Triggers: Perfecting An Ancient Gadget

Triggers: Perfecting An Ancient Gadget

- Terry Wieland

If you ever question the importance of a trigger on a rifle, try shooting a matchlock. How they were ever used to hit anything is a wonder. It took centuries, literally, to perfect the trigger in principle, and even today we are struggling to improve it.

For many years Sako rifles were generally acclaimed as possessing the finest triggers of any factory product. Time after time, Sako triggers were described as resembling a “glass rod breaking.” Try as I might, it’s impossible to come up with a better analogy.

That description has been around for at least 60 years now. I’ve tried to trace it farther but dead-ended in the 1950s. What this tells us, though, is that even long ago there were some triggers that approached perfection.

For target shooters, triggers and trigger pull can become almost an obsession, but it’s equally important in a hunting rifle. Assuming a basically accurate rifle, the quality of its trigger pull largely determines how well you shoot it. What’s worse, a poor trigger pull can start to act on you psychologically, to the point where you know you’re going to make a bad shot before you begin.

The problem of putting a good trigger on a rifle has been complicated in recent years by the involvement of the legal community, particularly litigation lawyers and corporate counsel, whose job it is to protect the company. It seems to be generally accepted that a trigger with a light pull (3 pounds or less) is somehow more dangerous than one with a heavy pull. As a result, many rifles come from factories with pull weights set far heavier than they should be. This is often compounded by the manufacturer either making no provision for the user to adjust the pull, or warnings that no one should attempt such a thing.