The Trouble With AR-15 Triggers

Rarely a week goes by that one of my students, friends, or acquaintances from social media doesn't ask about some newfangledy AR trigger. "Hey, what do you think about the "Master Speed Blaster Ammo Spender" trigger? And it is typically one that I may or may not heard of. Right now the AR trigger market is full of contenders. If I go to Brownell's website right now and search for "AR-15 trigger," I am beset with 233 entries all vying for my attention. Now many of those entries are just parts or related items, but fully 50% of them are full on triggers of varying types and features.

Now I do understand wanting to swap out a stock trigger on your AR. The stock trigger on most ARs is definitely nothing to write home about, much less brag about to your colleagues. Most are pretty creepy, somewhat gritty feeling, and break somewhere between 6-9 lbs. None of these features will help you in the speed and accuracy department, much less the "I want to shoot rounds downrange as fast as humanly possible, pls send help?" department.

Side note, if you want a binary trigger, a forced reset trigger, or any sort of trigger, you should definitely have that trigger. Hell, the whole NFA got me down and I don't agree with any of it, so don't mistake what I'm writing as a "you shouldn't have this thing" post. My idea of gun control is if you want a belt fed machinegun and a tank to drive it around with, you should be able to have those things. But I digress....

The main reason I don't have much of an opinion on any of these new triggers is simply that I don't want to bother with them. I've played with a handful of aftermarket triggers, and with two exceptions, they were just too quirky. Some required all sorts of adjustments, which could walk, and would walk at the worst possible times. Some had so many moving parts that it scared me. Some were either way too light or way too short for me. (Not for you, just for me.)

Honestly, I've basically settled on Geissele (and also ALG, which is obviously Geissele under a different outfit) and LaRue triggers. Between those two, I've got at least 100,000 rounds downrange with absolutely no issues. They don't wear out, they don't lose adjustments, they just keep working. Occasional swap of the hammer spring seems to be about the only thing they need, and they rarely need that. Also, between those two brands, they offer a wide variety of trigger profiles, pull weights, and stages. There's likely something for most everybody in their offerings.

Did I mention that every single one of their triggers I have tried has been bulletproof and just keeps working?

So, if you're contacting me for trigger advice about the new hotness in the AR world, I'm likely not going to be of much help. For that I sincerely apologize, because I'd love to help you if I could. If you want to be boring like me and have a trigger that just keeps working, well, in that case, I have two recommendations...

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Hey, check out my youtube channel, there's a lot more there. I realized a while back that most people don't read (well, except for you guys, and I thank you for that), and so I started spending most of my social media firepower over there.

Police Firearms Training

 One of the hardest aspects of police firearms training is the lack of time. Even for agencies that hit the range more than required minimums, it often means that a police officer will only get 8-16 hours/year on the range. There are obvious exceptions such as officers on specialized units or those that train and practice on their own time. That last group is pretty rare though.

When you have a trainee on the line, that time is critical. If that trainee is having any issues it is important that they are corrected immediately. I've seen some instructors simply let things slide or assume that the trainee will just "figure it out." The problem is that often that trainee is just building bad form and imprinting it more heavily by virtue of repetition. As has been said before, practice makes permanent, not perfect.

If I could offer any piece of advice to my fellow police firearms instructors, it would be to be proactive in terms of form correction. Even if it doesn't all stick, try and get your trainee to improve. Each repetition under instruction is worth so much, as that may be the only practice and help they get before a critical incident that would require those skills in the future.

Another piece of advice, if as an instructor you have a trainee with issues that you're having difficulty sorting out, don't let your ego get in the way, ask another instructor to help. Even the best instructors don't see everything, and sometimes a team approach yields better results. Often the way that one instructor states things doesn't get understood, and the simple approach of another voice with slightly different verbiage does the trick.

I don't say these things from any position of superiority, I too am still learning. If I ever come to you and tell you that I have all the answers, you'll know it is an imposter.

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Check out my youtube channel for more regular content. I've been slacking on writing, but I have taken up a new life when it comes to running my mouth and showing things in front of a camera. I'm sure my mother wouldn't be shocked at that.

Take care and stay safe guys!

Information, Eyes, Sights, and You

It has been said before, and by people smarter than me, that your eyes give you information. When it comes to shooting a firearm quickly and accurately, that information is critical in that it tells you when the gun is on target and there is reason to fire the gun. That reason may be that you're shooting a bullseye, getting ready to ethically harvest game, or attempting to save your life. Without the proper information, you won't do well at any of those tasks. 

If you do much reading of opinion by high level shooters, you'll note that many don't care if you shut one eye or not when you shoot. Such notables as Gabe White and Tim Herron have both stated that closing one eye is not problematic if it allows the shooter to get hits. I personally have seen some very high level shooters use such techniques as squinting or shutting one eye to accomplish some or all of their shooting.

Note that the eye closing or not is a very personal thing and depends on a lot of factors. The old adage, "see what you need to see to get your hits," which I attribute to Brian Enos, encapsulates a lot. One of the things inherent in that statement is YOU. He doesn't say "see like I see in order to get your hits." Everybody's brain and eyes work a little differently, and so what works for him, Tim, Gabe, or me, may or may not work for you. 

What I've come to realize is that the best thing to accomplish is finding the right amount of information in order to work most efficiently. For a lot of newer shooters, both eyes open gives them too much information, and they can't process it all in a timely fashion. They can certainly learn how to shoot with both eyes open, but unless they're going to practice more than once or twice a year, the odds of them changing that substantively are low. Any time you are trying to modify such visual cues for your shooting, you are really re-training your brain to work with a different amount of information, and that can take time and repetition to accomplish.

A related topic is sighting systems. Iron sights, especially on handguns, are low information/low communication devices. What I mean by that is that slight movement by the shooter is often not perceived through that sighting system. Shooters using that sort of system have to work harder to glean more subtle cues from that sighting system. Red dots, most especially on handguns, are high information/high communication devices. They show you quite clearly your smallest movements, from your respiration to your pulse to your grip doing weird things during your trigger press. With rifles a red dot may fall back to somewhere in the middle, whereas a magnified optic is most definitely a high information/high communication device. Making standing hits on longer range targets often benefits from dialing that magnification down, because magnification magnifies EVERYTHING, both the good and the bad.

The challenge with any of those sighting systems is getting the right amount of information from it to make your hits, without getting either too much or too little information. What I call "right sizing" the information in order to get your hits. With irons it often requires concerted effort to work on follow through and shot calling. With a red dot it often requires concerted effort to shoot through the wobble of the dot. With a magnified rifle optic it requires picking the right amount of magnification and finding the best stability you can given your current position.

And lastly, back to the eyes. I've been asked repeatedly by students about it, and related topics. Just yesterday one of them said that they had been told they need to have both eyes open when they shoot because "tactical." (I'm paraphrasing, they were much more cogent and articulate than that.) I asked them if they could get good hits in a reasonable amount of time with both eyes open, or if that was a struggle for them, and they indicated that at this point in their shooting journey, they weren't getting good hits in the required amount of time. So I told them that if they were going to end up in a gunfight, only hits count, so maybe from that perspective, for them, closing one eye and landing bullets where they needed to go would be the most tactical of all.

I realized at some point that while I tend to shoot both eyes open a lot, when I'm shooting much smaller or distant targets, I still tend to close one eye. That applies to both iron sights and red dots, and you would think that it wouldn't matter. I suppose it probably doesn't, but what I'm doing by closing that eye is removing unneeded information from my process. That said, maybe you don't need to, but if you find yourself needing to adjust what you're doing with your eyes to get hits, don't concern yourself with it, just do it.