I’ve been out shooting four times in recent weeks in temperatures that made my bare hands uncomfortable; ranging from 28 to 35 degrees. I have been told and found it to be credible and match my experience, that in cold weather the skins pores contract and this makes our skin “slicker” and in the case of our hands, slicker hands makes gripping more challenging.
As it relates to pistol shooting I’ve slowly connected the dots on this phenom as it relates to shooting different pistols. I say slowly because after two cold hand sessions I was flummoxed and frustrated by my hits with the 43X. Then I started paying attention to shooting other sizes of pistol.
I’m as big of a geeked out fan of the 43X as anybody but I’ve found this gun to be much more challenging to run effectively with cold hands. The gun takes some stout gripping and you can tell how much harder that is to do when the hands get uncomfortably cold. The net effect were below average hits for slow fire precision and a lot more difficulty managing recoil in rapid strings of fire with resulting poorer hitting than I’d come to expect.
I found that moving back up in size to standard frame Glocks, in my comparisons, my RTF2 G17, RTF2 G19 and Gen 4 G26 reduced the degree of degradation significantly, down to just a small noticeable degree.
I found my shooting performance with my CQB to be largely unaffected whether for groups or on drills.
I also have been shooting a bit with gloves during these sessions but due to the “mildly” cold temps, just with a pair of Outdoor Research hot weather gloves which are quite thin. My previous experience shooting with gloves was generally matched in that there was some degradation of performance shooting the slimline and standard frame Glocks which generally tracked in degree of degradation with the cold bare handed shooting already mentioned.
I was surprised to find that my performance shooting the CQB gloved (light gloved) was barely affected. Some gunhandling was slowed a bit, like hitting the slide lock reload slide stop with dominant hand thumb; that got a little cludgy. And I was a bit more deliberate in the draw mechanics adjusting to the change in tactile senses but I felt solid and the marksmanship wasn’t really affected. Probably not much of a surprise given the heavy gun with a super trigger characteristics but there it is.
The biggest surprise for me was how much harder shooting the slimline gun was with stinging cold hands vs the bigger guns.
@GJM
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Originally Posted by GJM
