a solid, consistent visualization is important.
The term ‘pull,’ for instance, implies a movement of the whole hand. One doesn’t normally pull something with just a finger, one pulls using the whole hand and arm movement. That’s not the image one should have in mind while trying to isolate the trigger finger from the rest of the hand and hold the gun steady! ‘Press’ implies using the tip of the finger and moving away from the body. Again, not really consistent with the job we’re wanting to do.
So, what does your obviously obsessive-compulsive author use? I prefer the term ‘stroke,’ as in a golf stroke. A stroke, in either golf or shooting, consists of two parts. For the revolver shooter, the first part is compression: the act of moving the trigger backward against spring pressure and firing the round. The shooter is compressing the springs that power the gun, and the term implies a smooth, consistent motion regardless of speed.
The second part of the stroke is the trigger return or reset. The golf equivalent of this is the follow-through, a term which I like very much but haven’t yet worked into my teaching lexicon. The return resets the trigger back to the forward-most position, ready for another compression.
The return is incredibly important and just as incredibly ignored. Many revolver shooters and experts have said that the trigger return is at least as important as the compression, and with this I am in total agreement. I’ve found that attention paid to the return pays dividends in consistent shooting.
A trigger stroke, then, is one full movement of the trigger – a compression and a return. I urge you to banish the word ‘pull’ from your revolver vocabulary. Let the autoloader shooters deal with it!
A proper trigger stroke - key to good shooting
Once the decision to fire has been made, the trigger is compressed smoothly, evenly, and straight backwards until the round ignites. The compression should be consistent in speed, neither slowing down or speeding up, and the trigger should be in constant motion until the gun fires. Don’t stop or even slow down once the compression has started; keep the trigger finger moving until the gun fires. This keeps any deviant or ‘steering’ pressure on the gun constant, which is easier to compensate for than pressure which constantly changes.
Once the round ignites, the trigger is immediately allowed to return. The finger pressure used in compressing the trigger is relaxed and the trigger is allowed to return forward. The trigger finger should remain in contact with the trigger as it returns, but only slightly; any resistance will simply slow the trigger’s movement, and may cause some guns to bind. Maintain just enough contact so that you can feel when the trigger has stopped, at which point it is completely reset and ready for the next shot.
The trigger return should have the same speed as the compression. Like the compression, it should not vary during the trigger’s movement. If we step back and look at the trigger stroke as a complete action, except for the direction reversal it should look like a single movement.
Naturally we don’t want the muzzle to move off of alignment with the target during the compression, and we want to develop that same level of muzzle control during the return. With a long trigger stroke, there is a significantly larger amount of time that the revolver is spending resetting compared to an autoloader. If one wants to shoot a revolver both quickly and accurately, it’s necessary to start the trigger return immediately, as opposed to an auto shooter, who can afford to pause slightly before allowing the trigger to reset.
Because efficient revolver shooting pretty much requires that the trigger return start immediately after the round is discharged, it’s not inconceivable that the bullet might still be in the bore as the trigger finger reverses direction. If the muzzle is disturbed at this point the round will not be as precisely placed as the shooter may have intended.
For this reason I recommend practicing the stroke, focusing on trigger return, until the muzzle alignment (as shown by the sights) does not vary during any phase of the stroke. In days past it was a common technique to balance a coin on the front sight and practice until the coin did not move regardless of which direction the trigger was going, which serves to illustrate both what’s required and that it’s possible to achieve.
(I’m told by a knowledgeable source that this concept of the trigger stroke was called “rowing the boat” by instructors at the FBI Academy back in the 1960s. Since I wasn’t there I can’t vouch for the claim, but I think it the mental image is certainly valid.)
Your finger, the trigger, and even some geometry
How your finger fits the trigger is important because it affects how the two interact with each other. How they interact affects your ability to keep the gun aligned on target as the stroke is completed. It’s very common for shooters to continually fight that interaction, and they’re not even aware that they’re doing it!
I said that the trigger compression should be straight back, but in practice it’s a little more difficult than that. If you think about it, you’ll realize that your fingertip never really travels straight for any distance. That’s because it pivots at the joints, and a pivot doesn’t allow straight motion. A pivot imparts a circular motion, and if you hold your trigger finger in front of your face and flex it you’ll notice that the tip doesn’t describe a straight line. At some point, no matter how much you manipulate the muscles and pivots in your finger, its path starts to curve.
If you think further, you’ll realize that a revolver’s trigger doesn’t go straight back either. It pivots too, and the tip of the trigger describes a circle. (You’ll note that your trigger guard is curved to match the arc of the trigger.)
The arcs of your finger and the trigger are at right angles to each other. As the trigger is traveling in a circle back and up, your finger is traveling out and back in. The two are working against each other for the full length of the trigger’s movement. It’s pretty obvious why most people have trouble maintaining muzzle alignment with all that going on.
It’s my contention that all this movement causes most shooters to try hanging on to the trigger – grasping it with the trigger finger – because it feels like it’s trying to get away.
Remember that the trigger is rotating up and away from the trigger finger. The finger slides down the trigger face, and the natural reaction is to hang on by curling the tip of the finger inward. It’s as if the shooter is trying to keep the trigger from running away from home!
This movement is worsened by the finger’s natural movement, which is toward the palm as it flexes backward. As the trigger is moving out of the finger’s grasp, the finger is naturally moving to grasp the trigger more tightly. This is where psychology meets physics.
This grabbing action of the trigger finger tends to steer the gun to one side. For a right-handed shooter, it usually results in the gun being pulled over to the right as the finger’s arc comes inward, toward the palm. (Now do you see why I avoid the term ‘trigger pull’? The last thing I want to do is encourage the student to pull the gun even more!)
The usual reaction is to curl the finger even more, so that the tip contacts the frame. This contact pushes the gun in the opposite direction of the finger arc, and if carefully done the two forces cancel each other and the gun stays relatively straight.
As I said upfront, my primary interest is in the revolver as a self-defense tool. Getting both of those forces just right is easy on the target range, when you can clearly watch your sights and there is no life-or-death pressure. Doing it in the face of a determined attack, perhaps in sub-optimal light, is another matter. Even in competition it’s not easy, because as the pace of shooting increases it becomes harder to balance those forces with the care necessary.
As it happens, there is a solution: stop the trigger finger from steering the gun in the first place. How do we do that? Believe it or not, it’s pretty simple, but it takes a little conscious effort to retrain the brain. We can do this with a little dry fire practice.
(Safety note: always triple-check your revolver to be sure that it’s unloaded before commencing any dry fire! You must also make sure that you have a proper backstop for