Every once in a while, I sorta step out of things that are within my range of expertise and talk about other things I experiment with.  That is why every once in a while you see me talk about somewhat random things, like bags, shirts and other accessories.

Mantis X is an accessory that is a little more relevant than most.  For a little while now I have been talking about miniature red dot sights and their applications on handguns.  While I do not talk about handguns all that much, I shoot them quite a bit and go take classes once or twice per year.   With all that practice, over the last twenty years, I have become a somewhat adequate shot (not good compared to people who are truly good, but good enough to understand my limitations).   Some classes I take are shooting classes with a lot of lead heading downrange, while some are more of what I would call “thinking” classes.  For both of them, to do well, my fundamentals have to be pretty solid.  Generally, noone has ever become a worse shot by practicing the fundamentals.

With that preamble done, I stumbled onto the Mantis X rather accidentally, and about 3 seconds after learning about it, I made arrangements to get one here to play with.  Basically, it is a small device that clamps onto the rail on your gun (be it handgun, rifle or shotgun) and using a bunch of internal accelerometers and stuff, it senses what exactly happens as you pull the trigger.  Then it transmits the data to an app on your phone.  The app plots what was happening before and after a trigger press, provides some statistics on how you have done overall and makes suggestions on what could be causing some of the problems.

Mantis X works for both live fire and dry fire.

I had grand plans to use on both handguns and long guns, but so far it has been so incredibly useful for my handgun shooting that it stays put on my Glock.

This thing is awesome.  I repeat: it is freaking awesome.  It seems to pick up subtle problems just fine.  I can do some basic troubleshooting and see the differences between what I do in dry fire vs live fire.  It gives me an idea of my wobble zone.  It gives me some data to see what happens when I speed up or slow down.  It tells me if I am doing anything differently when using iron sights or a red dot.  It tells me what happens when I experiment with different ways of holding the gun.  And the list goes on.

I could not be more impressed if I tried.