Sharpen Your Axe

“If I had six hours to cut down a tree, I’d spend the first four sharpening my axe.”

So goes the quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, although there isn’t really any evidence that he actually said it. Still, the idea that work is done more effectively with proper preparation absolutely has merit.

That’s why so many good shooters use dry fire practice to “sharpen their axe” before heading to the range and expending live ammunition. In fact, I know one Master-class USPSA shooter whose weekly routine consists of five days of dry fire practice, one day of live fire practice, and one match. That means over 70% of his practice is done without going to the range.

Of course, dry fire practice requires careful attention to safety, since it is done with a real gun. You must get all live ammunition out of the room where you are practicing, and ensure that you have a solid backstop in case you mess up that first part. It’s also difficult to see any feedback from dry fire practice while you’re doing it…that feedback comes (hopefully) when you do go to live fire.

Enter the Mantis TitanX Smart Laser Training Pistol, which addresses those issues. I recently (yesterday) acquired one to see just how effective it is. For what it is worth, I bought this device with my own money, so any opinions I share here are 100% my own. That said, I am just getting acquainted with the pistol, so I’m not ready to roll out any sort of review just yet. I’ll try to put together a more thorough evaluation once I’ve spent some more time with it.

Still, I do have a few initial impressions. For starters, it’s pretty reasonably priced ($199*) for what you get. The pistol comes in a nice hard-sided ballistic fabric case, along with two weighted training magazines and a USB/USB-C charging cable. The pistol itself powers on with a single button on top of the slide. Pairing it with the MantisX phone app is pretty easy, too. If you can pair your earbuds, you won’t find this any more difficult. From there, you have access to several different training modes and drills, all of which are tracked by the gun and collected by the app. It’s going to take me a little time to get a handle on all the metrics and analysis that the app provides, but it appears to be pretty extensive.

For now, I’ll go out on a limb and say that I’m pretty optimistic that this will turn out to be a good purchase…but time will tell. For now, I believe I’ll go sharpen my axe.

* Put in your NRA membership number at checkout and get 10% off.