Shooting with gloves afteraction

So despite living in Virginia for going on seven years now, I had never really devoted any serious time to shooting in winter gloves.  I have shot in the cold before, but always wearing tactical gloves, which really provide no warmth whatsoever, but do help out with grip once your hands get a little numb.  With the high yesterday reaching freezing (yep, 32 degrees was the high), I decided that it was a good time to give gloved shooting a try.  The main impetus behind this was that I have been wearing winter gloves more and more when I concealed carry, and defending my life is not a good time to figure out what changes gloves make in my shooting style.

The gloves I used were Outdoor Research Gripper Gloves, which I had picked up at the Exchange on base.  I also have a pair of their Backstop Gloves, but I don't wear them as frequently and decided to stick with the Grippers.  Both are very comfortable, and I recommend them, although they are made in China and I would prefer something US made.

As a disclaimer, since this was my first time shooting with heavier gloves and I was wearing multiple layers of clothing, I shot from a Safariland drop holster, not from my usual G-Code belt holster.

Overall, the gloves did not make a huge difference in my shooting style.  The biggest point to take away was that because of the decreased sensitivity brought on by the gloves, I had to make a conscious effort to ensure that my trigger finger was adequately contacting the trigger.  My first few shots tended to be left of center, as I only placed the tip of my finger on the trigger.  Once I adjusted for that, things went pretty smoothly, although my draw stroke was slower, mostly due to the hood on the Safariland, which my G-Code doesn't have.  I conducted magazine changes and immediate action drills with minimal difficulty, which I think was partially due to the Vicker's extended mag release and base plates, which perform exactly as advertised.

Stay safe, train hard, train real.

Trigger pull alterations - some thoughts...

In the spirit of two earlier articles I posted on sport shooting and accessory/part selection, I wanted to share some lessons I've learned the hard way (not the "Oh crap, I'm going to die" hard way, just the "Hey, something's not right and I spent money on this" hard way). 

I own a CZ-85B that I had customized specifically for sport shooting.  As part of the custom work, I had a trigger job done that resulted in an amazing improvement in the crispness of the trigger and the pull weight reduction.  When I went to test fire it in the middle of the ammo shortage, I had a mix of PRVI and PMC ammo to run through it.  The PMC ran reliably throughout, but I experienced several failures to fire with the PRVI.  I took the ejected rounds and ran them through my other 9mm I had brought (unmodified), and they fired.  I was a little confused at first, because my CZ had always run whatever ammo I fed it previously.  Then I decided to read the description of the work that had been done to it.  Included in the trigger job was a lighter mainspring.  One of the things your mainspring influences (other than trigger weight) is how hard the hammer strikes the firing pin.  A lighter mainspring means a lighter hammer strike.  Ammo with harder primers (PRVI, TulAmmo, etc) may not reliably fire in a gun with a lighter mainspring. 

Does this concern me?  As it relates to my CZ, no.  As I stated, I wanted this gun modified specifically for sport shooting.  When I sport shoot, I control the ammunition that I feed it.  I'm not quite to reloading yet, but I can try multiple types of ammo, and feed it the one it likes best.  For those of you who are planning for the Day of the Zombie Horde or other self-defense/societal breakdown scenario, this should concern you.  Unless you have cases of ammo stacked in your garage (and judging from the shelves at Wal-Mart, some of you do), there will come a point when you will need to scavenge for ammo.  When that happens, you need a gun that will reliably fire whatever you can find.  Gun designers are relatively smart people, and they design guns to perform in a variety of scenarios.  If you choose to tune your gun for a specific purpose, that is perfectly fine, but be aware of the unintended consequences that may come of it.

My second lesson learned was with modifications made to my Glock.  I installed a spring kit and reduced weight trigger connector.  I liked the trigger pull so much when sport shooting that I considered changing out the springs on my carry pistol as well.  Then two things happened: 1) I actually read the spring manufacturer's instructions and 2) I paid more attention during my dry-fire practice.  The manufacturer's instructions specifically state that the reduced power striker spring, while excellent at reducing trigger pull weight is NOT to be used in a defensive pistol.  Why?  See above for my experience with the CZ.  Second, during dry-fire, I glanced down as I worked the slide to reset the trigger and noticed that the trigger was not resetting fully forward.  It was resetting far enough to be ready to fire, but not far enough to reset the trigger safety mechanism (that annoying lever on the trigger everyone loves to hate).  Per GLOCK’s website, “The trigger safety is a lever incorporated into the trigger. When the trigger safety is in the forward position it blocks the trigger from moving rearward. The trigger safety and the trigger must be fully depressed at the same time to fire the pistol. If the trigger safety is not depressed, the trigger will not move rearward and allow the pistol to fire. The trigger safety is designed to protect against firing if the pistol is dropped or the trigger is subjected to lateral pressure.”  In other words, if it doesn't reset properly, and my shirt/jacket gets in the trigger guard or I drop the pistol, bad things could happen.  The lower weight trigger spring I installed is the most likely culprit.  Since I plan to go to the range this weekend, I will re-install the original springs this week and dry-fire to see if the problem improves.  If I find the lighter springs are causing the problem, I will permanently remove them.

