Which is ass backward if you ask any championship-caliber shooter.

Splits are commonly listed in the “overrated” category.  There’s way more time to be gained in transitions/movement.  

But splits get chicks.  Right?  :P

This ^

Look, I could limit myself to old ass gear I utilized when active duty  .but why? The facts are that gear and technology improves and if that improvement can make me a better shooter at a price point? Why not? I can TRY to shoot the 100 yard gong with a Glock, M&P, Walther and miss 75 percent of the time. I can also try with a optics equipped double stack 2011 and make hits 90 percent of the time.  Some people just love to try to dictate to others what they can buy or shouldn't. As if it's their dollar spent.

How many threads have we seen you know youknowwho argue incessantly like a troll just to get people riled up?

He's a troll and you let it degenerate until someone else pushes a little too close to the edge.

Who really needs to change their ways here? The guy who constantly finds himself in these threads? Maybe the site staff who allow it to happen?

I think it's nearly a complete myth that a high-end 1911 is a more reliable 1911.  Maybe more durable and better fitted with some longer lasting small parts, but never understood what reliability upgrades are included in something like a Springfield PRO that aren't there in the TRP.  

That being said, if a guy has a 1911 and it starts malfunctioning, it can be tricky to diagnose.

You have a failure to feed with your 1911, what do you change to keep it from happening again?  

You MUST pick from all these variables and if you're not very familiar with how pistols work you could easily guess wrong.  

Is it related to the recoil spring, lubrication, the mag spring, mag feed lips, worn out locking lugs, extractor tension, bullet shape, how powerful the ammo is, is it dirty, etc?  A lot of these are not applicable to other guns.

A noob could easily lose his mind trying to diagnose it.  Or if you're a department armorer and a SWAT guy says his 1911 doesn't work, you take weeks to figure it out because he had one out of four mags with a weak spring but he didn't give you that mag or some nonsense like that.  It could take hundreds of dollars of ammo to prove that the problem is solved.

I also have a theory that 5" Kimbers are no less reliable than other 1911s, except their owners tend to have bought them because they're pretty and don't know much.  No offense to any Kimber owners here, but they're pretty common in noob traps like Cabela's.

Agreed.

If I was an armorer I'd not want to manage a fleet of 1911s.

I'm fine with keeping mine up which theyve needed nothing but springs and extractors tensioned.

I replace their internals when I get them. Not because I had to but because it gives me a set of spares if something breaks.
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"Fleets" of 1911's were up and running longer than many of us have been on planet earth. Most people tend to forget that. The originals were nowhere near as tightly built as they are today with hair width tolerances etc. As machining has advanced so has the tolerances sought for things like 2011's built for competition and the like. When deployed we had precisely zero 1911's go down. MCB Quantico wasn't performing blood sacrifices to keep them running or any another other voodoo magics. Staccato seemed to have located the happy medium of tolerances while retaining the specifics of original to produce a highly reliable 2011. I see 1911/2011's as any other tool. You can invest the time and energy to understand most if not all the moving parts or you can hire a "mechanic."

Springfields need a little tweeking but aren't bad.

There’s no hard rules for guns. Some Springfields are far beyond what tweaking can fix and some need none.

Mostly just to win Facebook flex offs.

What you need to do, is get your ass in here and familiarize yourself with the staccato. That way, you can argue this love hate topic with us degenerates

True but I trust springfield milspecs more than g19s

Lol wat?

I must have missed that portion in all of the dryfire books where Stoeger tells people to go train with Hipoints if they want to get gud.

I don’t. I’ve had good luck with Springfields and love mine but I sent more back compared to glocks even though I’m pretty sure I sold probably 10x as many glocks.

If you want to perfect your trigger squeeze faster, then use a gun that demands perfection.  Preferably something in double action.  Just like a red dot will reveal all of the problems with your presentation, a double action trigger will quickly reveal all of the issues with your trigger squeeze.

If I want to perfect my trigger squeeze then I'll do 'trigger control at speed' drills on the guns I always use...

