As I have mentioned in other posts, I attended the academy in the waning days of the revolver roaming the earth in duty holsters. One could still find “semi-automatic transition courses” in various training catalogs.

My own agency had transitioned from the S&W Model 64 (K-frame .38 Special revolver) to the S&W 4006 only a few years prior to my arrival. The 4006, now out of production, was a “traditional double action” (TDA) pistol meaning that the first shot was fired double-action with the reciprocation of the slide in recoil cocking the hammer thus making subsequent shots fired in single-action mode.

Here, Dave Spaulding of Handgun Combatives discusses the training of that era and teaching people to “shoot to reset”:

My experiences very much mirror what Dave describes in the video. The only problem was that I was never told that the pinning of the trigger was an intermediate step in the learning process. I discovered it on my own while participating in the “reactive shooting” portion of a course. I remember going back to my agency and telling some of the guys, “Hey, did y’all know that you can let the trigger reset during recoil?” receiving only a tepid reaction.

The state qualification course is shot against very generous par times, and quite frankly, one has plenty of time to shoot, let the sights settle, then let the trigger reset, and then press another shot. Most of coworkers and colleagues just didn’t see the need to be able to shoot faster because “I shot a 98” was thought to be “good”. It was later when I dipped my toes into the competition world that I realized that there was another level of “good”, and it wasn’t until I dove into the open enrollment world that I developed any real consistency.

Here are two short videos from Ernest Langdon of Langdon Tactical discussing trigger reset and the problem with teaching shooters what he terms as the “interim step”.

Going back to Dave’s video, somewhere along the way I saw the demonstration that he describes in which one shooter grips the gun while another shooter smacks the trigger with a pen. Yes, it worked.

After seeing that demo, I concentrated on grip, and yes, I found that with a very firm grip I could smash the trigger and get hits. Well, I could get hits provided I was shooting at something like an eight-inch circle at distances inside of 10-yards.

In late 2018, I attended the Applied Fundamentals course with OpSpec Training. I signed up for the course based on other things in the description, but what I received was a rewarding (while at times frustrating) three day class on trigger control. Two key components in the class were prepping the trigger and resetting DURING recoil. This class came at exactly the right time for me as I had hit shooting plateau, and I was trying to work through some issues.

Trigger reset can be done by either letting the trigger out only to the reset point, or the trigger can be let out past the reset point and then prepped again. Both of these can be accomplished during recoil. The latter method does help avoid trigger freeze.

I personally believe that either of the above described methods are superior to the trigger slapping method advocated by some. I am aware that many high level competitive shooters utilize trigger slapping, but they are very small segment of shooters capable of doing such.

UPDATE: I am updating this post to include the following video from Dave Spaulding covering reset in recovery. I want to be clear about what he is teaching. I chose the video above because of the historical context that he explains.