If you ask each student to define their grip, you will get a different answer from each one. There are no two hands alike, even from the same body so that may not be as bad as you think.
What Is Good In Life
Everyone will grip a pistol a little different, but there still needs to be order in the chaos. So, what is the most important thing to consider? Is it gripping the pistol as high up as you can? Or, with a death like grip? Or another favorite; 30%/70% grip force applied. The bottom line is none of those are as important as considering how important that first round is in a gunfight. Another way to look at this is the most important round you fire will be the first round. I’m sure there are plenty who would argue and point out the semi-automatic pistols are feed through a magazine so they will have a supply of ammunition. Perhaps, but will you get the opportunity to fire said supply of ammunition? What I’m talking about here is many people will teach gripping the pistol in a manner that compromises their trigger management.
Putting Things In The Proper Context
When we work with students during diagnostics we learn all sorts of things, but probably the single greatest thing we learn is trigger management or lack there of. Ask any seasoned shooter and they will tell you, trigger management ranks up there with breathing in a gunfight. No doubt, yet when we (the industry) work with students we often forget that notion when we are talking about a firing grip. Instead, we need to talk about how to best apply consistent and reliable trigger management from the start. The firing grip needs to support this, not grip the gun with whatever name brand grip and then figure out how to manipulate the trigger afterwards.
Understanding The Game
My grip probably won’t work for everyone because not everyone has the same size, strength and type of firearm. How we approach the trigger should though. You first have to have enough power on the trigger to move it along its natural path with minimal disturbance to the sight alignment/picture. That is the formula for generating a hit, do it consistently for repeatability. Then the trigger has to be completely isolated from any other part of the frame, it can only touch the trigger and the face of the trigger to be exact. If it touches any other part of the frame it will displace force on the pistol prior to the shot and that will equal to an errant shot.
You Have To Look Closely
Most folks can’t figure this out for lots of reasons. They don’t have standards to gauge progress. If it is valuable, then it is worth recording. It is worth observing, measuring with the goal of repeating. More importantly they don’t shoot at distances that will isolate these issues. Really all we are talking about is the 15 yard line for most and the 25 yard line for the rest. At these distances, the shooting error is more apparent. While you may not know exactly what you are doing wrong, you know you are doing something wrong. With greater reflection you come to realize it is probably the trigger finger’s movement and not the grip.
So, when we see folks struggling with their accuracy a lot of times it’s because they haven’t thought about logical sequence. For some reason, they think the grip is about the rounds in the magazine versus the round in the chamber, hence 2 1 3.
