I think a lot of concepts are poorly understood or poorly communicated.
Autodidacts are rare. More so, autodidacts who are capable of breaking down their understanding of a topic into comprehensible language to people who don't know the topic.
The
over-reliance on the visual aspect of shooting is one of the great hinderances the typical person has from performing better with a handgun. The sighting system is the only part of shooting that we can see, and being a species that takes in most of its information through visual input, we naturally frame almost everything we do through visual processing.
But the visual aspect of shooting is the least important part. It is nothing but a passive reflection of what you're doing to other much more significant parts of the gun in the same way that your car's windshield is just a passive indicator of what you're doing on the real controls of the vehicle. Seeing through the windshield is not unimportant, but neither is it what actually moves the vehicle. Same goes with sights. You need some sort of reference to check the alignment of the gun on target because there is absolutely nothing "instinctual" about the process. But once you have that reference it does diddly to fix any of the rest of it.
The sights are not the driver of the shot process,
especially not with a handgun,
especially not when it comes to defensive shooting.
And yet look at how much hullaballoo there is about irons vs. optics in so many parts of the gunterweb. Each has valid benefits and valid drawbacks, but neither is really where the game is won or lost. A lot of the people who love dots and most vociferously champion them do so because it's the first real coach they've ever had. They can see what they are doing through the shot process and more easily call their shots, which is a completely new experience for a good many of them.
The typical person gets a sight picture on target and then goes to shoot and ALOTTASTUFFJUSTHAPPENED and wait, why is my bullet hole 6" from where I wanted it?
Hell, the point shooting weebs are still out there and still making noise because they have no idea how skilled shooters actually use sights. "You don't have time to aim in a gunfight!!!" There's a grain of truth there. Because they don't know how to use sights, they spend far too much time trying to "align" their sights and over-confirm and stare really hard at them and then mess up the shot anyway because it turns out that staring really hard at the bumpy things on the slide doesn't fix the violence you do to the gun below them. Since they don't understand the shot process, sighted or unsighted doesn't make much of a difference for them. They suck with sights. They suck faster without spending the time trying to "read" the sights...understanding that when they "read" sights it's like somebody who has had their first three lessons of Hooked on Phonics trying to read a dissertation on nuclear fission.
What they don't realize is that skilled shooters are not staring at their sights. They are, in the main, looking through them. They are not seeing the crystal clear sight picture photo that shows up in books and powerpoint slides. Some may, but those people have exceptional eyesight. What most people are seeing is the fuzzy or out of focus gross shape of their sights and making the shot. They aren't spending seconds looking at their sights, but hundredths of a second seeing a yes or no signal and getting on with the shooting. Ironically, this is the same way people who know how to read well deal with words. They are not reading them letter by letter, but really just seeing the general shape of a word they recognize and that gets a processing shortcut that comes along with boatloads of information on that word's meaning and meaning in the context of the other words around it.
If I had an audience who could read at least at a high school level and I flashed some simple words up on the screen for .05-.07 second, the vast majority of them could tell me what that word was. Not because they saw and processed each letter, but because if they've done enough reading the general shape of the word would be familiar enough to recall it. Without the need to consider context and meaning, just going with rote recognition of the word, they can pick it up fast.
"Oh, that was 'cat'." "That one was 'orange'." Etc.
Well...that's essentially what skilled shooters are doing with sights. They get a yes or a no
based on a simple mental model of what the sights are telling them and get going if it's a "go" or take a tenth or two of a second to correct it if it's a "no", and then getting on with it. I mean, does anyone think that Ed McGivern had a hard front sight focus when he was shooting aerial targets? The dude had a brass bead on his front sight. He was looking
through his sights to track the moving target so he could hit it. And that's why the brass bead actually exists, to facilitate a more target-focused method of shooting because when you are looking at the target
you can still see the bead.
Most new shooters struggle with iron sights because most of the people teaching them are barely more literate than they are. It's similar to the
serious problems in reading instruction that has damaged the learning of generations of children. The typical academy's dogma on sights is like "whole language learning" for sights when what everybody actually needs is phonics.
I've had a number of folks who got taught to shoot in academies come to class and unlearn that shit, replace it with a better model and then unlock an entirely new level of performance because they finally understood WTF was happening when they were firing a gun. Oddly enough, those people swap back and forth from irons to dots without really caring much about which was on top of the gun.
Originally Posted by GJM
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