Second Shot Low DA/SA

[TCinVA]

I found it helpful to spend a few weeks worth of range sessions doing basically just controlled pairs from a low ready: DA-SA-decock. Over and over and over. Little else. Sooner or later, you'll decide you've gotten far enough with this issue and move on to other stuff.

There are shooters here much more experienced and skilled than me who say they are more accurate with DA pistols than with SA pistols, even DAO vs SAO.

The SA trigger pull on my Langdon-ized 92 pistols is very, very nice. It makes up for a world of sins when I'm shooting at 25 yards. It's incredibly easy to shoot various 25 yard standards once that hammer is cocked and it allows me some of my best scores. At like 75% speed, it's much easier for me to land very precise hits with the SA shot. It takes more concentration on trigger for the DA shot than with a striker gun.

It's not a night and day difference, but I shoot a striker gun a little bit better overall thanks to the consistent trigger. I have to put a little more focus on trigger work when I'm shooting a DA/SA gun.

[Artemas2]

I found it helpful to spend a few weeks worth of range sessions doing basically just controlled pairs from a low ready: DA-SA-decock. Over and over and over. Little else. Sooner or later, you'll decide you've gotten far enough with this issue and move on to other stuff.

There are shooters here much more experienced and skilled than me who say they are more accurate with DA pistols than with SA pistols, even DAO vs SAO.

Thats was pretty much my expirance also. I struggled for a while, but then one day it just wasn't an issue anymore.

Contray to what Earnest feels, I think the 92s are among the more difficult TDAs with the long DA and long SA. Switching from my cz to my LTT feels very dramatic for the first mag.

[Clusterfrack]

@HammerStriker, your problem is a common one. How much deviation are you seeing in your second shot? If it’s more than a few inches at 7 yards, it’s almost certainly not due to trigger mechanics, or even a sympathetic grip issue. So I think @Suvorov’s first post is probably spot on. Here’s some material I wrote for another thread:
——-
There are many reasons for a miss, and only one of them is trigger mechanics:

1. Trigger mechanics: trigger pull moves sights off target
2a. Recoil control: arms move sights off target in an attempt to control recoil
2b. Recoil timing: you attempt to time the recoil cycle of the gun, but press the trigger at the wrong time.
3a. Transition timing: you pull off the target before the gun is finished shooting it, or shoot before the gun has arrived on target
3b. Transition damping: your transition wasn't 'critically damped', and you overshoot the target.
4a. Sight alignment: sights misaligned
4b. Sight placement: sights aligned but aimed wrong (usually looking at the wrong place on the target)
5. Vision: focus or eye dominance. Looking at the sights through the wrong eye.

You need to use your muscles to return the gun to the target after the first shot. This should happen after the first shot is fired and before the second one. So, there's some critical timing that has to happen. That gets tricky when you try to shoot fast splits, like in the doubles drill. As you're learning to do this, sometimes the timing is wrong and you fire after you push the gun down, or you fire before the gun returns. This isn't a flinch. It's part of the learning process. As you develop your grip, stance, and relaxation, the amount of force needed gets smaller, and it starts to feel like "just letting the recoil happen".

Here's a quote from Hwansik: "Most pistols have a high bore axis. Mixing in physics, when we fire the gun, there will be an upward force created by the leverage related to the bore axis and the grip axis. If the operator doesn’t push the gun down, the gun will stop higher than the original spot after a shot."

There's some really good info about this on the PSTG, but it's behind a paywall.
https://www.practicalshootingtrainin...urement-drill/

In my opinion pushing down on the gun is the main reason fairly experienced shooters have big misses. So you are in good company. Ball and dummy can help diagnose, but I do not find that it will solve the problem. Here's why: if you are shooting multiple shots with reasonably fast splits, you have to return the gun. As you shoot faster splits, you have to predict when the gun will return. Pushing down on the gun before (or as) it fires is a timing problem. And it's one that I do not believe ever goes entirely away, no matter how skilled the shooter.

A couple years ago I worked really hard to minimize this issue, and I'll describe what I did here.

1. Learn to "turn off" automatic return of the gun. Hwansik Kim has a great drill called Measurement Drill where you fire a shot and let the gun stay aimed up where it recoils. Then you fire another shot to measure how well your grip and stance control flip of the gun. That drill helped me a lot because it's about NOT returning the gun. Now when I shoot steel or very tight shots, I've learned to just let the gun stay up and return it "later". (Note: later is ~ 0.5s.)

2. Minimize the amount of muscle you need to use to return the gun precisely. This is the really deep rabbit hole--maybe the deepest in shooting. Grip, wrists, arms, shoulders, and stance all factor into this. The gun has to recoil, but you can make returning it very subtle. Trying to eliminate muzzle flip is not necessary or desirable. 13 year old girl GMs do this really well, so you don't have to try to be a monster. You can burn a LOT of ammo trying to figure this out.

3. Recognize when a timing issue is happening. I can feel it coming on sometimes when I'm shooting groups--especially weak hand only-- and can often stop the push.

4. Shoot different guns. Since recoil, timing, and weight will be different, you are forced to adjust how you return the gun.

[Stony Lane]

Load one round in your gun; remove the magazine. Draw and fire one shot (DA), then dry fire the next shot (SA). This will very quickly show you what is happening. Drill until a good SA shot becomes second nature. Grip hard. (I'm still working on it.)

