From a safety standpoint, the trigger finger should be clear of the trigger and held straight outside the trigger guard at all times until the sights are aligned on the target (Rule 3). When we retract or lower the gun from the aiming position to the ready position, we move our trigger finger off the trigger. If we’re shooting a pistol with a manual safety, like the 1911, we also thumb the safety to the “on” position at this time. If another shot is to be taken, keep both hands on the gun in the proper grip and bring it back to the mid-chest position with the barrel pointed downrange and slightly toward the ground. When extending the gun for the next shot, that is the time that the safety is disengaged, hammer cocked, etc., as the gun first starts moving upwards and outwards, so you are ready to shoot by the time the gun is brought into your line of sight. (Proper movement of the gun from either the holster or the ready position to the aiming position and back will be fully covered in following chapters.)
With a hammer-cocking trigger pull, such as that on a double-action revolver or semi-auto, we need to be able to exert considerable force through nearly an inch of motion. This unavoidably imparts motion to the gun, making this technique largely unsuitable for a very precise shot and much more difficult to master. There are ways, however.
First, we need to train and strengthen the trigger finger to perform this long hard pull with minimum disturbance to the gun. A high volume of dry-fire practice can accomplish this.
Second, there are two ways to deal with the pull. You can have either a long, steady, continuous pull until the hammer drops, or it can be a “staged” pull. The staged pull brings the finger about three-quarters of the way back, or to the point just before the hammer is released. There the finger pauses for an instant, while the shooter steadies the gun and verifies the sight picture. At this point, the small remaining part of the pull is applied, which has minimal effect on the sight picture. With a great deal of practice, staging can be done at a speed almost as fast as that with a straight-through pull.
Trigger mastery requires a great deal of attentiveness to the details just presented, and a great deal of practice. Fortunately, much of this practice can be done simply through dry-fire practice, which is “firing” an empty, unloaded gun. In this kind of practice, you go through all the mechanics of firing a shot, but, of course, you’ll hear only a click instead of a bang. (Make absolutely sure your gun is unloaded, including chambers and magazines, perform your practice in the safest possible direction within your domicile, and don’t keep live ammo in the same room in which you’re practicing.) There are lots of benefits to dry-fire practice; there’s no noise, no recoil, no distractions, no emotional baggage, no motivation to flinch. A high volume of dry-fire, especially by a beginner, will make an enormous difference in skill acquisition.
Eventually, you will reach the point of having a totally subconscious trigger pull reflex, in which seeing the correct sight picture for the shot will cause your trigger finger to fire the gun without any conscious thought process, an act that will occur literally faster than you can consciously think about it. This is what enables shot-to-shot split times — the time span in between shots — to get down to around 2/10-second, sometimes even faster, among accomplished competitive shooters.
Ideally, you should hold your breath when firing. The motion of breathing imparts motion to the gun. There is some evidence that holding your breath after exhaling results in greater steadiness, and doing so also follows the natural cycle of your unconscious breathing, so it is something you can do without much thought or disruption of your natural breathing habit. This is how shooting accurately with a rifle is accomplished. At first this will be difficult, especially if you are taking extra time to aim and develop a slow trigger pull to maintain the surprise break. You should also be aware that holding your breath for more than about eight seconds will start to degrade your eyesight and physical performance. If you run out of air on a shot, don’t rush the shot. Instead, lower the gun, breathe regularly again, and start over. If you must breath with the gun extended in the firing position, do so from your lower abdomen, not your upper chest, as this will impart less motion to the gun.
Eventually, your speed will be great enough that the handgun can be raised, aimed, and fired within a second or so. At that point, simply pausing your breathing motion for that second is easily accomplished.
Chapter 8
The Draw
Assuming we carry a handgun for self-defense, we might find ourselves in a situation that requires its usage in a hurry. Failure to perform quickly in such situations can cost us our lives. With this in mind, the gun carrier needs to develop a smooth and efficient draw stroke, one that incorporates a good and proper strong-hand grip on the gun at first touch, a smooth motion to clear the holster, and an efficient movement of the gun into our line of sight so that a sight picture can be acquired as quickly as possible.
There are various approaches to drawing, including short motions that bring the gun barely out of the holster for use in engaging targets at arm’s length or less. There are also many different ways to position a holster. For simplicity’s sake, I will concentrate on the basic draw motion from a strong-side belt holster, a draw that brings the gun to eye level for sight acquisition, using the two-hand hold as previously described. This gives us the greatest odds for firing accurately in a short time period. Remember, a fast miss solves nothing and merely gives our opponent a better chance to shoot us first.
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, so one would think that motion of the gun in a straight line from the holster to the extended position might be the best. However, such a movement doesn’t allow us to see our sights until the gun has reached that extended point. What we really want is not speed of the gun from the holster to the extended position, but rather speed from the holster to our line of sight.
To do this, we want to bring the gun from the holster upwards in a fairly steep line, so as to place the gun in our sight line and fairly close to our face in as little time as possible. This is the “straight line” we are concerned with, not the one from the gun’s muzzle to the target. Once the gun’s sights are in your sight line, you’ll transfer your focus to the sights and then drive the gun forwards along that sight line and out to the fully extended position; you will remain focused on your sights throughout the extension. This allows for the correction of any errors in the sight picture at the earliest possible time and also permits us to reach the extended position ready to fire the shot (or even before that, if necessary), having already formed the correct flash sight picture.