In summary, it's your gun, tune it the way you want, but ensure that you have done your research and understand any unintended consequences that may occur.  Just because it’s the latest and greatest, or the manufacturer promises that this is the last upgrade you’ll ever need, or your buddy tells you how much faster he is with his super-light trigger pull doesn’t necessarily make that set-up right for your intended use.

Firearm accessory analysis

            Merriam-Webster defines Analysis as “a careful study of something to learn about its parts, what they do, and how they are related to each other.”  In reality, most people conduct analysis on a daily, probably hourly, basis.  To thinking, functioning adults, analysis becomes an almost unconscious process that assists them in everything from building a budget, to planning the most efficient way to complete an errand run.

            In the firearms world, equipment manufacturers develop products that they advertise to give some sort of “edge.”  Examples include extended magazine releases, extended safeties, enhanced sights, enhanced triggers, and other enhancement products with a price range from relatively inexpensive to hundreds or thousands of dollars.  These products may legitimately provide a solution to a validated problem, however, new shooters purchasing a firearm for the first time (and some old shooters who just really like gear) often fall “under the spell” of these advertisements, and spend thousands of dollars customizing their firearms to the specifications of an individual who endorses the products without conducting any sort of analysis of their own needs.  Usually, the end product meets all the criteria for “high speed, low drag,” but may provide little to no real improvement to the shooter.  Conducting a simple analysis before cracking open the cool-guy firearm parts catalog remedies this situation.

            First, ask the question: “How do I intend to utilize this firearm?”  People utilize firearms for different reasons, including competition, self-defense outside the home, self-defense inside the home, and instruction of others in firearm usage.  While a product designed for one category may provide benefits to another category, each product must be evaluated separately.  For example, extended magazine releases enhance competition firearms by allowing for faster magazine changes, resulting in a lower time and possibly a higher ranking.  In a defensive situation, they provide the same benefit, resulting in less time spent with an empty gun in the face of an armed criminal.  However, a competition situation varies significantly from a defensive one.  In a competition scenario, competitors usually carry specialized holsters outside the confines of their clothes and intentionally minimize the dangers of an accidental magazine release (or carry enough spare magazines that losing one does not represent a critical failure).  In a defensive situation, the user frequently conceals the firearm underneath clothing, the firearm is subject to the bumps and bruises of daily life, and carrying copious amounts of extra ammunition is extremely impractical.  In this case, the loss of a magazine due to accidental release represents a much greater danger and deserves additional scrutiny by the shooter to determine if the enhancement warrants the additional risk.

            Next, ask “Can this firearm do the job without enhancements?”  Although this question is highly subjective, many first-time purchasers buy a stock firearm and immediately begin customizing, without ever having taken the firearm out for a test fire to determine its baseline performance levels. 

If the answer to the question to the above question is “no” or a qualified “yes,” the next question becomes “What specific performance enhancement does this product provide, and do I really need it (or, does the benefit gained from this enhancement outweigh possible risks or associated costs)?”  Once again, each individual shooter’s needs vary, and what appears to be a need for one may not be for another.  Going back to the magazine release example - my hands are very large, and I can easily reach the magazine release on all of my handguns with little to no difficulty, whereas a shooter with smaller hands may experience significant difficulty in reaching a magazine release, especially on firearms with double-stacked magazines.  In their case, they may “need” an extended release, and I may not.  If they elect to install the extended release, they should do so in light of question 1, and ensure their own willingness to accept the possible risks of the extended release.  The “needs” analysis must be conducted for every firearm enhancement being considered.

            After developing a list of their “needed” enhancements, shooters should ask, “How do these enhancements interact with each other, and can a single enhancement accomplish multiple tasks?”  This question comes from personal experience.  In an effort to improve my hands’ purchase on my handgun and speed up my magazine changes, I purchased an enhanced set of grips that included a “thumb scoop” and an extended magazine release.  I installed both parts and conducted dry-fire drills to test the parts’ efficacy.  I soon noticed that when I conducted a magazine change, my magazine release stuck.  After testing with multiple firearm manufacturers and multiple parts manufacturers, I discovered the issue.  The combination of the “thumb scoop” with the extended magazine release caused me to press the magazine release so far into the frame that it allowed the magazine catch lock to rotate out of position, locking the magazine release.  I re-installed the original magazine release with the new grips and the problem ceased.  The two enhancements, installed for two different reasons, actually addressed the same issue (easing access to the magazine release) and in my case, caused failures when installed together.  As a result, I removed the extended releases from all of my copies of that firearm and kept the grips in place.  This analysis saved me approximately $20 per firearm and provided greater reliability.

            As the shooter adds each enhancement to the firearm, they must conduct dry-fire and live-fire drills under conditions as close to their intended use as possible.  As they conduct these drills, they must continually analyze/assess with the question, “Is this enhancement performing the task for which I installed it, and is my firearm properly equipped for my expected situation?”  Equipment changes, needs change, and people change.  As a firearm’s mission evolves, enhancements that had been previously installed may progress into obsolescence, or new enhancements may be “required.”  A constant state of evaluation and analysis is necessary to ensure that the firearm remains ready for service.

