It's all in the hands. The hands are the part of the body that interact most directly with a handgun. And how the gun reacts to its own recoil depends on how the shooter grips it.

Brian Enos, along with his good friend Rob Leatham, developed the straight-thumbs method of gripping a handgun that is the standard among serious shooters today. Photo by Nidaa A.

Ideally, what we want is a grip technique that causes the gun to point naturally at the target; we shouldn't have to waste any time searching for and aligning the sights. Also, when the gun fires, we want it to track consistently, i.e. return to the exact same spot with no effort on our part. If we make that happen and learn how to reset the trigger action while the gun is still in recoil (an entirely different topic), we can fire the gun as fast as it comes down out of recoil and still be accurate.

No one knows more about fast and accurate handgunning than USPSA/IPSC Grand Masters. The United States Practical Shooting Association is the active body of the International Practical Shooting Confederation in the U.S., and Grand Master is its highest rating for shooting skill. These guys (I don't want to sound sexist, but at this point there are no female GMs) are the gods of high-speed precision handgunning. Even among Grand Masters there are Grand Masters. Thus I enlisted the aid of two of the most famous and accomplished Grand Masters in USPSA history to get their advice on the topic of gripping the handgun for the maximum rate of accurate aimed fire.

Brian Enos, along with his good friend Rob Leatham, is credited with creating the straight-thumbs method of gripping a handgun so associated with the sport that many people call it the "IPSC grip." Enos' career as a sponsored shooter spanned two decades, with Smith & Wesson, European American Armory and Strayer-Voigt. He went 1-2 with Robbie Leatham at the 1983 Nationals; won the Bianchi Cup back-to-back in '83-'84 and the Masters in '89; and in the '90s was a member of the winning three-man Sportsman's Team Challenge team five times. He wrote Practical Shooting: Beyond Fundamentals, the most useful shooting manual in the history of IPSC. In 2000 he retired from professional shooting to start www.brianenos.com, a very successful Internet website and pro shop.

SOURCES
Brian Enos Glock Inc. JGD (860) 223-3013 Sevigny Performance Strayer Voigt/Infinity Firearms

Dave Sevigny has burst onto the practical shooting scene like a supernova. Beyond any doubt the best Glock shooter on the planet, Dave began competing in IDPA and USPSA in 1999. Famous for using Glocks with very little or no modifications, Dave won his first IDPA state championship using his carry Glock 23 and inside-the-waistband holster. Since then he's won more than 60 world, national, area and state IDPA/USPSA/IPSC championships. He's the reigning USPSA National Production Champion, IDPA Stock Service Pistol National Champion, IPSC World Production Champion and Pan American Production Champion. He's currently the anchor of Team Glock.

In this article I'm going to speak of "right hand" and "left hand" when discussing grip technique, going on the assumption that I'm talking to someone who master grips the gun with the right hand and uses his left hand as the support hand.

THUMB-OVER-THUMB
Let's begin by talking about the thumb-over-thumb technique. At this time, no top shooter uses this grip; however, it still has its virtues, primarily that it's a very easy technique to teach and very easy to execute. Even new shooters can understand this grip. This is usually, in my experience, not true of the straight-thumbs technique. When you try to teach straight-thumbs to newbies, it just doesn't work. The necessary rolling forward of the wrist, so important to the "IPSC grip," just feels totally weird to them. Their hands break apart under recoil. And you'd be absolutely amazed how many people there are in the world whose wrists simply won't bend that far forward.