FOREFRONT: No Glocks For Cops? An Alternative View
Some of the most popular DA/SA autos place the safety lever on the slide, where it is harder to reach for all shooters, but especially for those with smaller hands. Throwing the lever upward to OFF SAFE is awkward, and weakens the fi ring grip.
With all due respect to Mr. Owens and his opinion, I disagree with his argument. I understand his concerns about human performance and reactions under stress, and share many of those same concerns. In fact, I’ve spent a great deal of time and eff ort researching and writing about the eff ects of combat stress on physiology and performance, but I dis- agree with his conclusions on the best way to deal with these challenges. In my opinion, Mr. Owens is trying to fi nd a “hardware” solution to
a “software” problem, and although he describes the focus on training as “utterly irrelevant” in his commentary about the original piece, I think he has it backward. I think his focus on technology is the truly irrelevant issue, and his suggested fi x creates as many problems as it solves.
The Problem In his article, Mr. Owens made the claim that about 20 percent of police offi cers put their fi ngers on the triggers of their guns when they shouldn’t, and I believe that is a credible fi gure. In fact, it might even be too low of an estimate. My own study of the New York Police Department (NYPD) data from 1999-2011 indicates that the ratio of reported “Accidental” or “Unintentional Discharges” to “In- tentional Discharges” occurring during “Adversarial Confl ict” with a perpetrator varied from a low of 30.6 percent to a high of 63.6 percent, with the average at 44.9 percent for the entire period. Addi- tionally, looking strictly at the Accidental/Unintentional Discharges, an average of 25.9 percent of the 13-year total occurred while the offi cer was struggling with the suspect. While it would not be valid to extrapolate the NYPD experience to the nation as a whole, it’s instructive that the offi cers on this depart- ment fi red their guns accidentally almost half as much as they fi red them at suspects, and that at least a quarter of the accidental discharges occurred during enforcement actions, not administrative handling. T ese numbers indicate what we already know, namely that offi cers
9 The Police Marksman Summer 2015
sometimes place their fi ngers on the triggers of their weapons during stressful and violent encounters when they feel threatened. T ey often do this subconsciously, without recognizing that they are doing it, and when they fall, get startled, get bumped, get struck, or grasp at some- thing with the other hand, they frequently clench the weapon hand in response. If an errant fi nger is resting on the trigger, then it will likely be pulled and the weapon will discharge.
Hardware “Solution” #1: Increased Pull Weight Mr. Owens has suggested a change in hardware to address the prob- lem, but the track record on such eff orts has been poor. Over the years, law enforcement agencies have experimented with various technological “fi xes” to prevent these errors, but none have been very successful. One of the most common “fi xes” has involved increasing the
weight of pull required to move the trigger, either by choosing a dif- ferent design, or by modifying an existing design. Unfortunately, this only results in a pistol that is more diffi cult to deliberately fi re with precision, particularly for offi cers with smaller or less powerful hands. T e increased presence of females in law enforcement has focused attention on this issue, and some of the best research indicates that females have a mean grip length that is 11 percent shorter than that of males, a hand width that is 14 percent shorter, and a maximal grip pressure that is roughly 40 percent less than that of males. T is makes it very diffi cult for these offi cers to properly manage a trigger with a heavy pull weight, particularly if the increased weight is combined with a longer trigger reach, as it is on pistols with Double Action (DA) triggers—the very pistols that Mr. Owens suggested. During the XM10 pistol trials, the US Army discovered that seven of 12 female soldiers in a test group could not fi re the candidate pistols in the DA mode due to the combination of trigger reach and
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