Considering iron sights, when employing this, is there a characteristic of a rear sight that would be beneficial? Dot/dots, plain, serrations, depth of sight cut, shape of sight cut, wider/narrower, etc.?Originally Posted by TCinVA
Considering iron sights, when employing this, is there a characteristic of a rear sight that would be beneficial? Dot/dots, plain, serrations, depth of sight cut, shape of sight cut, wider/narrower, etc.?
Great points, and excellent posts. I was thinking about splitting this thread, but there's so much good stuff here in one place.
Once I moved beyond an emphasis on front sight focus, my iron sight shooting skills grew significantly. It's easy to confirm alignment of irons without bringing focal depth back to them. Except for very difficult or high-risk targets, focusing precisely on the target with blurry irons works as well or better for me. I like your 3-part approach below. It's interesting to consider if/when in that sequence a given person would shift from target focus.
“There is no growth in the comfort zone.”--Jocko Willink
"You can never have too many knives." --Joe Ambercrombie
There would be a point at which a rear sight window would be conceivably too wide to give you good information...but beyond the size of the window relative to your target size you're not really looking at the rear sight.
This is the point in class where I point at the visual aid and I say that this void in the sight is called a "window". What do we do with windows? We look through them. So ultimately all I care about is that I can look through the rear window and see what I'm trying to hit. So I don't care much about the rear sight.
If you work with dots that have co-witnessing iron sights and you eat your vegetables like a good person and actually work with the backup irons on a regular basis you are going to be presented with a pretty unappealing sight picture most of the time. Take the Ameriglos I have on my Glocks:
Look at how shallow that rear notch is. Look at how narrow it is. That iron sight picture is uglier than Janet Reno in a camshow and 10 years ago I'd have been able to write a dissertation about all the specific ways I don't like the sight picture.
...except it doesn't matter. Because even with that short, squatted rear sight notch and only being able to see a relatively tiny sliver of front sight if you look at a B8 through that notch and you put the front sight in the center of it, maintain your grip and press the trigger like you have some sense you will hit X, 10, or 9 all day at 25 yards.
If the window of the rear sight is so big that you end up seeing almost everything as smaller than your rear window, that would be a problem. Beyond that I don't care because I'm not really looking at the rear sight. I'm looking through the window in it at what I'm trying to hit.
My X count at 25 will never win me a Bianchi Cup that way...but I ain't shooting Bianchi Cup.
3/15/2016
@TCinVA, this is great. By all means, carry on.
”But in the end all of these ideas just manufacture new criminals when the problem isn't a lack of criminals.” -JRB
The answer would be "when they feel they need more visual confirmation to guarantee the shot."
One of the things I'm getting at here is that the sights are the least important part of firing an accurate shot with a pistol. Sights are taught as if they are what drives the rest of the shot process but in reality they are nothing more than a reflection of what you're doing to the other parts of the gun. What you do to the grip and the trigger determine how the sights look. All they really are is a visual representation of everything happening below them that you can keep track of to ensure you're hitting what you want to hit.
The more you realize what actually produces the location of the bullet hole, the less attention you pay to the sights. This doesn't mean you don't look at them, it means you stop applying inappropriate levels of mental focus on them.
You can see a fucked up sight picture in as little as .005/second. (Tom Givens has excellent presentations on this) In that brief an amount of time you can tell if it's high, low, left, or right. Or if there's no front sight in the window at all. And you can tell that just by seeing more or less the gross shape of how the sights look in relation to each other. Typical teaching approaches it like if you stare long and lovingly enough at your sights the answers to all of life's problems will materialize. In reality it's like the weather channel. You only want to look at it long enough to figure out if you need a coat or an umbrella and then get on with your life.
This is another reason people go apeshit for dots because it's a big glowing ball that allows you to maintain a target focus and yet still follow the bouncing ball. For the first time they're able to passively watch the aiming reference and it allows them to focus more on other aspects of the shooting process that are much more productive. Well, that's what people who know how to use iron sights have been doing all along. It simply hasn't been explained well because being good at the thing is not the same as understanding how to teach the thing to somebody else.
If we could do detailed analysis of the mental processes of top level performers, you'd see that somebody in a police academy getting yelled at by some "instructor" to FOCUS ON THE FRONT SIGHT would have a ridiculous level of brain power dedicated to their sights while someone like a Rob Leatham would have only the tiniest amount of brain power on his sights. Leatham understands what is actually responsible for where the bullet holes end up. The poor soul in the academy only knows what received "wisdom" their instructor can parrot.
Once you realize that all any pistol sight can do for you is tell you to fix it or send it, you stop looking at them for anything else. This is also a process where more time and experience drives you to look for that hard focus less and less until it's something you go for only when absolutely necessary.
Early on people feel the need for that safey-safe a lot more. When I teach this block of instruction in class it's paired with exercises where we work through the key questions and get them comfortable with applying the concepts at speed. In a private session with a tiny lady who is only big enough to actually conceal a Glock 42 that she struggled to shoot at 3 yards before, after going through these concepts with her I had her at 25 yards on a piece of steel and I asked her: What kind of shot is this?
"My window is nothing but white and my front sight is in there."
"So what should you do?", I asked.
BANGTING...BANGTING...BANGTING
She proceeded to stack three shots almost touching each other in the high chest of that piece of steel. At 25 yards. Hell, I couldn't have fired those three shots that accurately if I tried.
Her focus was on maintaining a consistent grip and working the trigger carefully, and all she did was passively watch her sight to see if it was a go. Now we'd spent time working on grip and trigger too, but when she knew where to put her focus her ability to hit skyrocketed.
It all crystalized for her and in 4 hours she went from being mystified about all of it to telling me what she did wrong immediately when she failed to execute the process properly.
A good instructor is in it to put himself out of business. Because if I'm doing this right eventually you can coach yourself and you don't need me. Which is good, because I can't be there for your gunfight.
Last edited by TCinVA; 12-12-2022 at 12:39 PM.
3/15/2016
Adding to @TCinVA's point that obsessing over sight picture is counterproductive (unless shooting Bullseye): I think trigger mechanics are not as important as many people think.
“There is no growth in the comfort zone.”--Jocko Willink
"You can never have too many knives." --Joe Ambercrombie
Cooper said a LONG time ago sights confirm stroke.
Whole lot of data loss from Cooper until now. From the past in general.
Cooper wouldn't have any trouble finding a red dot on his pistol if he had one.
3/15/2016
Thank you for phrasing it like this. This is the puzzle piece I needed for irons.
(Ironically, it’s the same thing that made a dot work for me after trying all kinds of special formulations.)
I went to a class with Tim Herron as well and fully agree that his class was worth that tidbit about what I kinda came to understand as "rear sight focus"
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