And you can do that, I'm not saying you can't.  I'm just saying that perfecting a DA trigger is a quicker way to perfect your trigger pull.  Glock triggers require more perfection than 2011s, double action triggers require even more.  If you hit a plateau, give it a try.

But Ben did spend a lot of time perfecting the DA pull so that it is as good as the SA pull.  He didn't just move to a gun with SAO, because DA was harder.  Now he rips with both,  ever see him shoot an open gun?

I shoot a DA/SA gun... trigger control at speed is using the DA trigger pull... shooting is also more than the trigger pull. I want to have the feel and weight of my gun down for transitions/reloads/bringing the gun up. Do you go and find the heaviest gun you can when you train those skills?

I mean, he shoots (or shot is more accurate I guess) tanfos, so the DA was part of that, and shot the Beretta 92 starting off, so no change there either... I doubt he'd argue to go find a shitty DA/SA gun and train with that... I'd bet real money he'd suggest getting the gun you want to compete with, and putting the time into training and familiarizing with it.

I have not seen him shoot an open gun.

Sometimes, I generally carry 1911s and Glocks, but I like to train with my Berettas, S&W 3rd Gens, and revolvers as well.  But can you honestly say that your DA shooting hasn't made your SA trigger control better as well?

The point it he didn't go straight to SAO because DA would take more training.  He didn't throw $1500 of crap on his gun to make up for lack of skill.  He learned the skill of perfecting a DA shot instead trying to buy skill.  So you hand him a DA gun, he can shoot it well, you hand him a SAO gun, he will shoot it will.   That is what a good shooter does..shoots everything well

I would wager that if you told him you had trouble with a DA trigger press, he wouldn't tell you to sell your gun for a Staccato

Trigger Control at Speed basically makes it so you don't pull the trigger different between SA or DA.

If it is such a difficult shot though, im treating my DA trigger pull like a SA trigger by stopping just before the break.


He was a production shooter and primarily focused on that division... why would he spend time on SAO?

Beyond that my argument isn't about SAO/DA... its against training with the crappiest gun, and that top level shooters do that and suggest doing that.

I doubt any of those shooters started on high end 1911s or 2011s.  And again, I'm not saying you have to.  I'm saying it's a quick way to improve your trigger control, especially for new shooters.  If you've already got good trigger control, then press on.

He could have shot any division he wanted.  The point is he didn't give up on DA because it was harder. he learned to shoot it.  Now he can shoot DA or SAO guns well.  But many here choose not to shoot DA because it is harder than SAO, so they can only shoot SAO and fall apart if they have to shoot DA or with irons or without a comp or major caliber,  They rely on a particular gun for their shooting skill and not their own skill.

Yeah its an odd argument by BMSMB, because he is someone that trains on a DA/SA gun and didn't just skip to a SAO gun because it was too hard.

I invested into a platform that I thought was easier than a glock (cz-75) before I knew much about shooting handguns. I was incredibly bad at shooting handguns at that point and was looking for any help I could get at a reasonable price. My concerns at that point were for getting results. I did not know how to train at that point beyond slow single trigger pulls at a small target.

I started shooting USPSA to get better, and through that, I eventually found podcasts/forums that talked about how to train to get better.

If I had picked a SAO gun at that point and still spent the same time to get better at handgun shooting, I think I would still be the quality of shooter I am currently, but I would have progressed in other areas, as I wouldn't have struggled as long on just accuracy.

They definitely make better base guns to clone a MEUSOC 1911 than a G19 does.  I know what you're up to.

Not me. Springfield has been worse than Colt or Safari Arms by a long shot. Failures under perfect conditions. The can really choke when the sand is blowing. Especially Colt. Had a lightweight Commander basically lock down. We just kept shooting to see how things faired and only a g19 and my sar1 Romanian AK didn’t miss a beat.

The Colt wasn’t as tight as a Staccato so maybe a tighter gun would keep some grit out. Haven’t seen any torture videos yet.

When the 1911 was brought into the world, it was brought into a world of hand-fitting. It was fed from magazines intended to be essentially disposable with ammunition carefully manufactured for maximum feed reliability.

