After spending a short time with the Trijicon RMR on the VP9, one of the things I’ve struggled with is finding the red dot after presenting the firearm. It’s different than aligning traditional sights after presentation. Maybe it’s different when the firearm has suppressor height sights that may provide a better point of reference, but I don’t currently have those types of sights on the VP9. Either way, some times after presentation I’m left without a dot and no frame of reference as to whether the gun is aligned too high, too far left, or two far right. And that needs to be fixed.
Enter the drill.
One of the purposes of dry practice is to build good muscle memory. In this case, I want to rely on muscle memory to present the VP9 with a perfect sight picture every time. With the dot that means, the dot is centered in the RMR lens.
So here is the basic motion that I am going to practice:
- From the compressed ready position and with a good grip,
- extend to full presentation,
- confirm the dot is centered in the RMR lens and on top of my target.
That’s it. That motion is repeated over and over for a good ten minutes or so. However, there is a bit of variation over the time the drill is performed.
I generally like start with about 2-3 minutes of slow deliberate movement. This is a good warm up and establishes the baseline of motion I am trying to achieve. During these slow repetitions, I am playing close attention to my grip, stance, head movement, and shoulder movement. Once I am comfortable with the movement, I spend the rest of the time working speed into the motion. This starts with speeding things up until presentations start occurring with a missing red dot. At that point, I back off the speed until I am consistently finding the dot. At which point, I increase the speed… The speed up and slow down process continues until the ten minutes have passed.
Does this drill really help? Maybe. Again, I’m not an expert nor am I an instructor. So maybe, I’m building a habit that I will have to break later. However, I can say that the more I do this drill the less often I find myself presenting the firearm with no idea where the dot it.