Back to reality…

In lieu of my posting drivel, these are some excerpts from Stephen Wenger’s excellent blog on guns… With links 🙂

• Drawing and reholstering should be programmed reflexes. If you program them with a simple open-top holster, then use a thumb-break holster for a special occasion, your reflexes may not be tuned to pop that thumb-break in an emergency. Conversely, if you are programmed to pop the snap on a thumb-break holster, you may waste time seeking it the day you wear an open-top holster.

http://spw-duf.info/holster.html

• One of the great pleasures in life is meeting someone and clicking right off the bat. I don’t recall which year I met Rich Grassi at a seminar of the now-defunct American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers but it was one of those meetings. I do, however, have very specific recall of the invaluable lesson he taught me at the later 1996 ASLET seminar, for which he is briefly acknowledged in my book.

• I was reminded of this when Rich posted a five-years-after review of my book at The Tactical Wire, a site he now edits in his retirement from the Shawnee County [KS] Sheriff’s Office, an agency he served as a sergeant and one of its key use-of-force trainers. As Paul Harvey used to say, “and now for the rest of the story…”

• The seminar was held in Grapevine, Texas, home to the massive DFW Airport. One afternoon found me and one other brave student out at the DFW DPS range, attending Rich’s course on backup guns. The bravery part is that the temperature was 27 degrees, with a wind-chill factor of 22 below zero. All the other students who had signed up for the course decided to find indoor alternatives when they realized how bad the weather had turned.

• Anyhow, after Rich completed his lecture on the criteria one should consider for a backup gun, he explained that he gave the deputies on his department fairly free rein in their choices, so long as they could pass the standard department “qualification” with that gun. He then marched us out of the heated trailer and made us fire that course.

• I embarrassed myself turning in a score of 60% (I think 75% was the minimum score to “pass.”) I spent some time rationalizing that I had been shooting an Airweight Centennial revolver, in my non-dominant hand, wearing gloves that did little for the cold but still encumbered my shooting. Further, the wind was gusting hard enough that I was literally having trouble keeping my sights anywhere on the target at the 25-yard line and anywhere near the center at the 15-yard line, for the length of time required to complete a double- action trigger stroke.

• Rationalization is still rationalization. Airweight Centennials were what I was carrying in those days. When I went home from the seminar I spent the next three months shooting nothing but those guns, dividing my range time equally between my right and left hands, with a large proportion of it shooting one-handed. When I finally felt that I had achieved competence with my carry guns, I discovered that I actually felt more comfortable shooting a J-frame S&W revolver than one of the larger K-, L- or N-frame models that had previously consumed most of my range time.

• There’s an old country saying about dating that refers to spotting a prettier girl at the dance than the one who had agreed to accompany you: “Dance with the one yah brung.” If you regard shooting as a skill that you may need some dark night at a “party” for which you received no formal invitation, you’d better spend your range time “dancing with the one yer gonna bring.”

http://spw-duf.info/emperor.html#dance

• George Patton liked to say that the perfect is the enemy of the good. He usually said it in the context that, in warfare, a good plan, executed vigorously and quickly, will prove superior to a perfect plan executed after a delay for the additional planning.

• As I’ve discussed elsewhere, I believe that serious users of firearms are best served by finding a gun that does a good job of meeting their needs for a defensive firearm. Once that choice is made, I recommend concentrating on honing the skill to use it and acquiring multiple copies of that gun. I contrast this with the ongoing quest to find the perfect gun. The reason to purchase multiple copies of the good gun that you select – aside from whether you heed my advice to carry more than one gun – is that a firearm used in self-defense will likely vanish into an evidence locker. Further, if your carry gun has to go in for repair – and that does happen – it’s nice to be able to go to the safe and pull out a duplicate that matches your trained reflexes and carry system.

• My friend Rich Grassi has described his experience with a modified S&W Shield pistol. One of the modifications was the substitution of an Apex trigger for the factory trigger.

• Like Glock pistols, the Shield has a “safety” built into the trigger. Unlike the centrally mounted levers on the triggers of Glocks, the “safety” on the Shield takes the form of a hinged, two-piece trigger. The Apex trigger, on the other hand emulates the Glock trigger, with the “safety” lever centered on its face. As I understand the problem that Rich experienced, the placement of the distal crease of his trigger finger on the outer edge of the factory trigger worked fine but failed to depress the “safety” lever consistently with the Apex trigger. This necessitated what I take to be the placement of the pad of the finger over the center of the face of the trigger. Thankfully, the unintended consequence of this modification was discovered in the “sterile” environment of the range, not during a gunfight.

• By no means am I trying to suggest that all guns function perfectly out of the box and should never be modified. In fact, I am a proponent of Evan Marshall’s “one-year rule” – wait until a newly designed firearm is on the market for at least one year, to allow for debugging – before purchasing that new design. What I am trying to suggest is to evaluate very carefully any contemplated modifications. Ask yourself whether and how the contemplated modification will improve your use of the gun as a life-saving tool. Recognize that you may be challenged to defend any modification in court.

• If your gun has an acceptable trigger, altering it to make it “crisper and lighter” may allow a hostile attorney – particularly in a civil case, where a finding of negligence, rather than intent, provides for access to your homeowner’s liability insurance – to argue that you turned it into a “hair trigger.”

• By contrast, if you spend the money on aftermarket grips for a revolver or a “grip reduction” on a pistol, you may improve your ability to keep the muzzle aligned where you want to place your shot without affecting the mechanical operation of the gun. The same argument of reasonableness can be made for the substitution of aftermarket sights that better serve your needs.

• Most self-defense incidents take place at distances better measured in feet than in yards. While I would be wary of selecting a handgun that produces more of a pattern than a group, modifying a reliable pistol –such as a 1911 – to produce one-inch groups at 25 yards may compromise its reliability under less than ideal conditions.

• You may be able to find a gun that meets your defensive needs out of the box. Alternatively, you may find that you need to make some reasonable modifications of your chosen gun to improve its function in your hands. Either way, give the gun a realistic test of reliability. Before pistols were designed to feed hollowpoint rounds, the rule of thumb was that a pistol should be able to cycle a minimum of 200 rounds of your chosen carry load without a malfunction. I know of a state police agency that made a decision to switch to a relatively newly designed pistol, only to learn that the first lot that they received would not function reliably with the agency’s choice of duty round, requiring the manufacturer to reconfigure the feed ramp. Revolvers ought not to require as extensive testing but I read a blog posting from another instructor who had purchased a seven-shot revolver from a reputable manufacturer. “It fired exactly four rounds before breaking.”

http://spw-duf.info/emperor.html#perfect

h/t Stephen Wenger