Efficiently Integrating with a Firearm

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. One of the things we talk a lot about when it comes to self-defense is the use of a firearm. In a home defense situation or in a public environment, if we decide to have a firearm handy, we get the opportunity to use it, we want to be able to use it as efficiently as possible. Understanding how our hands work and how our hand is gonna integrate with that firearm is important. One of the most complex systems in human body is, rather are our hands. The hands are unique in the amount of neurological tissue that is designated for their integration. The muscular system of the hands are, is very complex, both the movement from flection to extension as we've talked about, but also the movement of expanding the fingers and closing the fingers together in order to integrate with our environment. The tactile stimulation, or the ability to sense what we're touching is very, very concentrated in our fingertips and so that allows us to be very precise in what we do. The blood supply to the hand is unique in so far as it has two major arteries going to the hand and it is designed in such way that you can lose one of the arteries and still perfuse the hand. It's set up in a loop system that's very unique to mammals. And so the neurological supply to the hand is also unique in so far as you can lose one of the nerves with the flexors to the fingers, but you don't lose the other two fingers, and so you don't lose the entire system by losing one nerve. So there's a redundancy in the design of our hands and we rarely, when we work out and train, we rarely concentrate just on the strength of the 19 muscles of our hands. One of the things that's unique about our hands also is that the musculature for the, that the number of muscles in the thumb and the number of muscles in the forefinger are more than the other fingers. And so we have a greater dexterity and precision, both neurologically and strengthwise with our hands than we usually talk about and than we usually think about. One of the things that's important to understand as far as I'm concerned is just the incredible versatility and power of the human weapon system. The fact that we can do so many things and we can do so many things intuitively and efficiently without breaking things down into the smallest nuance of mechanics. On a square range and a target shooting environment that stuff may seem important and may seem like it shaves a 10th of a second off your competition time, but the reality is you can pick up a gun and shoot it without any training. The less training we need in order to be able to things efficiently, to be able to achieve the goals that we're trying to achieve with competency, the better off we are and understanding that physiology is really important, so I really wasn't aware of the redundancy inherent in the system. That's great to know and it also affects our thought process. I noticed that hands weren't one of the vulnerabilities that you talked about earlier, maybe because the hand is so redundant it's kind of hard to break that down on the enemy. Exactly and just because you do a pressure point on the hand doesn't mean that the other fingers can't manipulate also with regard to that. So some people would say, "Well, they are a vulnerability because you can do joint locks and that kind of thing." But in reality, there's such redundancy in the system that there's always a counter to those kinds of things. And so they become, they can become advantageous to the weapon system. Okay. So we know that the hands are incredibly strong, resilient. We know that we have most of our dexterity and strengths with our thumb and our forefinger. And of course, that's really where we're gonna do most of the grasping, and then our forefinger, of course, is the actuating on the trigger when it comes to our gun for self-defense. Let's talk about integrating the hand with the firearm. Okay. This area of medicine is frequently referred to as ergonomics and how a gun is used and how it fits into the hands is very important. What's unique about hands, one of the other things that's unique about hands is that each hand changes over time and it changes in what that hand has done throughout its life. For example, a 19 year old person's hand is not the same as a 65 year old person's hand. And that 65 year old hand has accumulated years of experience that change how they integrate with their environment. So when we're considering guns, you have to make sure that that gun fits naturally into the hand and that that hand is comfortable on that grip. Now is it safe to say we could learn to shoot any gun and some guns are gonna be easier to shoot that others? I think that, yes, I overall in general I think you could say that that some, depending on your hand strength, on your hand size, and the design of a gun will make a big difference on your ability to shoot. That's the reason so many guns are customized. So we've got a couple of different firearms here. Of course, we've checked them and cleared them, we know that they're unloaded. We've got the Glock, we've got an H&K and we've got a 1911. Now the 1911 design, of course, everybody knows a that's familiar with the 1911 design, we can change the type of main spring housing so that we can have a flat one, an arched one, a semi-arched one. There's a lot of different variation here and there are some other guns also that we can change the arch here. We can change that angle of grip. But these three guns represent three different arches. Why don't I pick them up and then you can talk a little bit about how, what you see, what you see as far as the ergonomic nature of my integration with this firearm. Well, one of the things that's important is we can start with actually how the gun contacts the hand and the contour of the hand. This region of the hand is, has a very dominance, obviously, with the thumb in controlling it and being able to pull the two fingers together and being able to establish control. And so how the gun actually hits the palm is very, very important. Okay, so that's maybe example number one, which if I extend out and you kind of look at the shooting position there. One of the things we've talked about also is how the arm is able to stabilize the gun and how that integration takes place biomechanically. We find that when the wrist is canted that it allows stabilization much more because it's utilizing the brachioradialis muscle and that's an important aspect of how you hold that gun and how you utilize it. Okay, so this cant this, the idea that I have to crank my wrist up here is not something we'd look for in a firearm. That's something that structurally weakens the system biomechanically. Okay, let's take a look at another option. I would add as a caveat, unless someone is very trained. Okay, so, again, with training, we can overcome almost any deficit in a design or any of the integration to that design with our human weapon system. The reality is we want to try to minimize the need for training. We know that training resources, our time, our budget, maybe even our interests are always limited, so the more ergonomic, the more natural, the more intuitive our relationship between the firearm and our hand, the easier our training process is gonna be. Let's take a look at the Glock. So with the Glock, the place that we start also is how the gun integrates with the hand. You can see here that there's more of a gap than there was in the last pistol that we picked up. Likewise, with the arm placed in an extension, once again, he has this angle is more, is a tighter angle. Whereas when he relaxes with it, he drops it down and the brachioradialis controls it more and the contraction of that holds the gun down and he has more control of it. So as I extend, I'm not cranking it quite as much as I was with the other design, but I'm still not in a natural position. That's exactly right. Okay. And now moving to the flat mainspring housing 1911. When we look at this gun, what we notice is that the contour is different, and so thus the stabilization has a potential to be less. Likewise, the cant of the grip is such that it utilizes the brachioradialis musculature more, and as a result is sometimes is considered a more stable platform. Okay, so the design of a firearm and finding the firearm that fits best in your hand is an important consideration when you understand that your training, time, energy, effort, budget are always gonna be limited. Finding the most ergonomic, the most natural firearm for your hand may be a process that you have to go through over time. Maybe one of the best things to do is go to a gun shop, go to a rental facility, go to a training facility where you can try a lot of different firearms out and see just how natural you are when it comes to pointing that firearm in your shooting position. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.