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Thread: DA/SA in a recent class...

  1. #31
    Chasing the Horizon RJ's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hot Cereal View Post
    Stick with shooting for accuracy. All these kommandos that have Instagram or YouTube accounts with lots of followers, those guys are no doubt shooting with blazing speed and accuracy, but they’re doing it on a known course of fire with static targets that don’t move or shoot back. They are treating it like a USPSA match, obsessing over time, looking cool, being bougie and calling it ‘standards’. Train yourself to shoot accurately. If you can, take a FoF class that utilizes actual sim guns, not airsoft, but that’ll do if you can’t find sim guns. You’ll soon learn that hits really do count and tactics greatly outweigh raw speed. Train smart and be safe man.
    Just curious, have you ever shot a USPSA match?

  2. #32
    Murder Machine, Harmless Fuzzball TCinVA's Avatar
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    With a DA/SA gun, you are always going to need more discipline when firing that first shot. Even with a very nice DA trigger like the one you can get on a Langdon Beretta, you will need extra care on that DA shot.

    I use timers a lot because defending oneself with a firearm is a limited time opportunity. There is always a timer running when you are playing for blood, whether that's an animal who isn't just going to stand there all day and let you shoot it or a dude who is trying to cut your head off and put it on a stick. It is useful to become comfortable accomplishing useful things within the timeframe a fight is going to last.

    Because I use timers, I can quantify what I'm doing.

    I've found that with the good DA trigger on my LTT gun, I'm going to need to press the trigger at about a .35 to .4 second rate to ensure the shot goes where it is supposed to. In other words, I need to take about an extra tenth of a second to help ensure I keep the trigger's movement to the rear at a consistent speed. The temptation is to accelerate through the last portion of the trigger press which results in command detonation and negates any good you were doing in the shot process up to that point.

    Behind the gun it feels really slow, but it is only slower by truly insignificant fractions of a second. Another benefit of the timer is that you can put objective measure to how something "feels" and find out that your feelings are bullshit and should be ignored.

    After the first shot, the SA trigger is much more forgiving, requiring nowhere near as much discipline in the shot process to get a good hit. The last time I shot my LTT gun I was hitting a 5" circle at 25 yards while essentially beating the shit out of the trigger in SA mode. The SA trigger is actually a tad too light for my taste in the gun as it sits, so I'll be putting in a heavier hammer spring.

    So if you are a trained shooter who has figured out that shooting is about the discipline of observing the shot process regardless of what else is going on, a DA/SA gun will take a little getting used to but you'll be fine.

    The problem is "trained shooter who understands the discipline of shooting" describes maybe .5% of the human beings on this rock who are toting a handgun. Being charitable, it might be 1% of people in a uniform who are toting a handgun as a piece of issued equipment.

    It is difficult to teach people how to shoot a DA/SA gun because it is difficult to get people to actually understand that they have to grip the gun, see the sights, and manage the trigger when there is one trigger press to deal with. So difficult, in fact, that almost nobody carrying a handgun as a defensive implement is anywhere near being truly proficient with it.

    Training in the institutions is oriented around getting people to pass a test which is a baseline for a legal standard of competence with a handgun. That standard is a self-licking lollipop due to the legal system. Virginia's DCJS standards are bad, but judges and lawyers don't know that because judges and lawyers don't know anything about shooting handguns. So the judges and lawyers look at the standards set by DCJS and figure those must be a good measure. And the DCJS standards stay bad because it's a "proven legal standard".

    In truth, those standards are what they are so that police departments can spend as little as possible on training and ammunition.

    The standards are really nothing more than a way of, as Greg Ellifritz puts it, transferring liability from the agency to the individual officer. The fact that said officer is in no way, shape, or form actually prepared for the realities of shooting to defend himself or the public in a real fight is irrelevant.