The war department specified exacting tolerances in the production of the 1911. When the WWII contracts went out, all manufacturers had to meet very stringent tolerances that allowed for any parts from any manufacturer to be assembled into a working gun. That was not cheap or easy.

This did not result in a hard-fit 1911 pistols with minimal clearances between major working parts. Neither did it produce sloppy rattle traps. The end result was a high quality, extremely reliable pistol (the most reliable in the world at the time) with tiny sights and the ergonomics of a cheese grater.

Post war, bullseye shooting was the primary form of competition with a handgun. Because there were a blue million 1911 pistols on the market and GI parts were plentiful, they were a natural fit for bullseye guns. That's when gunsmiths started accurizing 1911 pistols by doing things like peening slide rails to try and get more consistent barrel lockup. Some entrepreneurial types like King's Gunworks eventually started manufacturing parts specifically intended to be fitted by gunsmiths...but that took a while. Immediately post-war the gunsmiths that did the work were taking GI parts and modifying them by welding on bits and filing them down to produce a better fit.

The guys doing that work at the highest levels were revered for a reason. There was no Brownell's catalog. They had to make the part, then fit it to the gun.

Slowly but surely, pre-made parts of good quality that were mass produced but needed a skilled hand to fit them started coming to market. The aforementioned Kings is, I think, the first to do that way back in the 1960's. Swenson, Hoag, Pachmayr, and others of that caliber rose to prominence in the 70's as non-institutional formalized handgun training began anew, this being the foundation of what we now know as training. That evolved from competition where legends like Cooper, Carl, Chapman, Weaver, etc all worked out that actually worked repeatedly under stress at speed. (Namely having sights and using them...something we'd lost thanks to J Edgar's homosexual lust for Delf Bryce)

Almost everybody had 1911 pistols in one form or fashion...because the 1911 was the pistol in America at the time. If you were serious about self defense and had a semi-auto, it was a 1911. Maybe 1 in 20 serious handgunners had a Browning HP. You might find a few S&W 39's mixed in there, too. But not that many...although the number started to rise with the ASP and the Devel getting porno-quality centerfolds in gun magazines at the time.

The problem with the 1911 then was the magazines. Everybody was still using USGI style magazines, and they were of highly irregular quality and were not terribly durable at all. At the newly minted Gunsite, the reload with retention was invented and heavily used primarily as a means of keeping people's fragile 1911 magazines (originally designed to be disposable, remember) functioning. The crushed granite surface of the pistol ranges proved absolute hell on magazines dropped freely. Reloading with retention eventually morphed into a "tactical reload" that became a religion among some people who had no idea why the practice was originally used in formal training.

Of course, this was in the small civilian world of serious self defense with handguns. Most police agencies were still running revolvers as sidearms and despite a few pioneering departments (I think Illinois issued the S&W 39 in the early 70's, along with some other departments scattered throughout the land with at least a couple in California) going for semi-automatics the policing world would continue to stick with revolvers until the game-changing Miami shootout.

Revolvers were finicky beasts that required proper maintenance to have any hope of working. But they weren't bedeviled by feeding the newfangled jacketed hollowpoint bullets and they weren't fed from fragile magazines, so they were more "reliable" if you wanted to look at them like that. Plus they'd been in police holsters for decades, all the training programs were just fine thanks (I mean, despite the flaws shown by high profile LE failures like Newhall) and it didn't require changing anything because change is bad.

The USGI 1911 of WWII was not a finicky piece of equipment and it wasn't hard to keep it running provided you fed it with the ammunition it was designed to use. But by the 1970's the equipment that Colt had been manufacturing the 1911 with was now getting on to be almost a century old. That created some issues. You started to see collet bushings show up to compensate for some of the slop introduced by their worn-out machinery. The magazine issue would stay an issue until the Wilson/Rogers and Shooting Star magazines started to hit the market in the mid 80's. By then Gunsite had become a religion...but other training outfits started to show up. Like Mid South:



Incidentally, one of the features of the Beretta 92 that would go on to become the M9 is it could be loaded by dropping a round directly into the chamber...and in that video you see why. It was common for people to do that, which is hell on 1911 extractors. Rob Leatham would come along shortly and blow apart a lot of what you see in that video.

