fixed potential downside to a high hand grip. If the grip tang has sharp edges, as on the older versions of the 1911, this can dig painfully and even lacerate the hand. Sharp-edged slides on very small autos, like the Walther PPK, can do the same. Simply rounding off sharp edges or installing a beavertail grip safety fixes that.

Now let’s count up the many advantages of the high-hand grip. (1) It lowers the bore axis as much as possible, giving the gun less leverage with which to kick its muzzle up when recoil hits. (2) It guarantees that the frame will be held as a rigid abutment for the auto’s slide to work against. With too low a hold, the whipsaw recoil that follows moves the frame as well as the slide, dissipating some of the rearward momentum needed to complete the cycle. The result is often a spent casing caught “stovepiped” in the ejection port, or a slide that does not return fully to battery. (3) On most handguns, this grasp allows a straight-back pull of the trigger. If the gun is grasped too low, a rearward pull on the trigger becomes a downward pull on the gun, jerking its muzzle – and the shot – low. Draw is hastened because (4) the grip tang of the auto is the easiest landmark for the web of the hand to find by feel.

A high-hand grasp on a revolver. Note that the top edge of the gripframe is higher on the “hammerless” S&W Centennial (AirLite version shown), affording the shooter more control than a conventionally styled revolver. Note also the white-nailed “crush grip.”

The crush grip in action on a Kimber .45. Note that the fingernails have turned white from max-force gripping pressure.

Pick up a gun magazine with one or more stories on action shooting championships, and watch how the winners hold their guns. The webs of their hands will be riding high. Now you know why. The champions know what so many other shooters have missed.

Lost Secret #3: The Crush Grip

In target pistol shooting, light holds are in vogue. The bull’s-eye shooter is taught to let her pistol just rest in her fingers with no real grasp at all as she gently eases the trigger back. The IPSC shooter is taught to apply 60 percent strength with the support hand and 40 percent with the firing hand (occasionally the reverse, but 50 percent of available hand strength in any case).

Common sense tells us this will not do for a fight. For one thing, it is dexterity intensive, and dexterity is among the first things we lose in a fight-or-flight state. For another, the genuine fight you are training for always entails the risk of an opponent attempting to snatch your gun away. We know that action beats reaction. If you’re holding your handgun lightly or with only half your strength and it is forcibly grabbed or struck, it will probably be gone from your grasp before you can react. But if you have conditioned your hand to always hold the gun with maximum strength, you have a better chance to resist the attack long enough to react, counter with a retention move, and keep control of your firearm.

A third tremendous advantage of a hard hold, one that world champion Ray Chapman always told his students, is that it’s the ultimate consistency in hold. “40 percent hand strength” is one thing in the relatively calm environment of the training range. It’s something else when you’re at a big match shooting for all the marbles, and it’s something a league beyond that when you’re fighting for your life. One effect of fight or flight response is that as dexterity goes down, strength goes up precipitously. Even in target shooting, marksmanship coaches agree that a consistent hold is a key element of consistent shot placement. There are only two possible grasps that can be guaranteed to stay truly consistent: no pressure at all, or maximum pressure.

The front sight is the key to good hits. In close, even an image like this, well above the rear sight, will put the shot where it needs to go.

A fourth big advantage for the crush grip is that it prevents “milking.” When one finger moves, the other fingers want to move with it. The phenomenon is called “interlimb response.” As the trigger fingers tighten, so do the grasping fingers, as if they were milking a cow’s udder, and this jerks the shot off target, usually down and to one side. But if the fingers on the gripframe (NOT the trigger finger!) are already squeezing as hard as they can, they can’t squeeze any more when the index finger separately pulls the trigger, and milking is thus made impossible.

Finally, the hard hold better controls recoil. If you had me by the throat and were holding me against a wall, and I was struggling, would you relax your grip or hold harder? The harder you hold me against the wall, the less I can move. Similarly, the more firmly you grasp your gun, the less it will move in recoil, in terms of both overall gun movement and the stocks shifting in your hand.

Detractors of the concept call this “gorilla grip,” and warn that it interferes with delicate movement of the trigger finger and can cause small tremors. Those of us who advocate crush grip answer, “So what?” Delicate manipulation of the trigger disappears once the fight is on. The hands are going to tremble under stress anyway, and the shooter might as well get used to it up front in training. If the sights are kept in line, the gun’s muzzle won’t tremble off a target the size of a human heart.

Lost Secret #4: Front Sight

The most precise, almost surgical, accuracy comes when the eye focuses on the front sight, with the rear sight in secondary focus and target in tertiary focus.

Every marksman who is accomplished with open sights remembers the day he or she experienced “the epiphany of the front sight.” The phrase “watch your front sight” doesn’t mean just have it in your field of view. It doesn’t mean just be aware of it. It means focus on it as hard as possible, making sure it’s on target, and that it’s not moving off target as you stroke the trigger. Pistol champions and gunfight survivors alike have learned that this is the key to center hits at high speed under pressure.

As discussed in the chapter on point shooting, you don’t need the perfect sight picture of the marksmanship manual. But remember that the handgun is a remote control drill, and it must be indexed with where we want the hole to appear, or the hole will appear in the wrong place. The sights, at least the front sight in close, will be the most reliable such index.

A smooth roll of the trigger becomes more critical as the shooting problem becomes more difficult. With the 11-ounce .357, double-action, and weak-hand-only, you can be sure the author is focusing on this trigger stroke.

Lost Secret #5: Smooth Roll

A smooth, even, uninterrupted roll of the trigger, as discussed in the last chapter, is critical if the shooter is going to break the shot without jerking it off target.

Note that the last two elements, “front sight” and “smooth trigger roll,” are not listed as “to the lines of secrets four and five, prior.” This is because it’s debatable whether they are really lost secrets, and if so, who lost them. Every competent instructor will teach the students how to use the sights and how to bring the trigger back. The problem is, these things are very easy to forget until the student develops the discipline to first think about doing them, and then finally ingrain the concepts through repetition so they are done automatically. Power stance. High hand. Crush grip. Front sight.

Smooth roll. I try to go through it in my mind like a preflight checklist before I even reach for the gun.

You don’t even have to think about it all at once. As soon as you know there may be a stimulus to draw the gun, slip into a power stance. It might be a thug giving you the bad eye as you wait for a bus, or it might be that you’re on the range awaiting the “commence fire” signal. If you’re in the position to start, you don’t have to think about it any more.

Condition yourself to always begin the draw by hitting the high hand position. Once it’s there, it’s done and you don’t have to think about it any longer.

Crush grip? I tell my students to think of the eagle’s claw. When the eagle sleeps, it does not fall from its perch because its claws automatically clutch it with a death grip. If we condition ourselves to do this whenever we hold the gun, it’ll happen on its own when we need it without us having to think about it.

Power stance…high hand…crush grip…front sight…smooth roll. Recover these “lost secrets” and apply them…and watch your combat handgun skill increase.

Power stance, high hand, crush grip, front sight, smooth roll. The author, foreground, brings it all together as he wins a shoot in the Northwest. Note that spent casing is in the air above his STI, but gun is already back on target despite recoil of full power .45 hardball. Photo by Matthew Sachs.