Developing expertise requires a high quantity of high-quality training — deliberate practice — but generally this deliberate practice is not simply doing what you’re trying to get good at.
Playing golf may be pleasant, but it’s an extremely time-inefficient way to practice your golf game.
Sparring may be as close to the real thing as a boxer can get, but taking a lot of hits doesn’t build you up.
Shooters have their own problems. Getting to the range can be time-expensive, and shooting live rounds can be money-expensive. So, shooters have long relied on dry-firing, or going through the motions of shooting without live ammo — which means “calling” your own shots and manually racking the slide of your normally semi-auto gun between shots.
Patent lawyer and “practical” shooter Mike Hughes decided to develop an alternative, the SIRT training pistol, a replica Glock with an auto-resetting trigger and a pair of lasers, a red one activated by taking up slack and “prepping” the trigger and a bright green one activated by breaking the shot:
I suppose a number of people will be turned off by the fact that it costs as much as a real Glock — but that’s really only the cost of a few thousand rounds of training ammo.
A few comments, since I actually have one of these things.
1. It is really easy to see your trigger squeeze errors with both lasers turned on; you can see the dot on the wall move as you squeeze the trigger – you don’t have to rely on clock style targets to try to diagnose the problem.
2. This is quite possibly the perfect tool with which to train new shooters.
3. If you’re trying to learn how to point shoot, the SIRT is great to check your point of aim. I don’t even let the trigger break; I just prep the trigger with the red laser turned on.
4. I used to dry-fire extensively (I still do, but now split my time). I was worried that I was training myself to rack the slide every time I shot a round, which is not a problem with the SIRT.
5. Be wary of the dangers of rapid fire without recoil.
6. It takes a lot of concentration to keep one’s focus on the front sight (the green laser seems particularly bright to me). I find that this problem can be partially mitigated with strong ambient light.
Thanks for weighing in, Johnny! It sounds like you’d say it was worth getting.
As with Airsoft or a .22 conversion, you need to live fire with real ammo often enough to maintain your timing and the habit of keeping a strong (support-hand) grip and a strong posture.