Efficacy of Revolver Dry Practice for Pistol Shooting?

[RJ]

While you’re there.... “Sig250 22LR”. Closest thing you’ll find that vectors (near) your budget, DAO trigger, and 22LR all at once.


ETA: Looked up a few posts and see that Chuck beat me to this.

Thanks!

I had been thinking about one of those .22 conversions but stopped when I found was about the cost of another gun, or almost.

At this point I’m going to stop commenting in this thread as I’ve gotten quite a bit out of it.

I’ll keep going with the Dry Practice this week with the LCR and see how a range session goes this weekend with the G19.5. Will be interesting whether it helps.

I will say pressing the LCR many many times is probably good for my hand strength lol. I did 50 presses on a simulated Gabe White head dot at 7 yards last night. Tired.

[Leroy Suggs]

You need to stop taking classes and going to conferences so you can spend that time shooting your gun. You shot 3,000 rounds in 16 months, that's like 20 hours of range time if you shot that outside of a class. I don't even think you have shot enough ammo through that Glock to know how to dryfire it properly. Figure out in live fire what you need to see and feel to make shots at various distances and target sizes so that you can dryfire those tasks correctly. Your going to just spin your wheels until you put serious amounts of ammo through your gun.

Rich, pretty much this
I suggest for the next 12 months forget the classes and shoot.
Use the class money and time to buy 12,000 rounds and shoot them.

You are shooting less than 200 rounds a month now. You will never get good. (Neither will anyone else shooting that small amount).

[jandbj]

DryFireMag for the G19? May also help with dry firing on that platform.
No personal experience but it looks like it may have merit.

[Jared]

While I have not hesitated to give Rich constructive criticism, I think that Rich, unfairly here, is taking a beating.

Relative to his overall development as a shooter, he has taken plenty of tactical training. What is standing between him and his next point of development is technical shooting, and specifically trigger control. A TGO standard question is “how do you shoot faster? After a lot of Robbie answering questions with more questions, where you will end up is him saying “to shoot faster, you must press the trigger faster.” When you ask him about what if you can’t work the trigger faster without disturbing the sights, his response is that you simply must learn to work the trigger faster or you will not be able to shoot faster.

So how do you learn to work the trigger faster. That will differ by platform, and differ by shooter, but unfortunately trigger control is something that each shooter needs to develop on their own. And, regardless of where you are in trigger control, you can always get a lot better. Won’t take the time here, but JJ talks about spending months and cases of ammo working in trigger control when he was a government lead instructor.

Trigger control work is exhausting and does not lend itself to being learned in long sessions, or group classes with lines of shooters. While periodic instruction is helpful, what really needs to happen is Rich needs to shoot thousands and thousands of live fire rounds to develop more trigger control. While it is always the Indian and not the arrow, different triggers are harder or easier to shoot. Rich has picked the Glock, which is easy to shoot OK, but one of the very hardest triggers to shoot really well.

I pretty much agree with all of this. If a rimfire let's Rich fire more real bullets that helps him diagnose issues with trigger control, then Rich should probably rock on and get one.

My two cents is that if Rich just wants another gun because he wants another gun, then he should get another gun. Bonus points if it helps him achieve his goals.

One of the best things I ever did for my shooting was using bricks of ammo and a K22 one winter just shooting walk back drills over and over and over.

To the specific gun in question here, the 22LR LCR, one of those is likely the next gun I add to my safe.

[GJM]

Here is my trigger control story. For years, maybe decades, my one hand shooting, especially support hand sucked. I bluffed my way through standards stages, and generally avoided it. Then I went to the Rogers School, and bluffing didn’t cut it. There was no way I could make Advanced there with my level of one hand shooting ability.

I decided to fix it, and used a S&W 317 revolver and more thousands of rounds of .22 ammo than I would like to admit. Working a long, heavy trigger while steering the sights on a lightweight revolver took a lot of effort, but eventually I started to get the hang of one hand shooting. I shot so much with just my support hand, that to this day, I would rather shoot one hand with just my left, support hand.

