Fine-motor skills are all of those little functions that we do on a daily, even hourly, basis with our fingers and hands. Tying our shoes, buttoning our shirts, typing on the computer are all fine-motor skills. For the defensive shooter, fine-motor skills are also involved in loading the gun, executing the proper trigger press and clearing malfunctions. In fact, take a minute to examine all of the things you do on a daily basis—not just gun related—and you will realize we are using fine-motor skills constantly.
What messes everything up is something called the fight-or-flight response. When we are faced with possible serious injury or even death, our sympathetic nervous system kicks in. This is an unconscious function in which our body prepares itself to either fight or immediately flee from the threat. We may choose which reaction will occur, but we have no choice with our body’s preparation for the event.
When faced with the deadly threat, our heart rate increases and our body rushes blood to our various muscle groups at the expense of the extremities (such as fingers). The result is that simple little tasks for which we use our fingers—often without even thinking about it—suddenly become difficult. Our finger and hand movement become seriously compromised.
While you may never have had to face a life-threatening situation, you probably have experienced something similar at your first shooting match. You might have fumbled a simple reload, jerked your trigger or forgotten a match’s course-of-fire. And, all of this was because of simple stress, not the fight-or-flight response. If fight-or-flight is a 10, then the stress that has messed us all up in shooting matches is something like a four. What I’m saying is that when fight-or-flight kicks in and our fine- motor skills go out the window, it is not a pretty picture. And, of course, this is a quite serious—deadly—picture.
So, what can the armed citizen do about it? The first thing is to identify the firearm functions that we’ve been devoting fine-motor skills to and find another way to get the job done. This is one of the reasons we suggest not releasing the slide of a semi-automatic handgun by pressing the slide lock; that’s a fine-motor skill. Instead, it is much more positive to grasp the top of the slide in front of the rear sight, and forcefully jerk the slide rearward, allowing the slide lock to disengage, sending the gun’s slide home.
In the same vein, during my police-pistol competition days we often reloaded our revolvers by placing them in our left hand, opening the cylinder, and punching the empties out by stroking the ejector rod with our left thumb, a fine-motor skill. It is a far more positive and dependable move to smack the ejector rod with the palm of the right hand to dump the empties.
Of course, in handling firearms, it is impossible to avoid using some fine-motor skills. Loading a revolver with one’s fingers, speedloader or speedstrip involves fine-motor skills. In fact, clearing malfunctions on any type of firearm involves fine-motor skills. And, of course, performing a proper trigger press is all about fine-motor skills.
This is why practice is so important. By continually repeating a particular function, it becomes a habit, and habits help us function almost unconsciously. When you were first learning to tie your shoes, it was probably quite a chore and required your absolute attention. Nowadays you perform the same task without even thinking about it. And creating habits is the reason we work continually at the range and in dry practice, with our trigger press and speed reloads. If we can’t avoid a particular fine-motor skill function, then make doing it quickly and correctly a habit.
Just be conscious of making sure those habits are good habits. Bill Jordan told about a fellow officer who, coming out of an extended gunfight, noticed his pants pocket was bulging. Being a handloader, when practicing at the range he would dump his empties in his pocket so they wouldn’t get dirty by falling on the ground. He had unintentionally formed a habit—one that was probably not a good idea where gunfighting was concerned, regardless of how clean his empty brass was.
So, we deal with the whole phenomenon by realizing that the fight-or-flight response will affect any and all of us when our lives are threatened. We deal with the loss of fine-motor skills by finding ways to get the job done while avoiding relying on the dexterity of our fingers whenever possible. And when fine-motor skills are simply unavoidable, we focus our practice on those functions until they become good habits.
