Trigger Reset and the Lowest Common Denominator

I read an article last week that a friend forwarded to me from POLICEONE titled “Why teaching Cops Trigger Reset Could cause problems on the street”. This much of the title was enough to cause me pause. The rest of the title had me shaking my head in disbelief; “-Train For The Worst Conditions And Lowest Performing Shooters”. In hopes that the title was in jest I continued reading. It wasn’t. Here we have a national on-line publication claiming through one of its writers that we forgo one of the two most basic fundamentals of accurate shooting, and we wonder why our peace officers can miss their target so often.

Throughout the article the author gave numerous reasons and examples to justify his position that trigger reset is a “dangerous concept” and should not be taught. He suggested that our current officers are not interested in learning marksmanship, that we face reduced training budgets and unpredictable ammunition supplies. He claimed that there was no time to teach reset, lets just call it TRIGGER CONTROL, when officers could only be expected to fire a few hundred rounds during qualification.

The author then hits us with his coup de grace. “Do you really think a cop whose only trigger time is two to four qualification shoots per year can even master the fine motor skill of trigger reset?”. He goes on, “ Hell no! They can’t even master trigger reset on the training range – asking them to perform such a minute task under combat conditions is downright irresponsible. We know fine motor skills degrade rapidly under stress,,,,,,,blah blah blah.” He threw in the obligatory reassurance that he “cut his teeth on a 1911 and a double action revolver.” Mention that you have experience with a 1911 and your street cred goes up, I get it.

The solution he offers to this “problem” is to train shooters to squeeze the trigger and completely release it before pulling the trigger again. Another way to describe this is slapping the trigger. Advocating this practice in combat defies all logic and any current thought on the matter that I’m aware of. If only the author could make all of us carry his favorite polished, tuned, Pachmayr’d wheel gun everything would be in balance. There’s more but frankly its just as predictable and at this point you get the general idea.

The entire premise of this article is wrong.

My initial impression is that the author is lazy. He’s lazy and he wants other law enforcement firearms instructors to be just as lazy. An instructor or coach cannot force the student to learn, but he can create an environment where the student wants to learn. That’s where the work is. This is the difference between the clueless instructor that reads from a PowerPoint, and the teacher who’s passion for their craft and knowledge on the subject made your progress easier.

It’s easy for the instructor to blame the student for his lack of ability or success. “They are too stupid to understand and they aren’t interested so I’m not even going to try.” If the instructor tells a class that they don’t have the ability to reset or control their triggers no wonder they have a lack of interest. The situation is self-fulfilling.

To the larger picture, there is still a pervading belief in law enforcement that firearms qualification is training. I can’t overstate this; basic firearms qualification is the antithesis of training. It conditions the shooter to stand in one spot and fire a predetermined number of shots at a non-moving target. It is the measurement of a minimum result against a minimum standard. It is the cruise control of shooting.

Now the assertion that the officer will have no ability to retain any of their fine motor skills, so teaching trigger control will be a waist of time. If you only train them to the level of losing their fine motor skills that’s exactly what will happen. There are methods to train past this and we no longer have to settle for this loss in all cases. Again, more effort on the instructor’s part is required here. Have your keen investigative senses picked up a pattern yet?

The mention of the “Lowest Performing Shooters” in the title sounds a lot like “training to the LCD (lowest common denominator). In 2016 this should be alarming to us, but I know it isn’t. I had a sergeant once who measured our curriculum against our poorest performers. The idea here is that you can’t conduct any type of training that everyone in the class can’t succeed at, even if the level is far below what most are capable of. This is yet another out for the instructor. Don’t go out of your way to motivate the deficient. Keep telling yourself the incompetent will always be that way and in the process turn off your best performers by not challenging them, the one’s that should be your examples. This is also the difference between outcome and performance based. Performance based training is more effective. It also requires more effort on the part of the instructor.

Shooting is not an abstract concept. The reason for doing it is to hit the target and for our purpose here that target is a person. We are shooting to save our lives or someone else’s. We should be going the extra effort to train our officers to do this with skill and confidence, as opposed to dumbing down the process to the point of making them incompetent and instilling doubt. Our officers are going against suspects who are bigger, stronger, more chemically medicated, and more predisposed to violence than ever before. When we have to shot them we have to shoot them more often. An examination of the suspects that attack us will reveal that they generally spend far more time training to be better bad guys (more violent) to defeat us than our officers spend being better officers. Telling them they are incapable of grasping simple concepts like resetting a trigger, because you don’t want to teach them isn’t helping them act decisively.

Trigger control and its brother gun/sight alignment are the last two things that we impart on a bullet as it leaves our weapon. Personally, I expect much more from the officers and private citizens I train. If getting them to that level requires more work on my part, so be it. They are worth it.