A few months ago, RMT Triggers offered to send me one of their pivoting Nomad AR triggers for testing. I’m not normally a guy who likes to tear down my guns and swap out the original parts, but RMT was pitching something that had me genuinely intrigued.

The unique RMT Nomad trigger offers a solution for a recurring problem that many shooters may not even realize is hurting their trigger pull due to the basic mechanics of the human hand. Normally, you might think that side-to-side trigger movement is a sign of a sloppy trigger, but can it actually help you shoot better?

My short answer is, yes! I can repeatedly pick up my otherwise mil-spec AR-15 rifle, swipe off the safety, and dry fire the Nomad trigger thinking it’s behaving just like any other trigger I’ve ever shot – well, with a cleaner break. But then I’ll look at the actual placement of the trigger and my finger. Without even noticing it, the normal straight up-and-down angle of the trigger is shifted, generally to the left but sometimes to the right if I’m in an awkward shooting position. 

It’s somewhat maddening, actually, but it makes a lot of sense. No part of my hand moves in a perfectly linear motion, and every joint from my shoulder to the last knuckle in my index finger can shift the angle and position of the pad of my finger. Adding gloves just makes it worse and even harder to detect changes in my trigger pull.

Yet, somehow, the Nomad trigger and my finger seem to find a biomechanical agreement with each pull. Here’s how the Nomad pulls that off.
 

How Does It Work?

While RMT coins the Nomad’s flexibility as “Patented Pivot Technology,” it might be a bit more helpful to think of it as an adaptive trigger. The Nomad is a 2.2-ounce easy-to-install drop-in kit that RMT says took four years of research, testing, and development to pull off.

The trigger is essentially allowed to move freely to adjust to any given trigger-finger position. If you think about it, the alternative is for your finger to put uneven pressure on the trigger, possibly throwing off your shooting. There are limits to the Nomad’s motion. It offers just 6 degrees of actual movement for both the pivot and rotation.

That may not seem like much, but it actually feels quite generous once your hand is locked into the grip. The trigger itself is also flat-faced with a 3-pound pull, further helping to remove interference from your finger placement.

All your other shooting mechanics still matter – breath control, sight picture, cheek weld – but the Nomad takes away some of the pitch, yaw, and roll variables that are hard to sense with just your finger. 
 

Unless you are somehow hulking out and bending your traditional trigger, which I find unlikely, those are forces you would otherwise have to compensate for elsewhere while shooting. Coupling that with the flat-faced trigger, short reset, and light break creates a recipe for faster and more accurate shooting with less effort. RMT breaks it all down in their marketing video pretty quick:
 

Range Time

First, the takeaway from the targets above really isn’t the groupings. From previous testing, I already know this specific rifle was holding sub-MOA groups even with the mil-spec trigger that came with it. I liked that trigger fine enough as a duty-style trigger.

The real takeaway is how easy shooting like this was and how much faster I could do it without worrying about the trigger impacting my accuracy. The RMT Nomad is actually hard to jerk. It just doesn’t want to let you do it, and it feels like it floats into a natural index point. The travel to the wall is very minimal, and the break is crisp and light. At the same time, the reset is short and positive, making follow-up shots while consistently riding the reset very easy.
 

But the real money was in the pivot and swing of the trigger design. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve taken a new gun to the range and felt my trigger pull shifting the gun. On many mil-spec AR triggers, I’ll even revert to an interrupted pull – only pulling while the sight is drifting over the target and pausing when it shifts. You can train for that, sure, but the RMT Nomad simply removes most of the problem by allowing the trigger to flow with your finger naturally.

Whether I was target shooting or just trying to run the gun, the RMT trigger easily outpaced my mil-spec AR trigger for speed and accuracy. It’s hard to put a hard number to it, but the groups from my testing came at what felt like a 50-percent faster pace with less work. It’s quite amazing how much time actually gets spent on a good trigger pull. In rapid-fire testing, the gun was a cinch to knock out hammer pairs from the standing at 50 yards on a silhouette.
 

Worth the Money?

I will say that it's a somewhat weird sensation when you play around with the trigger to just test how it swings and turns. When you’re actually shooting, however, it blends into a feeling that you’re only pulling back to the break and not fighting anything else along the way. 

On a competition gun, I can certainly see the merit behind tossing in a Nomad. In fact, I know someone who added one to their first precision shooter and liked it enough to buy a second one for their fun gun. But that performance does come at a cost that would have me second guessing the upgrade on a basic, run-of-the-mill AR – Ahem, like the Del-Ton Echo 316 I used. 

That said, I can’t deny the trigger made a huge improvement in an otherwise vanilla rifle. If you’re spending money on a precision gun you count on to shave off fractions of seconds in your shooting time, the Nomad would be a solid upgrade in my book. Plus, RMT backs it with a lifetime warranty and a bold “guaranty” to improve your accuracy. So, there’s that, too.