Just by sheer nature, people who carry, collect, or shoot guns come from various backgrounds. Even in policing, we see those who have grown up around guns, shooting cans on their grandparent’s property, hunting small and large game, or target shooting on the weekends with their dad. Conversely, we encounter those who have never touched a firearm until their first firearms day at their basic police officer academy. As a firearms instructor, we have an obligation to make each individual shooter better, regardless of their skill level. This blog post will simply focus on the fundamentals of pistol shooting. These fundamentals, or as we refer to them “laws”, are easily broken down into four categories: 1. Stance 2. Arms 3. Grip 4. Trigger Press. If the laws of these four categories are followed and not broken, a shooter will have positive hits on target, regardless of skill level.
When we talk about the laws of shooting, we like to move from the feet to the hands. This being, because your foundation, or feet, is the most important when it comes to building a stable shooting platform. In the past, firearms instructors (mainly from the law enforcement realm) have taught shooters to stand flat-footed, back on their heels, with their knees locked out. Over time, we have found that although this is a very stable platform, it actually does not allow for the shooter to obtain optimal body mechanics. Our bodies were created to be malleable, meaning positive forces can act on our body, but instead of breaking or snapping, the body is able to absorb this positive force and not break down. However, with the old “rigid” mentality taught shooters to work against body mechanics, in turn making the shooter less stable when the string of fire was more than one or two shots. At North Texas Tactical Solutions, we believe in working with your body, while providing a stable shooting platform. So, instead of locking out your knees and placing the majority of your weight on the heels of your feet, we teach the opposite. First, just like in any sport, we tell our students to get into an “athletic ready” position. This means place your feet shoulders width apart, with your non-dominant foot slightly ahead of your dominant. Second, slightly bend your knees. Lastly, place most of your weight on the balls of your feet. This position allows you to obtain a solid shooting platform, while also placing yourself in an advantageous position of movement. Vary rarely, whether you are shooting a competition, or find yourself in an actual gunfight will you shoot all your rounds while static.
The next “law” in shooting fundamentals is: your arms. Just like the previous paragraph touched on, the old mentality was to tell shooters that they should fully lock out their arms. Many instructors believed this allowed the shooter to fight against recoil of the pistol. However, if we focus on how the body is designed and what the gun is doing when it is fired, we can see that fully locking our arms out is a myth in terms of recoil management. When a shooter fully locks their arms out, the guns kinetic energy has nowhere to go but back into the shooter’s body using the locked arms as a medium. In turn, this means the full kinetic energy of the gun’s recoil is traveling all the way down to their foundation, the feet. Over the course of a few shots, even the strongest person’s foundation will slowly break down, causing them to miss shots on target. To reduce the effectiveness of these forces on our body we must optimize our mechanics. Think of your arms like shocks on a car. Shocks are placed on a car to absorb bumps in the roadway, which reduces the effects of these bumps on the passengers. Just like shocks, we can use our arms to mitigate the effects of the gun’s recoil on our body. To do this, we teach our students to bend their arms slightly at the elbow. Slightly bending the arms allows for the shooter to absorb the recoil and get back on target, while also ensuring that your foundation’s stability is not affected.
The third “law” focuses on grip. Unfortunately, many people have been taught that gripping a handgun is a complicated task, when in reality it is quite simple. The first step in gripping the handgun is grabbing it with your dominant hand. You should grab the handgun as high up on the “tang” of the pistol, placing this part of the gun in the webbing of your hand (between the thumb and pointer finger). By placing your dominant hand as high up on the tang of the gun as possible, allows for you to control the pistol and its recoil, while also establishing a solid grip. Again, when a shot is fired and the gun recoils, the gun is forced into an upward and backward simultaneous motion. The lower the shooter’s dominant hand is on the grip, the more space is created allowing the gun to move more freely during the recoil process, in turn making it harder for the shooter to control the pistol for any follow-up shots. After the dominant hand is in place, your support hand then meets the gun on the opposite side. To do this, press your support hand’s pinky, ring, middle, and pointer fingers together while keeping your thumb straight. Wrap the four fingers around the pistol’s grip squeezing tightly. Then place your support thumb along the horizontal axis of the pistol just below the slide. At this point, your hands will be married to the gun and in the best position to control the pistol during recoil. Lastly, move your firing hand’s thumb on top of the support hand’s thumb and mimic its positioning along the horizontal axis. Do not wrap the dominant hand’s thumb over the support hand’s thumb, but just slightly above.
The final “law” is the trigger pull. Finally, we are at the most exciting part in the process, sending rounds down range! Many people believe this is the most complicated part of the process; however, it is the simplest aspect of shooting fundamentals. If you have followed every law up to this point, pulling the trigger will just confirm that you have obtained a solid shooting platform. There are many ideas in the shooting community on how the trigger should be pulled with buzzwords like, “slapping the trigger”, “find the wall”, “pin the trigger to the rear”, and countless others. However, we follow one idea: simply pull the trigger. Nothing insanely scientific or magical, just simply apply constant pressure to the trigger until it goes off. After the shot is fired, get off the trigger as fast as possible and do it again. We can go into greater detail in future blog or social media posts; however, for the basics: simply pull the trigger.
Thank you for sticking with us through this post, and even though it may have seemed long-winded, or “dumbed down” for more advanced shooters, we believe these four laws are essential in making everyone a better shooter. If you have a stable stance, bent arms, firm grip, and fluid trigger press your shots will be on target. Just remember, use your body as it was intended and work with the forces acting on your body, not against them.