Some good discussion in this thread before it got closed http://pistol-forum.com/showthread.p...ing-else/page2
...and some remarks that caught my eye regarding how the trigger finger safety rule is interpreted.
The trigger finger rule I personally teach as third in order of importance after loaded guns, and muzzle sweeping.
The way I specifically phrase the rule follows:
Keep your finger in a hard register until the shooting cycle is initiated
So what does that mean?
Simply this. I think teaching from the perspective of a defined positive versus a vague negative is a better way of defining the trigger finger's placement. Usually when I do my safety brief on Saturday before the live fire portion of ECQC, I ask people their intepretation of the classic safety rules. The answers usually are some variation of "fingers off sights on". So for the vast majority of my coursework where there may indeed be coarse visual referencing of the gun, we're still not on sights. So the classic wording of the rule doesn't really apply for what I teach. Everyone seems to understand "shooting cycle" as pressing through to ignition, so that's usually no problem for new ECQC-ers.
The second thing I do is hold a Sim gun and place my index finger in the ejection port and ask everyone "Is my finger off the trigger?" They nod. I move my finger to the slide stop/disassembly lever and ask again "Is it off?" More nods. I then move it to the frame and ask again and they nod and start to understand......there are a whole bunch of "offs".
So I use the language hard register to describe the idea of a single repeatable area of the pistol that one's finger stays on or in until the shooting cycle is initiated.
The word register is nothing new as I know that alot of guys have been using it. I like adding the adjective hard because it should be some place on the gun that you can REALLY feel.
I think with more and more people adding doodads and widgets to guns that have rocker and tape switches, that interpreting the rule this way is really important.
Just my take.