Drawing & Getting a Sight Picture vs All that Plus Trigger Press

[Bongo Boy]

Shortened the topic as best I could.

Basic question here is:

Does it benefit me more to practice drawing the weapon a getting on target with a sight picture or, to get on target with sight picture and a dry fire?

I gotta believe this is a dumb question, but I've read Bruce Gray's publications and have seen other references to doing one thing and one thing only, which of course makes sense it it's one thing at a time. I'm thinking that getting a sight picture on target...period...is an exercise in 'driving to target'. So the exercise is one designed to teach the muscles how to get there with no overcorrection. To avoid what an engineer might call under-dampened behavior.

But then I wonder, what's the point if you don't also prepare yourself for a trigger press? I'm thinking that one without the other is going to end up with the student spending an extra tenth or two getting on the target perfectly, whereas if you combine them, you're learning to see what's good enough to get the hit you want.

Hep meh! Thoughts?

Edited September 9, 2009 by Bongo Boy

[Duane Thomas]

Do as many things as possible, as early as possible, so that when you get to the point of actually firing the gun, there's really very little left to do. Take advantage of the time you would otherwise waste while the gun is moving between the holster and the target to take up the slack in the trigger and prep it. Thus, when you get to the gun up on target, there's nothing necessary to do to fire the shot except complete pulling a trigger that's already had its slack taken out, is prepped and ready to fire.

Having said that, recently I've started getting away from the concept of a really hard pre-first-shot trigger prep. I still take up the slack and prep the trigger, but not nearly as hard, basically I'm just taking up the slack, hitting the "link" and then holding the trigger there until the sights are aligned acceptably. Then I pull the trigger through, pretty much all at once. I want every shot including my first one to be a smooth, back-and-forth trigger movement, and every one of them to be essentially the same, including the amount of force applied to the trigger. Consistency, the same trigger pull every time, and having those trigger pulls be a smooth, continuous application of energy seems to be working much better for me than the two-stage prep the trigger/fire the shot approach I used for years.

"Pull the trigger all the way through smoothly, with a continuous, consistent application of energy" is how we're taught to fire a revolver. In the past I've noticed, every time I've put in a lot of double action work on a revolver, when I've gone back to something like a 1911 or a Glock my smoothness and accuracy had improved immensely on the auto. I realized that was because I was applying the smoothness of trigger pulls necessary to fire a revolver well to the much shorter trigger pulls of the auto pistol, but until recently I never really made the mental leap to hanging onto that. Instead I just, in short order, went back to the two-stage trigger pull I'd been taught was the "right" was to fire an auto pistol.

I'm still prepping hard for distance shots, but even there in the near future I'm going to be practicing, essentially, applying double action shooting technique to a single action (or Glock, as the case may be) trigger for distance work. Be interesting to see what happens.