    Some departments recognize this and have leadership good enough to invest in the training and resources necessary to hold officers to a higher standard. And that is highly transient because usually said leadership is temporary and retires to be replaced by someone else who says "Why do we have to have standards higher than department X?" because they came from department X where they'd worked for "years". Meanwhile if you look really hard at department X you'd find that department X had fatally shot more people by accident in a given period of time than it had criminal suspects who justified the use of lethal force. But the city and their insurance policy paid out, so it wasn't like the new leader (carefully selected because of how well they represented "diversity") actually faced any accountability for how they were training their people.

    "Our training met DCJS standards!" Ah. Well, then. Case closed. The fault was on the individual officer!

    And that's how departments with higher standards get eroded by a leadership change. Upgrades to leadership can and do happen, but they seem to be rarer.

    Policing in general is islands of competence and professionalism under constant assault by tsunamis of mediocrity.

    And that's before we even get into the human factors of teaching people how to use handguns.

    Shooting requires your head and hands to work together in some form of harmony. Some human beings are so physically inept that the simplest thing imaginable requires immense concentration for them to achieve. I have run into people where the best I can do is get them to stop pointing the gun at themselves. I've had private training sessions where we never fired a shot because the person I was working with was absolutely incapable of handling the gun safely.

    These people show up to police academies too. And they are going to be handed a plastic, striker-fired handgun with a 6 pound trigger because that gun is cheap and kinda works OK. And then some poor bastard is going to be expected to teach that person how to pass the state standards. And that's with one trigger press to get this person to learn. Two?

    Now I know what you're thinking: Someone who is that inept shouldn't be using firearms. And they certainly shouldn't be given arrest powers and a gun and thrust into complex situations where life and death are on the line. But that's not what the courts and society say. The courts and society at large don't think that is a meaningful barrier to handing someone a badge and so those poor bastards charged with teaching firearms are expected to drag that person across the finish line.

    See, that person represents tens of thousands of dollars already invested in performing background checks and/or clearances and the institution doesn't want that money flushed away on something as trivial as how they perform with a lethal weapon they are expected to use out in public.

    Swirl all that together and you get institutions who are picking up plastic striker-fired handguns with 6 pound triggers because they are cheap and they are easier to teach recruits to pass a test with.

    Proficiency with a DA/SA gun requires sufficient training to instill the discipline necessary to effectively manage the transition between trigger presses. That takes time, money, ammunition, and skilled instructors who know how to coach. All things in short supply.

    Especially that last part.
    3/15/2016

  3. #33
    Murder Machine, Harmless Fuzzball TCinVA's Avatar
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    Other things:

    A good draw is not made on the range with live ammo. It's made through deliberate, careful dryfire practice. A good coach can give you pointers on the range, but you have to burn those in with dryfire.

    Splits are useful as a diagnostic tool for looking at how you are managing your grip, trigger, and sights. Especially your grip...because a good grip will allow the gun to come back to more or less where it was before you fired the shot. Which means you can start working the trigger sooner. Which means that another accurate shot to the same place takes less time. Someone who can shoot sub 1/4 second aimed splits and hit something is someone who has a good grip, has learned to process what they are seeing on the sights at speed (you can see an acceptable sight picture in hundredths of a second) and is able to work the trigger good enough to get the required hit. These are all good things. The point of looking at splits is not to chase the lowest number possible, but to get quantifiable information about what is happening in those fractions of a second where the shot is happening and recovery from the shot is happening.

    Thus when I see someone griping about using a timer, I'm inclined to think that they don't really understand what the tool is for. It's like someone telling me that this crescent wrench doesn't drive nails worth a damn. That person isn't going to work on my house.

    There are some areas of instruction where I don't use a timer because the people I'm working with aren't ready for it yet. But it is a priority for me to get the timer involved so that the people I'm teaching become accustomed to accomplishing useful tasks in the time frame that a typical defensive situation is going to last.