            Although I focused on the magazine release here, this analysis holds true for any enhancement to be considered.  A proper analysis conducted beforehand, followed by a systematic evaluation of the enhancements with a focus on analyzing interrelationships between the firearm, enhancements, and shooter present the best possibility of a creating a personalized firearm that meets the shooters needs while reducing the impact on a shooter’s budget.

Lessons learned from a natural disaster

The desk I was at when it hit, and the door I spent the quake in

In January of 2010, I was sitting in my room in the Hotel Caribe, Port-Au-Prince, Haiti sipping on a Coke.  Haiti hadn’t experienced an earthquake in over 50 years, and all the risk assessments my team had done prior to our arrival had indicated that the greatest danger to us was from street crime or riots.  My team had personal cell phones, and an Embassy-issued radio on the net operated by Post One.  I won’t go into details concerning the quake, as a Google search can provide you with that information, but I would like to share several things I learned:

The rest of my room and the door to the bathroom

Lesson 1.  Have a plan, practice it as much as you can, and don’t count on someone coming to save you.  Emergency services in a catastrophic event (those that aren’t affected by the event) will be focused on the most severe injuries or most severely damaged areas.  My team was required to submit a mission plan that included procedures for what to do in an emergency.  To be honest, I didn’t do the best job of sitting down and thinking about what could happen.  I blame it on personal complacency.  By this point, I had completed 2.5 years of mobile training teams on 5 continents.  Nothing had ever happened, and I was in the mindset that nothing ever would.  My plan for everything was the same: call the Embassy.  When the earthquake hit, the initial panic and injuries among personnel resulted in Post One having to assume control of the net and regulating traffic.  If you weren’t severely injured, you weren’t getting through.  We had a vehicle, but didn’t know how to get to the Embassy, and we didn’t have a map.  We also had no weapons.  If you read the news, you know that you don’t necessarily wander around certain parts of Haiti during normal daylight hours, much less when all security and social services just disappeared.

Lesson 2. Know your equipment and how to use it.  My team was issued a medical kit from Adventure Medical Kits, designed to treat everything from a hot spot to a gunshot wound.  Nobody on my team, myself included, had ever opened the kit to actually see what was in it, or read the field medicine guide that it contained.  My team also had Ultimate Survival Kits in a bottle.  Like the medical kit, we had never opened those kits, and we found ourselves digging through them in the dark trying to find the batteries to put in our flashlights.  Our satellite phone required a password to use, and we had rarely used it outside of checking to see if the battery was charged.  Under stress, the password was forgotten, and we ended up locking the phone out.

Lesson 3. Be prepared for a total communications failure.  Due to the massive damage to the infrastructure, all cell phone service was lost.  We locked out our satellite phone in the chaos, and the radio network was jammed with people needing assistance.  The military teaches you to plan for a primary, secondary, and tertiary method of communications.  We lost all three in a matter of minutes.  During another natural disaster, Hurricane Rita, I was in Houston for the evacuation.  As over 3 million people attempted to leave the city, all cell phone communication went down.  The only comms that would go through were burst comms such as text or the old Sprint push-to-talk phones.  And this happened before the hurricane even came ashore.

The hallway outside my room

Lesson 4. Stay calm.  I know this sounds a little ridiculous, because you’ve been told this a thousand times.  I can tell you that it is imperative, and a lot harder than it sounds.  Once the world stopped shaking, the only thing I could think about was getting us out of the hotel.  There were two exits from the hallway, one into the lobby, and one into a stairwell.  The exit into the lobby was partially blocked by fallen debris, including what appeared to be electrical wiring.  The exit toward the stairs was only slightly better.  I was preparing to head down the hall toward the stairs when one of my guys pointed out that we were only on the second floor, each room had a balcony, and there was a landscaping feature that reduced our drop from the balcony to less than 5 feet.  That little fact made our exit significantly safer, not to mention easier.  After we realized that we weren’t trapped, it made it a little easier to calm down, which allowed us to prioritize the equipment we needed to take with us.  We initially escaped with our med kit, survival kits, water, some snacks, and our sat phone.  As the evening wore on, we eventually had to go back to get some clothing to share with other hotel guests, but our initial evacuation left the three of us pretty equipped to make it through at least the night.

Looking back, there were many things I could have done differently, and even though my event occurred hundreds of miles from home, it has application here as well.  First, know the threats – be they hurricane, tornado, earthquake, etc.  Make a disaster plan.  Make your disaster preps.  FEMA has several resources at www.ready.gov.  Get together with your neighbors and incorporate them into your disaster plan.  One of my biggest pet peeves is watching Doomsday Preppers and listening to them talk about how they have prepared and they’re going to watch as everyone else who didn’t prep suffers.   Golden Rule aside, that’s not a good plan.  Almost no single person, or even single family, is going to survive very long in a disaster by themselves.  Make sure you include trustworthy people with needed skills (Ham radio, medical, security) in your planning, and practice operational security with people outside your circle.

Hopefully this has been useful to you, and my mistakes can help you be more prepared.