Originally Posted by
Dagga Boy
Tangent of the day I want to discuss.
DA/SA trigger systems.
A ton gets made of these and many discussions reach a massive level of stupid. Most people are aware by now that I address my working, daily carry personal protection handguns as a use of force tool, and not a shooting thing. If I am sport shooting.....I will look at things through that lens, but that is not how I look at this stuff anymore.
Here is what the DA/SA gets you from the use of force aspect. I teach threat evaluation and elimination through the S.E.E. principle I learned from a former Delta soldier named Gene Zink. See, Evaluate, Eliminate. This is different in many applications for how you perform each task and the time spent on each task depending on what you are doing and your capacity. Threat evaluation is vastly different for a soldier on the battlefield in open combat to an urban police officer in a populous urban area in a socialist utopia. For a citizen, it is different for a person in their own home versus while they are carrying a concealed firearm at a shopping mall. For some aspects of use of lethal force, spending a long time in the evaluation phase is a critical component on how you will survive the aftermath and the legal and ethical microscopic review of your actions after the shot breaks.
The benefit I saw of both carrying, shooting, reviewing others shootings, and hundreds of personal applications of force with a DA/SA pistol over a couple decades is they allow me to spend extra time in the evaluation phase, and actually still be evaluating into the elimination by lethal force phase. That DA trigger press is a long, smooth, rolling, build up to a shot, where a lot of rapid evaluation is still being done in a very compressed time frame and during a period after the decision to shoot has been made where your brain is doing some pretty amazing things with "time". Many like to treat all the trigger presses the same. I do not. Shot number one from the DA is my most important and the most difficult for two reasons. I have to focus on doing a multitude of things before that shot breaks as far as complex problem solving and that continues during the roll through the trigger action that the first shot will be. Once that problem solving is completed, evaluation completed, the intake of massive amounts of information completed visually, and the shot breaks.....now things change just like the trigger and I get a trigger that is now optimized for continued shooting which is only happening if a simple evaluation is still present..."is my threat still in my sights". At this point it is a continue to press issue. I do treat the triggers different and with different needs to the ease in which the shot is fired physically. The key to working these triggers to me is training a lot with dedication to shot number one and mastering the DA roll, and then the mastery of the transition from the first shot that is done with a momentum building roll to a shot, reset (flip or only to the reset point....I am a bit agnostic on this and sort of "do what works for you and your application and shooting style") in follow through and then a controlled short press to continue the process as needed. This needs to be trained to a sub conscious level of mastery. This tends to be the failure of these systems. The guns were often chosen to be hard to shoot negligently, and then the training to shoot well never performed by many police and military organizations,
The big issue with these guns is post shooting. From a purely lethal force use tool standpoint, Decocking HAS to be trained to a totally sub conscious remote control level-period. I implemented a protocol with my folks where decocking was done every time the pistol was taken off the engaged target and back to a Ready position, whether you fired or not......every time. I can attest personally to how well training this to the sub conscious mastery level works. Post shooting of an armed suspect who immediately dropped to a single centered chest shot, I made a conscious decision to de cock my pistol. It was already de cocked, which I did with no recollection of doing that task. That is what repetitive training is all about. Decocking every time the gun comes back to any Ready position off target is a freebie for getting a lot of repetitions in and will make the user of a DA/SA pistol far more competent when used as a working force tool. Again...how people want to run the things as a sport shooting gun is irrelevant to me, and the methodology will likely be very different when dealing with multiple un-assessed targets with no real consequence for getting things wrong. Different venue, different training and priorities.
The current popularity of front appendix carry, hammer guns are a good thing. Hammer guns with long movement triggers are a good thing. Many think front appendix carry was invented a couple years ago....pure fiction from the internet. Cops with snub nose Revolvers carried his way for a very long time. Due to a bad shoulder injury as a probationary police officer in 1988, I was forced to carry in front of my hips from that point on to be able to draw without pain. I carried both my off duty and back up guns in front appendix as a norm. Hammer fired, double action guns (both Revolvers and semi auto's) give the end user a lot more screw up room for this type of carry. At this stage in my life, I will not carry a striker fired pistol front appendix (and I spent a lot of years doing that with a Glock). Simply an acceptance of a stage in life where I don't want to depend on being 100% switched on every waking minute of the day. I would rather have that extra measure of control of the gun and the trigger and underestimate my skills than over estimate them.
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, let me mention I held a two-tone USP Compact at a LGS in Sparks NV:
