 The short answer is, after you've done a lot of shooting. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and I want to talk today about when to mod your pistol, right? There are all kinds of different thoughts and theories and whatever on this whole deal and here's my input. By and large, for the most part, I have shot a stock Glock. I'm a reluctant Glock user just because they have the best aftermarket support and whenever I want to put a light on it or get a new holster or new sights or whatever, there's an option for that with Glock. With other guns, yeah, maybe not, just kind of depends. Also the fact that magazines are actually semi-reasonably priced compared to all other handguns where the magazines are not. If I can buy an AR mag for like $9 on sale, there's no reason I should be paying $50 for a metal pistol mag. It's just bent sheet metal. So that being said, even with Glock, there are all kinds of different mods you can do. You can go all the way to the agency arms, super Gucci expensive thing, right? You can buy different triggers and connectors and whatever. So where in there do you need to actually bother to mod your gun? I bring this up because this became apparent to me recently. I took the modern samurai project pistol class. It was a one-day appendix class with a two-day red dot class after. And within that class, Scott, the modern samurai project guy, the guy who runs it, right? He has a very high shooting standard. If you're not familiar with his black belt patch standards, go ahead and Google that, the modern samurai project black belt patch standards. They're very difficult to do. And if you look at them and you're like, ah, that's not that hard, then you need to shoot more because you should easily be able to tell it's extremely difficult. So in order to do that, you have to have a very high level of skill. And I think trying to shoot those and working through this class, which was a great class, by the way, highly recommend it, I think I realized, okay, at this point in my shooting, I would benefit with some gun mods, right? And here I'm mainly talking trigger. The sights on a Glock, the stock sights from the factory are absolute garbage. I mean objectively the worst sights ever. You should change those every time. But when it comes to stuff like messing with triggers and spring pull weights and all this other stuff, or you know, having a really finely tuned, you know, 1911 or CZ or whatever, there are again infinite pistol mods here. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, which has no bottom, I think the place to start to do that is after you have shot, and this is a somewhat arbitrary number, like I don't know, 5 to 10,000 pistol rounds. And after you've really started to push a high degree of skill. I mean, if you haven't been able to successfully complete Reed Hendricks' pistol standards, which is a fantastic pistol standard set, then I wouldn't even bother, right? Make sure you're passing standards and you're really pushing the limits of your ability. And when you start to get to those upper reaches of your ability, I think that's when you'll start to understand, okay, I think a mod here would actually make sense because I'm going to get the performance out of the gun in order to allow me to apply my skill level to it. You have to get to a place where your skill level is starting to exceed that of which your equipment is capable of. And that's kind of a fuzzy place to be. It's a gray area. I don't know if there's any objective standard for that, but that's where you need to be before you need to start really worrying about mods. Until then, you should just spend your money on, you know, training and bullets and in order to continue to get better. ARs are, of course, a little bit different of an animal. I mean, even most stock from the factory AR triggers are going to be pretty decent. And then, of course, swapping in a trigger mod on an AR is both simpler and doesn't really cost you that much money or time wise. So I can understand how people can kind of do that. But the same principles apply, right? You're not going to be able to get the most out of your Gucci trigger until you reach a high level of skill. And once you're able to have that high level of skill where you're starting to be able to push past your equipment's ability to keep up, that's the time when it comes to mod your gun. I say pistols, and we talk about pistols because mods on pistols are going to make a bigger difference, right? A souped up race gun 2011 that has very high level of performance compared to like a stock, you know, $5, $600 Glock off the shelf. There's a large disparity in pistol performance there. But only the person who has an extremely high amount of skill is going to be able to necessarily, you know, unlock the performance of that pistol, right? If you were to take me versus some super pro shooter and you hand me the race gun, can I suddenly shoot as well as the pro shooter? Well, absolutely not, right? Because their high level of skill is that much higher and they've been able to achieve that where a performance pistol makes sense, you know, and they're in sporting and shooting and competition and all that other stuff. But you get my main point. So I wanted to make this video because if you're thinking about a pistol mod and you think, oh, man, you know, I'd like to do this or that or the other thing, I would ask you, do you feel that you've reached the point where your skills are pushing past the performance of the pistol? So if you get to the point where you're trying to earn a fast card or you're trying to meet the black belt patch standards or you're trying to do these extreme shooting abilities and standards, and after you try those long enough and you work on those long enough, you're going to start to realize, okay, I am my skill is starting to push past the performance of my equipment and therefore I need to upgrade my equipment in order to allow my skills to keep growing. So that's kind of my general thoughts on gun mods, pistol mods, especially, and again, we're mostly talking about triggers and trigger weights and stuff like that. So I hope that was helpful for most of us, right? The answer is we just need to dry fire our guns more, you need to practice more and you need to continue to grow that level of skill because one, that's something that you will never regret having. And two, a highly skilled person with poor equipment is obviously way more competent than a poorly skilled person with lots of good equipment. I hope that's helpful. Do brave deeds and endure.