AR-15 15 trigger group assembly

By Thomas Conroy

USA –-(Ammoland.com)- Shooters get touchy about triggers. And for good reason. The trigger is the key interface between the shooter and the gun.

The trigger “tells” the gun when to fire the shot. The more control and confidence a shooter has in a trigger, the more likely the shooter is to get hits. And as one old saying goes, “only hits count.”

Gunsmiths have probably been doing trigger jobs for about as long as guns have had triggers. And for most types of firearms, it’s probably best to leave trigger jobs to the professionals for all sorts of reasons. But the modularity of the AR-15 means that just about anyone can easily install a brand new, specialized trigger by simply pushing out a couple of pins, removing the original trigger group, dropping in the new trigger group, and pushing the pins back in.

The ease with which AR-15 triggers can be changed is both wonderful and awful – wonderful because it’s so easy to get whatever the trigger you want, and awful because there are so many triggers out there, it’s hard to know which trigger you actually need.

The type of shooting you intend to do the most with your Black Rifle matters a lot when it comes to choosing the best trigger. If you’re shooting High Power or other mid- or long-range targets, a two-stage match trigger might work great. If you’re shooting 3Gun, you probably want a sport-specific trigger with a short reset and a light, but not too-light single-stage pull to help you burn through the close targets quickly, keep your stage time down, but still give you enough control to connect with shots farther out. And if your type of shooting is mostly of the tactical or military variety, with lives at stake, a robust, proven and non-adjustable combat-style trigger might be the best.

So how do you make sense of it all? By reading and researching, and trying guns with different types of triggers, and finally getting some triggers, installing them, and shooting them a lot.