    One of the great stressors in an emergency situation is time. It is an emergency precisely because we know something bad is going to happen in a short period of time if we don't do something about it. In every area of emergency response timers are used. Whether that's timing how quickly a fireman can get his gear on or timing how quickly a combat medic can stop a femoral bleed using a live pig, we use timers in one form or fashion in any place where we are training human beings to respond to a lethal exigency because they need to know how to manage the extremely limited amount of time they will have to prevent a bad outcome.

    The idea that armed self defense should be an exception to that rule is fucking ridiculous.
    3/15/2016

  4. #34
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    @TCinVA.....Jesus man.....GET OUTTA MY HEAD!

  5. #35
    Murder Machine, Harmless Fuzzball TCinVA's Avatar
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    The most fundamental and beneficial thing you can learn to do with a handgun is learn how to draw to a good grip as quickly as possible.

    That can also be done without a single shot fired...IF you have the discipline to read what your sights are telling you.

    Doing dryfire correctly requires immense mental discipline and brutal honesty.
    3/15/2016

  6. #36
    Abducted by Aliens Borderland's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by M2CattleCo View Post
    P239s are awesome and their discontinuation is proof that Sig is retarded.
    I'll predict that in a few years the P-239 will become a classic and will be very expensive to acquire, especially in 9 MM. Parts production for discontinued Sigs will probably become a lucrative business. I don't know what models have been discontinued except P-225 and P-239. Looks like P-220 is headed in that direction also. I've had several of those and like a fool sold them.
    In the P-F basket of deplorables.

  7. #37
    Modding this sack of shit BehindBlueI's's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Borderland View Post
    I don't know what models have been discontinued except P-225 and P-239.
    P224 and P245 come to mind, although the P245 was replaced by the P220 compact, which I think has also been discontinued.
    Sorta around sometimes for some of your shitty mod needs.

  8. #38
    My first FI school that I attended (1997), we had half the class shooting the S&W 6906 (DA/SA), the other half shooting the S&W 6946 (DAO). All agency issued weapons with no unauthorized modifications. All 9mm and both models were three and half inch barrels. They even leveled the playing field by issuing a no retention, straight up and out holster to all students for the duration of the course. You would think that the 6906, with its lighter, second trigger pull, would provide a distinct advantage, and thusly win out over the numerous qual courses, man-on-man shoot offs, timed stress exercises, etc... that we participated in over the nearly three week school. But, our class top gun winner toted a 6946. Even your humble writer won a 12 yard steel shoot down exercise against several 6906 guys. Not a scientific conclusion, just an observation.

  9. #39
    Member jd950's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Borderland View Post
    I'll predict that in a few years the P-239 will become a classic and will be very expensive to acquire, especially in 9 MM. Parts production for discontinued Sigs will probably become a lucrative business. I don't know what models have been discontinued except P-225 and P-239. Looks like P-220 is headed in that direction also. I've had several of those and like a fool sold them.
    A bunch of different versions (various finishes, grip options and so on) of Sig DA/SA guns have been discontinued. As far as distinct models vs variations, in the past couple of years I believe that in addition to the P239 and P225A1, they dropped the P227 (double stack .45) and the P224 (sort of a shrunken P229) and the P290 subcompact. I wonder sometimes if they are keeping the remaining guns in production because of existing LE and military contracts and the resulting need for replacement guns and parts. Just speculation, though.

    I do think the P220 compact and P245 are gone too.

    Any company will make what sells and "everyone" wants short, light SFA triggers.

    I have made sure I have a reasonable stock of repair parts and/or backup guns for the recently discontinued guns that I like. I did the same thing with 3rd gen S&W pistols.

  10. #40
    Extremely strong posts @TCinVA . You took the words out of my mouth and added a bunch more I hadn't yet considered. We should really have a "best of" posts in PF.

    The one quibble I have is the quantification of only 1% of armed officers being highly proficient. I live in a semi rural area and we have far more than 1% of the local LEOs at our USPSA matches. All but one of them I would consider moderately to highly proficient. Just one anecdote...

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