Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Massad Ayoob
Read between
December 22, 2023 - February 21, 2024
in one-handed shooting, you’ll be stronger and better balanced if the forward foot is the one on the same side as the gun hand.
The forward leg should be sharply flexed. Pointing the forward toe toward the target helps most shooters align their bodies.
Some find it stronger to tilt the gun very slightly toward the weak side, no more than 15 to 45 degrees. This also helps to align the gun with the opposite eye, if the shooter is cross dominant, that is, firing right handed but with left master eye or vice versa.
The Beretta 92 is not sensitive to an unlocked wrist, a good thing when the shooter has to fire from an awkward position, as when tasked with a hostage rescue shot from a difficult angle in a Jacksonville IDPA match.
Note that “aiming” does not necessarily require a perfect, traditional sight alignment, but past 7 yards or so, that’s what you want. At close range, a very coarse aim of simply seeing the gun superimposed over the spot you want to hit may be good enough. By 7 yards, especially if you want a heart or brain shot, the sights themselves need to be in some sort of alignment. I use what I called a “StressPoint Index” some 25 years ago when I developed it; when world IPSC champion Todd Jarrett rediscovered it some years later, he dubbed it “shooting out of the notch,” and I think his term is more
...more
To refine this further, focus on the very top edge of the front sight. John Skaggs, who took over management of the Chapman Academy from Ray Chapman after Ray retired, taught this fine point and demonstrated why it worked. Firing offhand from 50 yards with the pistol he always taught with, a Beretta 92F, John would group his shots with deadly accuracy.
Remember that since the dots are below the top edges of the sights, a three-dot sight picture is lower to the bore than a conventional sight picture. This means that if your pistol was sighted in with the conventional “post-in-notch” sight picture, you may find your shots grouping slightly high when you aim via the three dots.
Some Berettas have been produced with the sights painted in the Von Stavenhagen pattern, in which there is a vertical white bar centered under the rear notch, and a white dot on the front sight. It is aligned by “dotting the i” with the rear bar forming the body of the letter and the white circle up front comprising the dot.
If memory serves me right, the very first Beretta 92 I shot (back in November 1989) had this sort of sighting setup.
Bull’s-eye shooters for more than a century advocated the six o’clock sight picture, in which the black circle of the target appears to balance atop the front sight. The sights, of course, have to be adjusted so the shot will go high from point of aim and spot into the center, or eye, of that black “bull.” Today, many bull’s-eye shooters advocate a center hold with iron sights, and that is certainly what you want with a defensive pistol. If you have to take a precise shot, you want to see exactly where that bullet is going to go. The ideal is to have the gun sighted so that at about 25 yards,
...more
Beretta pistols tend to come with pretty good trigger pulls. They may be heavy compared to some other brands – 5 to 7 pounds for the single-action pull on a cocked Model 92 is typical – but they are smooth in movement, and that’s what makes them controllable.
For the best high-speed shooting in single-action mode, and particularly in double-action mode, I have found that the distal joint of the trigger finger is the best contact point. It provides a quantum improvement in finger leverage against a heavy trigger pull.
“sweet spot” with the palmar crease of the distal joint placed on the trigger. Old-time revolver shooters who fired double-action-only called that sweet spot on the trigger finger “the power crease.”
Vasoconstriction is what has happened, via another mechanism, when you fall asleep lying on your arm and when you wake up, your hand has “gone to sleep.”
Off the top of my head, I can recall only one man who was able to “ride the link” during an actual gunfight.
Beretta 92’s attributes let you turn in scores like this: 120-12X out of 120 possible.
we see the dangers on the two ends of the trigger pull theory spectrum. Let the finger come all the way off the trigger, and you get miss-producing trigger slap. Try to ride the link, and you set the stage for a human error-induced failure to fire. This is why I suggest a middle ground, and the middle ground is this: Maintain a trigger weld, but let the trigger come all the way forward until it stops. By not taking the finger off the trigger, you have kept impact out of the equation on the next trigger pull and helped minimize the danger of an errant shot. However, by letting the trigger come
...more
As the support hand grasps the spare mag firmly, with thumb and middle finger holding tight and index finger down along the front of the mag,
At this point, if the pistol is at slide-lock, pressing downward on the slide release lever most easily and quickly returns the slide forward.
Even though some experts like Tom Givens are totally opposed to this.
Since the right hand remains on the gun throughout the reload, there is the possibility that if the right thumb is habituated to drop the slide, it will do so prematurely and close the slide on an empty chamber. But if we wait for the left hand to get there, that can’t happen, and it’s just as quick.
Some feel that reaching up with the whole hand and tugging the slide back and then letting it go is a better way to complete a speed reload. Their theory is that pressing down a lever is a fine motor skill that will desert us under stress. I have never heard them explain how a spear hand (lefty) or curled down thumb (righty) is “fine motor.” It’s not as if we’re talking about threading a needle or something. And if pressing a lever that releases the slide is impossible under pressure, how do these theorists expect to press the lever that releases the shot … the lever known as “the trigger”?
BIN-go!! THANK you, Mas! Not to mention no danger of bumping the safety/decocker this way!!
Reload with retention. The term comes from IDPA, and they call it “reload with retention” because it is so slow that it grates on the sensibilities to call it “tactical.”
Maximum speed tac-load. This is the one I practice for real.
I don’t use this for IDPA shooting anymore, since that sport generally requires movement immediately after the tactical reload, and a magazine held by ring and little fingers is too hard to put into a pocket while moving. Such movement, however, is unlikely after a real-world tactical reload. This technique works beautifully with most Beretta pistols,
It works less well with thin magazines whose floorplates are flush with the magazine bodies on the sides: factory 1911 magazines, for example. Also, very small fingers and very large magazines may be incompatible with this technique.
Universal tac-load. Pioneered by Jeff Cooper and standardized by Clint Smith and other great modern masters, this technique seems to be the one best suited to a broad range of hand sizes vis-à-vis magazine sizes. It works like this: The support hand snatches the fresh magazine and brings it up to the gun as if to carry out a speed reload. As the gun is reached, the index finger slides off the front of the magazine and to its side, the side away from the gun, leaving the index finger and thumb free to receive the depleted mag. Bringing the hand under the pistol, eject with the dominant hand,
...more
