Shoot your carry gun?

For almost 30 years now, I have been telling people to shoot the gun they carry. Train with it, compete with it, carry it. I’m not sure where I got that idea from originally, but it has been one of my foundational beliefs for a long time. It is easy to follow this tenet when you carry the gun of your choice. When you carry someone else’s choice, sometimes your trigger finger starts to itch.

Part of the reason you should only shoot what you carry is the whole “one gun man” thing. There are many parts to that, including the manual of arms, trigger action, as well as grip angle and recoil impulse. I can’t disagree with the thought behind that old aphorism, but I’m not totally sure it is as relevant today as it used to be. It is undoubtedly a good idea to stick to one gun, but back when that saying came about, I don’t think anyone ever imagined that shooters today might be shooting upwards of 25,000 rounds a year, some even shooting almost four times that amount each year. The level of skill you can achieve shooting that much, just dwarfs what most people could hope to see “back in the day”.

Please remember that I am only talking about shooting skills, not fighting ability. I would still and always rather take a cool hand over a more technically trained shooter.

Let’s look at another area, one that has always been near and dear to me. Your weapon’s zero. Where is your gun zero’d? When I was carrying a Sig P229, I was issued two identical guns. Many of my teammates saw them as a carry gun and a training gun. I saw them as a primary carry gun that I trained with, and a second if my primary gun broke. This happened more than once, thankfully always at the range. When that happened, I simply pulled the secondary out of my range bag and drove on. I carried and trained with the secondary gun until my primary was back up and running, usually only a few days at most.

One thing I noticed about my secondary guns (I had many over the years, lol) was that the zero was never identical to my primary gun. Both guns were always more than “combat accurate”, but one might be dead on at 25 yards and the other might be 2″ high at the same distance. Does this really matter? No, it doesn’t. Nonetheless, I saw a difference in where my bullets went during different drills, and it bothered me. Occasionally, I had to depend on my pistol to cover for my lack of a rifle. Knowing where the bullet would strike anywhere from 5 to 100 yards became an issue. Earlier in my career, a hostage situation presented a very small target at very close range. When your target is an eyeball, knowing precisely where your bullet will strike at 5 yards starts to matter. Your zero doesn’t usually affect this extreme close-range stuff all that much, but it can matter.

Where all this really come into play is in your confidence in making a given shot. My primary carry gun gave me absolute confidence in my ability to place my bullets where I wanted them. This in turn made me more confident in my ability to handle bad situations, and that led to more confidence in general. As we all know, confident people with real skills are a force to be reckoned with, in all areas of life. That may sound trite, or even like mystical mumbo jumbo. The modern use of the gun as a “martial art” is maybe the only fighting art in history that has mostly separated the mental from the physical. Traditional fighting arts generally recognize the need to train the brain as much or more than the body. Many fighting programs for actual military combat have even gone the other way and trained the brain more than the body. If you are short on time or resources, that is a time-proven way to go.

If you have a lot of time and resources, then you can train the body and the brain to high levels, which is what we see in many special operations programs around the globe. As enthusiasts, we basically have a lot of time and resources (even if they are constrained in some ways) and should be training the brain as much as the body. More on that another time.

So, back to the conundrum of wanting to carry and shoot a different gun than you are required to. I have been carrying a G19/RMR for almost 2 years now. I was carrying a 1911 before that but switched when work asked me to use the 19/RMR as part of a pilot program. I am not a Glock fan, and though I’ve carried them for much of my career, I have never warmed up to them. Since I switched back to the Glock though, I have made sure to shoot it the most in practice, as well as using it for every competition I have entered. I am now at the point where I think the gun is holding me back. Not that I can’t still learn to shoot it better, but the time and effort required for that is probably beyond what I am able and willing to do at this point.

I’ve decided to continue carrying the 19/RMR, but to compete this year with my LTT-tuned HK P30L/RMR. I have a few good rationalizations for doing this if a rationalization can ever be considered good.

1. The HK is a traditional DA/SA pistol. From much experience, I know that improving my DA pull will also maintain or even improve my ability to pull the Glock’s trigger.
2. I really enjoy shooting the HK and that may lead to more and better practice, at least some of which will transfer to shooting my Glock better.
3. I dryfire my carry Glock every day, often multiple times each day. This should allow me to stay fresh on using the gun unconsciously.
4. With the addition of a red dot sight, all of my pistols are now perfectly, and identically, zero’d.

This last point is a good example of how technology can help us improve. I have worn out dovetails (and my patience) when I have tried to get iron-sighted, fixed-sight guns to shoot to an identical point of impact. Most manufacturers offer sights of different heights to alter elevation but rarely do those work out exactly. This is one major reason why adjustable sight 1911’s remained in inventory as long as they did in some places.

Of course, I can also give you some reasons why an RDS is not a good way to go, but maybe we will address that some other time.

So, my plan is to conduct an experiment. Shoot and compete with the P30L for this next season, while still testing my ability with the Glock on a regular basis. If my ability with the Glock decreases, then I have to see where and how and decide if it matters or not. If my ability with the Glock remains the same or even increases, then maybe I have been needlessly slaved to my own notions of “beware the one gun man”. I will mention that several friends of mine with pretty significant fighting experience all do something similar. They shoot or compete with whatever they like, while carrying something different. They all admit that their ability with their carry gun is slightly less than with their “range” guns, but they feel that the difference just doesn’t matter. I’m certainly curious to see what I think once I get into this experiment.