doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Two triggers need straight grip?

I just read again, on another board, advise to a new shooter; "if you are shooting a side by side with two triggers you need a straight grip stock so that your hand can slide back easily for the rear trigger." I've read this many times over the years and I wonder if there is any truth to it.
I shoot two-trigger side by sides frequently and I've never noticed my hand moving at all. I can go from the back trigger to the front trigger or the front to the back and I never seem to be handicapped with a semi-pistol grip stock. I've watched other people shoot a two-trigger gun and I have never seen their hand move either.
My question is, do any of you feel that a straight stock helps with a two-trigger gun?

Pete

Pete, I think if you watch your trigger hand carefully, while dry firing the gun for example, you will see that you do move it--although very slightly. Some people believe this (minimal) movement is easier with a straight grip than with a SPG or PG. That being said, the vast majority of American doubles were made with one or the other of those.

Where I think a straight grip does help, at least some, is with people who have relatively short fingers and a problem banging their middle finger on the back of the trigger guard. A straight grip moves the rest of your hand farther away from the trigger guard, especially when compared to a fairly tight PG.

There's also the school of thought, preached by the late gunwriter Don Zutz, that a straight grip should be paired with a splinter forend, and a PG with a beavertail. He felt that kept the shooter's hands more "in line". But once more, most classic American doubles were made with a PG/splinter combination.

If you work at it hard enough, you can overthink some of this stuff.

Yes, straight or Prince of Wales and semi PG work best for me. Pistol grips out of the question.
To each his own.
JC

Mr. Brown, Maybe I do move my hand slightly, but if so, I never noticed it. But I never thought of the effect of the trigger guard hitting the middle finger. I have had that problem on one gun I owned and I bet a straight stock would have fixed that.

I have Don Zutz's book and although his ideas sound good in theory, I never noticed much difference in practice.
Pete

Adjusting your length of pull would have likely fixed it as well. That is often times the usual culprit of hitting your middle finger on the gaurd.

Then there's the theory that trigger hands can be over-controlling and the solution a handle that binds up the wrist and prevents gun-steering from the back seat. On the alignment to bore axis bit, I don't think there's a lot of difference between a long radius semi-pistol and a straight hand. Both Browning and Merkel made/or make double-trigger O/Us and both used the semi-pistol and a forend whose depth below the lower barrel is not THAT MUCH greater than the depth of a splinter below the barrels of a sideby gun. I also think that a strait hand or semi-pistol stock forces the wrist to pronate such that the elbow comes up and the pocket with it. How those trap shooters do the Joe Morgan pump with an Etchen grip I have no idea. I'd think that would another source of wrist strain as a tight pistol grip seems to me to bring the elbow down. As to this sliding stuff, I think I flex my palm slightly to get my index finger back to the rear trigger. Always feels better to me to move from the rear to the front trigger but I have not generalized from my experience to a rigid dogma which must apply to all.

jack

I've swapped between the two in the same days shooting and never noticed a problem. I've never read this before so I guess I didn't know I was doing something wrong. *laughs*

Destry

I doesn't matter which grip is used with a double trigger gun. And any movement of the hand when shooting a straight grip is just poppycock!

Someone said they thought they saw it written in stone, so we're supposed to believe it. I don't buy it. I don't move my hand on a straight grip, and feel that two triggers are easier managed with a pistol grip. Zutz was a good shooter, but there is a difference between being able to do it well and explaining why good shooting actually happens. His grasp of elementary physics was pretty poor. As to Zutz's preoccupation with hands in a line, how many international skeet shooters turn to a gun with a straight grip when the chips are down?

Ithaca, you won't find very many international skeet shooters shooting anything with a splinter FE either, so you needn't pick on Zutz on that score. The Brits, who pretty much refined the "game gun" concept, made a lot more guns straight/splinter than any other way.

As for hand movement, I just pulled out 3 guns (Army & Navy, Miroku Model M 12's, BSS Sidelock 20), all straight/DT, stuck in snap caps, and dry fired them. Hand movement in every case. Very slight, but it's there. In fact, if I consciously try NOT to move my hand very slightly when shifting triggers, it feels wrong. Could be other people will get different results, and it could be people outshoot me because I move my hand a little. But I've been shooting DT sxs for 35 years--several hundred different ones, in fact--so I'm not exactly new to the genre.