The competition world helped drive the development of good magazines for the 1911.

...but now there were a bunch of new double-stack 9mm pistols on the market, all competing to become the next military handgun. S&W, Ruger, Beretta, Sig, Browning/FN, H&K all had come up with higher capacity 9mm pistols for various contracts attempts. But the competition world and the formal firearms training world were still dominated by the 1911. Elite military and LE units used customized 1911 pistols. Some of them even flirted with newfangled double-stack 1911 pistols from Para Ordnance! Ultimately finding that they weren't reliable enough to depend on largely due to magazines.  

But they tried again, this time with raceguns that had become all the rage in competition circles!

...only to find out that yet again the magazines weren't capable of being relied on for duty type use.

We're 80+ years into the 1911's existence at this point. The demands of the gun had shifted radically. It was originally adopted to be a semi-automatic Peacemaker for cavalrymen. It was now being toted as a concealed carry and in some places duty-carried pistol feeding a wide variety of ammunition instead of the cartridge JMB originally designed. And now there are several manufacturers on the market, each with their own idea of how the 1911 should be made. Or in Colt's case, trying to keep making it on machinery that should have been retired probably in the 1960's.

It's funny, because we're in the exact same spot now with polymer striker guns. Everybody has their own interpretation of it. You can buy a 3rd generation Glock pistol now that Glock never touched. You can buy a Glock and have a sketchy outfit do all kinds of shit to the slide, frame, and internals that will either make it run like a racegun, stop running altogether, or turn it into a gun that occasionally goes full-auto on you. And you can put comps on them so you can experience problems when your recoil spring isn't within the right spec...just like you could do with the 1911 30 years ago!

The whole thing is hilarious.

The 2011's require about the same user commitment to maintenance and about the same level of armorer know-how that custom or semi-custom single-stack 1911's used to require. The latest generation magazines are supposedly the trick to making them much less finicky to work with and less concerned about maintenance, but you still need to be proactively maintaining the gun. But hot damn do they shoot pretty bullseye scores. And when you get one set up right and shoot it, it feels like cheating. And Stack-a-Toe, to their credit, has invested in creating the necessary factory support to get guns fixed quickly and train armorers to keep the guns running in the field. They made some outstanding hires to facilitate that and it's going very well for them right now.

A key difference today is I'm not seeing a bunch of drooling idiocy surrounding it like we saw 20 years ago from people who thought Glock's advertising was literal truth. "LOL it's not a bullseye gun, it's for gunfighting!" isn't getting said nearly as much now. The idea that, hey, you might actually need to properly maintain your fucking hardware is becoming accepted as a sensible thing to say, especially since so many people are screwing an electronic sight to the top of their slide with tiny fasteners hanging on for dear life. That and 20 years of Glocks in police holsters has demonstrated that bone dry guns growing fuzz that never have their magazine springs changed don't work so good regardless of how much "perfection" is advertised.

Yeah, my 1914 made 1911 hasn’t missed a beat. Barely shot it but rather enjoy the ergonomics.

God damn that was a good read.

Nailed it.

Great post

How are the Prodigy mags? I need to get some more and the difference in price between them and the G3 mags is pretty significant.

MBX is having their 4th of July sale

Buy 3 magazines for $400 get 20% off.

I just typed that out but it's real and I'm probably going to do it.

They have run fine in my Staccato and Prodigy (the prodigy itself required some work). The springs are not as long as the Staccato springs. I only use them for range time.

I am using Prodigy mags for range mags exclusively.  They do not run perfectly in my Staccato P.  At first they were pretty bad, but now I am satisfied with their purchase to use a training mag

Staccato mags for everything else.

Well this thread has answered the OP with some good reasons.  

Personally, I'd rather spend the $1300 difference from my G17.5 on ammo and have 99% of the accuracy

Added a Red Dirt trigger today.

I'm adding a 28 round mag.

haha.  only have 2 of their 26rd mags.

Awesome post, thanks! Attached File