Lightning fast triggers

I have heard of rifles with electronic triggers. What advantages do they offer?

Mike says: Precious few, if the opinions of all but a tiny minority of competition rifle shooters are concerned.

Back in the late 1970s I fired a Walther .22 match rifle with an electronic trigger. It was a very comfortable rifle to shoot, in that it had a straight-pull bolt, but the only electronic part of the system was that the trigger was a micro-switch which released a conventional firing pin. I haven’t seen one for more than 30 years, but I note that Walther now make .22 competition rifles and .177 match air rifles with electronic triggers. I’ve never seen a field shooting rifle with this system.

The other system I am thinking of is the Remington EtronX rifle, which was based on a Model 700 platform.

This rifle came out in the very early 2000s and had a purely electronic system. Pulling the trigger sent a current through an electrically-sensitive primer, and Remington claimed a lock time of 0.0000027 of a second.

The rifle was chambered only in .220 Swift, .22250 Remington, and .243 Winchester. The snag was that you had to use either Remington factory ammunition, or load your own with special primers made only by Remington.

I can find no details of any of these rifles being imported into the UK, and it seems that interest in the USA didn’t last for long.