Some friends and I have had some discussions lately about how our arthritic hands are making pistol shooting harder and harder. Some of us have even had to stand down on the .40 and .45 autos because our hands just can't take the beating any more. My case is a little more aggravated than most because of some recent nerve damage on top of ol' Arthur. So I decided to see if I couldn't continue shooting pistols by locating a good pair of padded gloves.......and I did. We don't have much around here in the way of specialized shooting accessories, so I wound up looking in a Lowe's store.
In my local store I found a big glove display over by the gas grilles, and among them was a series of gloves with escalating degrees of padding in the palms and fingers. They started with "Mechanic" at around $20, "Padded" for $25, and "Impact" for $30. So I bought a pair of the "Impact" model and they're the best thirty bucks I've spent in a long time. Here's what they look like:
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Realizing that a gloved trigger finger reduced the felt weight of the trigger pull to a dangerous extent, I cut the thumb and trigger finger portions of the "shootin' hand" glove off and it now looks like the following photo. You'll also note that they have a nice, wide wrist strap that secures with velcro.
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Here's how they fit the gun when worn on your strong hand. The glove tends to provide good padding without affecting basic gun handling skills, like a thickly padded glove would do. After just a couple of shots, the gun really felt good in my hand and I didn't feel like I had a mattress wrapped around the grip frame.
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I took them to the range today and I feel like I have a new lease on pistol shooting. Last week merely firing ten rounds of common 9mm hardball sent me howling. But today, with the glove on my shooting hand only, I fired 55 rounds of the same stuff and my hand feels just fine. So if you're having this kind of trouble, this is a darn good option to try, especially if you're considering downsizing and selling off your harder kicking pistols. If you're shooting the big revolver Magnum calibers, I don't know if they'll help you much because of the additional stress those guns put on your wrists, but they sure worked wonders today on my palm and finger joints with my 9mm Hi Power.
I'm aware that there are quite a number of gloves out there specifically made for shooting, and some of them are made especially for shooting pistols. Uncle Mike's makes them and Cabela's has a whole list of them in a wide variety of styles and materials. So why didn't I get a pair of those?
For the initial feasibility study, just to see if the idea was valid at all, I decided to stick with a locally available hardware store product that I could physically examine and try on before I bought it, not really thinking it would work this well for me. And it turned out that, in my case, this particular glove worked like gangbusters and I thought I'd pass on the information. But there are indeed a whole slew of specialized shooting gloves out there that I'm sure will work well also. I just wasn't in a good position to take advantage of them.
Best wishes.
JP
In my local store I found a big glove display over by the gas grilles, and among them was a series of gloves with escalating degrees of padding in the palms and fingers. They started with "Mechanic" at around $20, "Padded" for $25, and "Impact" for $30. So I bought a pair of the "Impact" model and they're the best thirty bucks I've spent in a long time. Here's what they look like:
Realizing that a gloved trigger finger reduced the felt weight of the trigger pull to a dangerous extent, I cut the thumb and trigger finger portions of the "shootin' hand" glove off and it now looks like the following photo. You'll also note that they have a nice, wide wrist strap that secures with velcro.
Here's how they fit the gun when worn on your strong hand. The glove tends to provide good padding without affecting basic gun handling skills, like a thickly padded glove would do. After just a couple of shots, the gun really felt good in my hand and I didn't feel like I had a mattress wrapped around the grip frame.
I took them to the range today and I feel like I have a new lease on pistol shooting. Last week merely firing ten rounds of common 9mm hardball sent me howling. But today, with the glove on my shooting hand only, I fired 55 rounds of the same stuff and my hand feels just fine. So if you're having this kind of trouble, this is a darn good option to try, especially if you're considering downsizing and selling off your harder kicking pistols. If you're shooting the big revolver Magnum calibers, I don't know if they'll help you much because of the additional stress those guns put on your wrists, but they sure worked wonders today on my palm and finger joints with my 9mm Hi Power.
I'm aware that there are quite a number of gloves out there specifically made for shooting, and some of them are made especially for shooting pistols. Uncle Mike's makes them and Cabela's has a whole list of them in a wide variety of styles and materials. So why didn't I get a pair of those?
For the initial feasibility study, just to see if the idea was valid at all, I decided to stick with a locally available hardware store product that I could physically examine and try on before I bought it, not really thinking it would work this well for me. And it turned out that, in my case, this particular glove worked like gangbusters and I thought I'd pass on the information. But there are indeed a whole slew of specialized shooting gloves out there that I'm sure will work well also. I just wasn't in a good position to take advantage of them.
Best wishes.
JP