[ECK]

OP, have you tried shooting Bill Drills to see where your subsequent shots are hitting? Bill Drill: USPSA target @ 7 yds. On the buzzer, draw and fire six shots at the target. Goal is to keep all six hits inside the A-zone and under 2 secs. If you’re into instant feedback, you could always use a steel plate and progress to smaller and smaller plates as you consistently keep all hits on the plate.

The Bill Drill is what I practiced a lot when I first started competiting and wanted to learn to “see the front sight” track up and down through recoil. Back then I was probably taking one sight picture and squirting two shots (i.e. the second shot wasn’t aimed). What the Bill Drill helped me to do was learn to track my front sight as it recoiled upwards and only depress the trigger for the subsequent shots when the front sight post came back down and was lined up with the rear sight and target.

The other thing I use Bill Drills for is figuring out what weight recoil spring to use for a given load. Too heavy of a spring and the gun tends to dip down as the slide slams forward. Too light, and the gun feels like it is ‘all over the place’. If running a stock spring, I suspect the spring is heavier than needed and your subsequent low hits could be the result of the muzzle dipping as the slide returns to battery.

Or, as has been posted above, it could be that you’re slapping the trigger on the second shot, not compensating for the lighter SA pull after shooting the heavier DA pull, and that’s causing your subsequent shots to hit low. Either way, the Bill Drill will also help with that.

[medmo]

If someone has been behind a gun a long time, they can do that.

I find most people cannot. If they do not grip as hard as they can with their shooting hand, it's that hand that rips at the gun as they're pressing the trigger. Changing your grip as you press the trigger (with either hand) is going to steer the gun off target. So understanding that the experience of recoil makes people grab the gun harder, let's just grab the gun harder before we press the trigger and maintain that pressure until we're done shooting.

This is especially important in defensive pistol work.

Grip the gun as hard as you can and get it up in front of your eyes as soon as you can. If someone can actually habituate gripping the gun as hard as they can and getting it up in front of their eyes on the draw instead of their belly or their chest, they'll be able to make anatomically useful hits very quickly at typical gunfight distances even with absolutely shit trigger control. Because if you're gripping the gun as hard as you can, your ability to steer the thing with the trigger is reduced to irrelevance up to about 10 yards.

A good grip and good trigger control is ideal...but that's not what people produce under stress. Certainly not with the levels of training they're being handed in typical police and sadly private sector training.

What we can get people to do in short order, however, is grip the living shit out of the gun and that alone will give them the ability to stop most threats. And it wont hurt when it comes time to shoot at longer ranges either...because we still need grip on the gun.

Grip is the foundation of running a handgun. You can't shoot a pistol the way we use pistols with a bad grip. If we can just get people to grip the bloody thing their accuracy will improve immensely.

Agreed. You have to start somewhere to get to somewhere. Gripping, actuating the trigger and shooting without disturbing the sights is key. Grip with one hand hard, grip a little harder with the other isn't too far out there for me. I get it. First get one grip down. Lots of good info you are throwing out there. I'm best with my self-Langdonized PX4CC and am a few tenths of a second faster drill to drill then striker fired pistols, (G19 G5, S&W M&P 2.0 Compact). I'm certain that I can group the same, within the same time constraints, at 25 yards shooting both DA or SA with the PX4.. Will test it and see. I also have about 5 years under my belt with this PX4 pistol with thousands of rounds down range and umpteenmillion dry fire.

[HammerStriker]

Thanks all for the helpful information. The more I think about it, the more I feel like I am likely anticipating the second shot. I know the the second pull (first SA pull) is going to be lighter and shorter and am anticipating this. I'm going to try to verify this next time I'm at the range...

[fixer]

Ball and dummy has helped me further diagnose anticipation issues and manage them better on DA/SA platforms.

And the best thing to happen to my Beretta 92 shooting was an HKP30. lol. Now I can shoot both platforms reasonably well.

[OlongJohnson]

OP, have you tried shooting Bill Drills to see where your subsequent shots are hitting? Bill Drill: USPSA target @ 7 yds. On the buzzer, draw and fire six shots at the target. Goal is to keep all six hits inside the A-zone and under 2 secs. If you’re into instant feedback, you could always use a steel plate and progress to smaller and smaller plates as you consistently keep all hits on the plate.

The Bill Drill is what I practiced a lot when I first started competiting and wanted to learn to “see the front sight” track up and down through recoil. Back then I was probably taking one sight picture and squirting two shots (i.e. the second shot wasn’t aimed). What the Bill Drill helped me to do was learn to track my front sight as it recoiled upwards and only depress the trigger for the subsequent shots when the front sight post came back down and was lined up with the rear sight and target.

The other thing I use Bill Drills for is figuring out what weight recoil spring to use for a given load. Too heavy of a spring and the gun tends to dip down as the slide slams forward. Too light, and the gun feels like it is ‘all over the place’. If running a stock spring, I suspect the spring is heavier than needed and your subsequent low hits could be the result of the muzzle dipping as the slide returns to battery.

Or, as has been posted above, it could be that you’re slapping the trigger on the second shot, not compensating for the lighter SA pull after shooting the heavier DA pull, and that’s causing your subsequent shots to hit low. Either way, the Bill Drill will also help with that.

This post just triggered an epiphany for me.

@JRB
A Bill Drill can be used like doing a dyno pull for fast shooting. Not particularly useful as far as representing actual tactical shooting, but potentially very useful for diagnosing mechanics of the system and making sure everything is tuned up properly.

Will have to think about that more.

[Irelander]

Timely thread. I just got my first DA/SA pistol and am having the same issues as the OP. Now I have a plan. Thanks!