Trigger control is not a skill you are born with.

[Clusterfrack]

This is turning out to be a great thread.

@Rich_Jenkins you're going to improve because you are putting in the work and focusing on what needs improvement. There are many paths to mastery, and some of them evidently are paved with .22 revolvers.

My personal experience, and from observing newer shooters, is that steering the gun by pressing the trigger isn't the cause of most bad shots. Pre-ignition push, and bad timing of the second shot (firing before gun has returned to target) are much more common, especially in SHO/WHO.

However, learning to press the trigger well enough to shoot really tight groups quickly at 25-50 yds requires a lot of work.

I'm still not convinced that investing a lot of time with a heavy, long trigger on a revolver is an efficient way to improve USPSA type shooting. However, switching to a DA/SA gun did help my trigger management because the DA pull is so unforgiving.

[David S.]

Not disagreeing with the between posts.

Have you experienced good trigger control? Do you know what Prepping The Trigger feels like when done correctly at speed? How about Slapping, or any other technique? Do you know what it feels like to be In The Zone? Have you felt the sensation of being on autopilot? I think there is value in having a good instructor guide you to sense those things, so you know what to look for. Yes, you could pound out thousands of hours of dry practice and tens of thousands of rounds to figure it out. Or you can find the rare instructor that can point you in the right direction. You'll still have to follow it up with thousands of hours and rounds to master the techniques you learned, but at least you have a starting point.

ETA. If your teacher isn’t teaching you the skills you want/need to learn, then it’s time for a new teacher. I’m not disparaging Tom Givens or anyone else. General classes are just that. Combative Pistol type classes are very broad in scope, so they can only touch on individual techniques like trigger control. They mention it, maybe spend 10-15 minutes shooting it, and move on. This isn't a complaint so much as the nature of the beast.

There are classes and instructors who are very qualified to teach specific skills. If you’ve identified an weakness, I would seek instructors who can help you specifically with that weakness while you’re taking GJM’s advice to put in those 10,000 hours and 10,000 rounds

Cheers,
David S.

PS. Yeah, I'll be at Tac-Con. I'm really looking forward to it.

[Jared]

This is turning out to be a great thread.

@Rich_Jenkins you're going to improve because you are putting in the work and focusing on what needs improvement. There are many paths to mastery, and some of them evidently are paved with .22 revolvers.

My personal experience, and from observing newer shooters, is that steering the gun by pressing the trigger isn't the cause of most bad shots. Pre-ignition push, and bad timing of the second shot (firing before gun has returned to target) are much more common, especially in SHO/WHO.

However, learning to press the trigger well enough to shoot really tight groups quickly at 25-50 yds requires a lot of work.

I'm still not convinced that investing a lot of time with a heavy, long trigger on a revolver is an efficient way to improve USPSA type shooting. However, switching to a DA/SA gun did help my trigger management because the DA pull is so unforgiving.

I know this wasn't directly solely or mostly at me, but since I did post a bit earlier.....

I'm certainly not saying that shooting can be mastered with a 22 revolver alone. It has been very helpful with certain parts of the equation though. I'm not really any kind of a master all the same. I do know that during times when Ive done a lot of DA shooting with a 22 revolver, my overall abilities trended to the positive.

[GJM]

Bill Rogers developed a method at his Basic class that starts with a .22 revolver, moves to a .22 pistol, then 9mm semi-auto as a way of most quickly developing skills. Haven’t discussed this recently, but he may have introduced a LCR 9mm into the process as well.

Bill says that his shooting always improves when he teaches the Basic class and shoots a .22 on many demos.

[Kevin B.]

You are shooting less than 200 rounds a month now. You will never get good. (Neither will anyone else shooting that small amount).

It is entirely possible to cultivate a reasonably high degree of skill (think Light Pin level on the Gabe White standards) shooting 50 rounds per week/200 rounds per month. The key is disciplined adherence to properly structured dry and live fire practice sessions.