My personal impression is that the main way to achieve this would be to concentrate on making the trigger action as close to “impossibly smooth” as money will allow, as well as not super short. So that the finger travels an appreciable distance but can feel no clicks, no increases or decreases in force, and neither starts from nor reaches a solid stopping point. Like moving a well-oiled piston that has nothing attached to it, through only the middle part of its cycle. The weight or force, as long as it was “easy enough”, would hardly matter.
Besides the obvious firearm analogy, I’ve read, and heard, “hair trigger” be used to describe something that is on the verge of snapping.
For example, John, who is known to have frequent fits of rage, is known to have a “hair trigger” temper. The smallest thing will set him off.
Col. Jeff Cooper wrote extensively on the subject of trigger pull. It was his opinion that a good trigger would have no discernible movement when pressure is applied to it, and that (as mentioned) the precise moment the round goes off should be a “surprise” to the shooter. He called it a “surprise break.” But again, that was simply his opinion. Others disagree.
I’ve never even used a gun, but I’ve played hundreds if not over a thousand pianos, and a very similar argument goes on in how to build (or adjust) a piano action, with very similar results. I’m surprised at the seeming similarity because the goals are so different - a piano weighs 500 pounds and therefore isn’t going anywhere, and there’s no target - but the way some people value smoothness and others value feeling exactly and predictably what the action is doing, and the way some people advocate improved control by requiring a certain amount of force while others feel that control is improved by a very light action, seems parallel. It’s harder to install the same aftermarket kit 88 times on a piano, instead of once on a gun, but people do it.
On that (and boy is this a hijack) the lightness of the key-dip in the pianos of Beethoven’s age, as well as their entirely different, “lighter” sound and less powerful projection the very different sound along the registers, the smaller key width, and the effects and uses of pedaling are critical in evaluating the “original-intention” aspects of the composer and performer.
Less well-known even with the more advanced manufacture of pianos used by Chopin and Liszt is the similar lighter key-dip than our pianos, which speaks to the performance of the “purling” and filigree passages in their works.
As long as the performance of music has been broached, a more applicable analogy on the smoothness of a physical “trigger-pull” is a wonderful rehearsal suggestion by the wonderful conductor Carlos Kleiber (cite later if anyone cares to some German YouTube, I think): when the violin section begins a certain passage with an imperceptible pppppianisimo awareness of their presence, everyone should play as if letting his neighbor play first, so that no-one (or of course the listener) senses or is concerned that his bowktroke has begun.
Slightly off topic, but do you have a source? My impression was that Hamilton was quick to defend his honor, and rarely backed down from a challenge, but that up until the Burr-Hamilton duel it had never come to the shooting stage, with his opponents usually retracting or modifying statements.
That’s also what Chernow’s biography says, and although it’s difficult to find anything online through googling, since all roads lead to Burr v. Hamilton, this one mentions in relation to that duel that:
Heavy trigger pulls on production firearms, especially handguns, are there for safety’s sake. So are features such as the slack, the creep, and the return. Getting rid of all those are for special situations wherein an experienced shooter need the outmost in accuracy, mainly in competitive target shooting, and only for static formats with lots of time allowance between shots.
I’ve had various kinds of set triggers on modern-made traditional-styled muzzleloaders for as long as I can remember (call it 55 years). On some you had to set the trigger to fire it; others could be shot with a heavier pull without setting. Most were “doubles” with basically two triggers; the rear setting the front as a hair trigger. A couple were “singles” where you used your finger to push the trigger slightly forward first making it into a “hair trigger”. Almost all have some way for the owner to adjust the pulls but there were a few home-made designs back in the early days of “reinventing the wheel” (say mid 60s) that you needed specialized knowledge to adjust. Its one of the reasons I always stress to hunter education students that “you have to learn your particular gun and how it works. Don’t borrow or buy something the week before season opens.”
None (or maybe few?) are modern inventions and are copied from period original arms. They seem much more common now than say 1750-1840 but I’ve never seen a true inventory to back that up. In theory a hair trigger can be more accurate in the hands of a practiced shooter but again that is more opinion than anything else. If you look at the results from something like the national shoots in Friendship Indiana both types of mechanisms are represented among the winners.
About the only thing I have seen never to have a set trigger any time is shotguns/smoothbores. I am sure someone out there made one at one time or another but I have never crossed paths with one. I always wrote it off to a difference in use and technique in shooting but almost every way I can think of to explain how I see it would start some sort of debate. I had an antique flintlock cannon lock that had a form of “pull/set adjustment” built in; I never went further than to note it being present and just being generally amazed at the entire thing.
“Cannon lock”?
Weehawken, dawn
Guns drawn
Even then there has to be a minimum pull. When I was shooting competitive pistol in the Navy, our accurized .45 ACPs had to have a minimum pull of 4 pounds, vs. the 8-pound pull* of a GI slabside. Times ranged from five rounds in ten minutes (IIRC) for slow-fire to five rounds in fifteen seconds for rapid fire. Even with slow fire, light pulls were not allowed; you just had to learn to move your finger straight back.
*To say nothing of a much rougher action.
Basically the “handi-capped stall” version of a flintlock. Rather than use the usual slow-match burning cord brought down to the vent/touch-hole you had a huge lock attached to the cannon barrel that you could stand back and pull from behind the gun. Some actually had a sort of “trigger” but you still used a cord to pull it ---- I would hope.
The first two times I tried to shoot a Feinwerkebau Olympic free pistol at 10 meters, I discharged accidentally. One-ounce trigger pull!
Me too, but the air pistol model. ‘65’ rings a bell, but it may have been newer. I don’t know if it was an ounce, but it’s a fantastically sensitive trigger. Well, we have the four rules for a reason.
Anyway, once you got used to it, I liked it. Just even thinking about the trigger once you got a good sight picture in your wobble and the thing went off. You had to follow-through, of course, and that could be funky with a springer, but it was amazingly accurate, if you did your job. Way more accurate than me, anyway.
There’s a lot of that. All of my guns are more accurate than me.
Thanks, kopek.
“GI slabside”?
Also, Gray Ghost,
“the four rules”? (Always assume it’s loaded…, etc.?)
Sure do. With the accurized pistols we were enjoined to hold the hammer back when releasing the slide lest the sear slip or bounce off of the stop. I forgot. Once. Luckily since the muzzle was downrange; all I did was have a four-round course instead of the allotted five.
Standard issue as opposed to something with fancy grips (often carved or shaped to make for a better grip) or something like the Colt Commander with some fancier trim and/or grips. I believe. But I could be wrong.
“Four Rules of Firearms Safety,” popularly codified in this form by Jeff Cooper, a firearms instructor of some note. From the wiki on gun safety, Gun safety - Wikipedia , they are:
Now, there are always exceptions to these Rules. E.g., one of the steps in disassembling a Glock is pulling the trigger. Would you pull the trigger on a loaded gun to disassemble it? No, you check that the magazine has been removed, that the chamber is empty (I do it by sight and by sticking my finger into the chamber), and then you know the pistol is unloaded. Only then do you pull the trigger. But while doing that, I still make sure to keep the muzzle pointed away from me or anything else I don’t want a bullet going through.
The Gun Safety wiki lists several other codifications of basically the same idea.