LDA

LDA? Wozzat den?


So a bunch of dudes and dudettes in gunblogland won an all expense paid trip to a Blackwater and Para training session in Virginia. Cool! I hope they post the crap out of what they learn.


But they are already starting to tease each other about firearm selection. Men are using .45, and the women are using 9mm. Para models, it seems. Makes sense. They want you to shoot Para, maybe convince you and your audience to consider buying Para. In the backs and forths Tam, knowledgeable about firearms as she is, is dubious about Para function, but is willing to give it a go. She let drop the term LDA.

LDA? Never heard of it. So I donned the magic emerald-green ring I keep in a green painted lamp on my desk and used its vast power to check the intarwebs.


Light Double Action? Ok. On a 1911 style pistol. Wot?! Blasphemy. John Moses Browning is spinning in his grave faster than the AN/GAU-8 Avenger sniffing out surplus Russian armor.


Some are trying the LDA stuff at the training, some the regular Single Action stuff.

But all that Light Double Action stuff got me thinking, anyway. And we all know how dangerous that can be.


Why do gun manufacturers monkey around with the trigger style? Do they sit around a big boardroom table smoking cigars lit with $100 bills saying, "how can we ruin the trigger on the NEXT product we release, gentlemen?" No. They have some reason. That reason may be dubious, as Jeff Cooper would say, "an answer to a question nobody asked," but there is still a method to the madness. Or there HAS to be...


Stick with me, we're deep in conjecture territory. Watch out for hostile ideas trying to ambush us, and keep a weather eye on the horizon of wisdom. I often lose sight of that horizon...


If you set out to make a pistol you approach the design of someone that wants to USE the pistol. You intend to get good shooting and use it regularly, shooting Imperial Japanese soldiers daily all over Mindanao, or suburban Washington DC shooting the walking dead in the brainpan as they gobble their way out from the population center. You want reliable, effective, and accurate for your expert hand. And you do you part, getting expert at shooting.


But what if you designed a gun for someone that doesn't want to USE that pistol? Like a cop or a sleepy homeowner. Pulling the trigger on someone is the last thing they want to do, but in the event they must, it has to work reliably, but their hand might not be so expert. You want a bit more safety because they won't be using it so often, you don't want it to go off when they don't want it to.


For the first type, you design something like a 1911 Single Action trigger. For the second type, you design something with some type of Double Action. But in keeping with an unpracticed user, you try to make that Double Action smooth throughout the length of the trigger pull. Maybe the firm pull of a Double Action revolver is too strong, so you lighten that a little. And when you pull the DA revolver trigger you can feel when the seer is about to trip. On this Light Double Action trigger you are designing you use your extreme engineering skills to make that trigger pull constant. With a modicum of squeezing, not jerking, the trigger, journeyman trigger puller gets the nice surprise break and he is more accurate than he would be with another trigger type. Voila, you have the design philosophies of the Glock, XDs, LDA Para's, S&W M&P's, etc. They all approach the problem with different technical solutions, but they are trying to get to the same place.

1911s vs. Plastic Guns has many points of contention, but the biggest one, really, is that trigger difference. (Hmmm, now I'm thinking about a 1911 style pistol, made out of the same plastic as a glock as much as possible. Would 1911 shooters buy a gun like that? It'd be lighter...)

The sad thing is, I may shoot better with those smooth DA triggers because I am still inexpert. But that is the goal of the engineers of DA triggers. The user doesn't HAVE to expend the practice time to use it effectively. The engineers have attempted to work around the user's ability. The shooter doesn't have to do as much of their part. I am dubious of the ultimate wisdom of this design philosophy. It feels like the same attitude that fighter plane designers took, removing the guns from jets assuming that all they'd need would be the guided missiles. That philosophy had to be adjusted in real world conditions.

Lessons were learned and applied with regards to handgun design 100 years ago, reinforced by participation in large scale conflicts (WWI and II, Korea, yada yada). Small scale conflicts in the interim may have seen amnesia grow over the hard lesson's learned. I mean really. Just because NATO allies like the 9mm stuff doesn't mean WE have to. If France jumped off a bridge would you? C'mon Uncle Sam, use yer head.

I'm just guessing here, naturally. What do I know what those guys think? Just an observation, and I could be as wrongheaded as I assume they are.