One of the most common complaints from non-revolver shooters about using one is that the trigger on the most common and mass manufactured ones made since WW1, have “long, heavy” triggers. This is such a fallacy that whenever I hear it, I shake my head like a dog trying to understand strange sounds. At this point in the information age, it is a bit ridiculous to hear this trope. 

Now, I completely understand why it still gets said. Probably the majority of the gun community who regularly engage on social media are not long term enthusiasts. Rather, they are most likely to have only entered the self-preservation centric shooting world fairly recently. This is exacerbated by the voices they listen to online, belonging to those they consider to be “subject matter experts”, who themselves are newcomers! 

It may shock many of you to find out that many of these personalities/instructors/”influencers” have only been involved in the self-defense sphere for less than 10-12 years. If you take a look at their resumes, they tend to all start serious work post 2010! Two in particular, one of whom has a podcast and writes for media, and the other a “YouTube Influencer” , neither knew anything about this area (by their own admissions, and yes, I can send you to those actual posts) before 2012. 

And unfortunately, it is worsened because these folks love to willfully ignore what came before them. Either due to sheer laziness, or rampaging narcissistic egos, they want to be seen as unique and better than others. God forbid that someone else had a great idea first. 

In that environment, all they know about triggers is a striker fired action. So it is no real surprise that their understanding of a double action trigger is on par with the hominids at the beginning of “2001: A Space Odyssey” looking at the Monolith and having zero understanding. 

My guess is that these same people also don’t know how to run a manual transmission in a car. 

If they would admit that they didn’t know, that would be fine. But they don’t. Instead, they attack a DA trigger and use terms like heavy, long, hard to shoot. Sure, just as if you don’t know how to drive a car with a manual transmission, it seems daunting and overly complex. But as anyone who grew up with, and learned to drive manual transmission vehicles, they are simple and easily handled. 

For those who doubt my words, all you have to do is take a look at the world of PPC (Police Pistol Combat) competitions. Pull the course of fire from any of the matches, and you will see incredibly difficult challenges that puts a tremendous premium on high levels of precision fire. And they have always been shot with double action revolvers. If DA triggers were so hard to shoot, then no one would ever do well on any PPC match. Yes, the highest levels are shot with excessively tuned triggers that are far lighter than a “street trigger”, but so are all the current “practical” matches like USPSA and IDPA. The vast majority of guns used in PPC competitions were either straight off the street, or a close training copy of the user’s duty revolver. 

DA triggers are not tough to learn to shoot. They just need to be taught by someone who knows how to do so. 

And beyond a shadow of a doubt, many revolvers come from the factory with heavy and rough triggers. The typical factory j-frame snubs coming out of S&W  for decades were particularly bad. But you know what other guns had bad triggers coming from the factory? Most every striker gun made prior to about 2017 or so. The whole problem of people pinning the trigger while shooting came about because the early Glock triggers were so bad (and unusual!) that the sales reps had to figure out how to get people to be somewhat okay at running them. And there quickly arose in the early days of the internet circa ‘97-98 how to do home trigger jobs to help make the striker action more palatable. It is only the past few years where Factories started making triggers that were cleaner and nicer as they come out of the box (and often circumvented safety is doing so, but that is another story for another article…….). 

The general point being that most triggers have the same issues and can be overcome the exact same way – through training and practice. 

But the focus of this series is on what are the positives of a revolver, not what makes it the same as other semi-autos, so why do I list a DA trigger as a positive for them? Two areas – safety and threat management. 

One of the positives that people will say about Striker Triggers is how easy they are to shoot when you need to do so. The corollary to that is that they are easier to shoot when you do NOT want to. Lighter pull weight plays into that, but more heavily factored in is the shortness of the movement needed to fire. There is a reason that the number of negligent discharges skyrocketed when every LE agency in the country went over to semi-autos as the duty weapon. That is not hyperbole. All you have to do is look at the records. It was much, much less common for a rookie learning to shoot a handgun in the academy to have an ND with a typical DA revolver trigger than it is today. 

As a matter of fact, I have three times barely been missed in training classes or on a public shooting range from getting shot when a person pulled a trigger when they did not mean to. One of them was a 1911, but the other two were Glocks. Could it happen with a revolver shooter? Sure, but the chances are astronomically smaller. 

The other aspect of that longer trigger pull (and a tad more weight needed to move it back) is that it is easier to stop a firing cycle, or even let off enough to prevent the first shot when the threat is no longer a threat. And in today’s age of the mainstream media and at least half the politicians in this country viewing guns and self-defense in any situation as “evil”, any bit of ammunition we can not give them to hurt us is all to the good. 

Tougher to shoot? Maybe, on occasion and in the right context, that is an absolute positive.