Could You Abort A Trigger Pull?

In "Can You Stop a Trigger Pull?" Sensible Self Defense did some experiments to determine how fast people actually pull a trigger once they start the pull. The answer is about 0.02 to 0.03 seconds if the trigger is all of the way forward, but only .015 if the trigger was staged with a slight pressure on it. This was fairly consistent among all participants no matter their skill level. Why this matters, the article explains, is because "[r]esearch has shown that most people can stop an action that they had just started but have not completed in 200 – 250 milliseconds," and any shorter than that probably cannot be stopped once initiated. Looking at the times above, that means that it is unlikely that you would physically be able to stop a trigger pull even if the trigger was all of the way forward, and impossible if the trigger was staged. 

 

    What is the implication for the armed citizen? If you are committed to firing a shot and have started to pull the trigger, the speed with which you can pull the trigger likely precludes stopping that action. In 2000 and again in 2009, Bill Lewinski and others studied how fast someone can turn and how fast someone can stop shooting (reference 2 & 3). In the 2000 study they found that the average time for someone to turn in scenarios where the threat was firing at a fictional “police officer” was 0.0300 seconds from one starting position and 0.0900 seconds from another. If the threat turns in the instant you pull the trigger, the trigger pull speed when combined with turning speed (particularly the speed of a young, athletic person) could easily result in shooting the threat in the back.

    Given that at any given moment in our lives today we are probably being video recorded, that video recording may show the threat turning away as you fire making it look like you are intentionally shooting them in the back when they are no longer a threat. Knowing trigger pull speeds and the speed in which someone can turn could be very useful information for the defense in case of criminal charges.