In 2012 while researching and working on my book, Handgun Training for Personal Protection, I worked with a local shooting club to put together a defensive handgun match. The stages for the match are those detailed in my book. But, I went a step further and for the Forty-Five Drill stage each competitor was required to shoot the drill with their own gun and with a handgun equipped with a Crimson Trace Laser Grip.
In the Forty-Five Drill the shooter is required to draw from concealment, put five rounds, into a five-inch circle, at a distance of five yards, within five seconds. Shooters were penalized 5 seconds for hits on the IPSC target outside of the five-inch circle and 10 seconds for a complete misses. So, the stage was scored by adding the penalties to the time.
The best score recorded with a shooter’s own handgun was 4.30. (By the way, this pistol was a Browning HiPower.) The best score recorded with the Crimson Trace Laser Grip equipped handgun was 2.99 seconds. The average score for all shooters with their own handgun was 14.82. And – this is the important part – the average score for shooters shooting a handgun other than their own, with a Crimson Trace Laser Grip, was 13.04 seconds. (This pistol was a S&W M&P in .40S&W.)
To put it plainly, shooters – on average – shot 12% better with a Crimson Trace Laser Grip equipped handgun they had never before fired, than they did with their own handgun. To me this is definitive proof that a defensive handgun equipped with a Crimson Trace Laser Grip is, on average and for most folks, a better option.
