Originally Posted by ToddG
I guess I'm not seeing what your getting at here then. In the picture, I definitely can not see your night sights. But it is a picture, not the real thing. So are you saying you can see your sights in that environment or you can not? Not trying to be a dick, just confused.
Night sights for carry guns and fiber optic for competition guns.
Following up since 41magfan mentioned it specifically.
My point is really driven home by the quote above. There may have been times when there wasn't enough light to ID, but you don't have to "maintain positive detailed visual ID" throughout every moment of an exchange. Like I said above, it's as easy as someone walking from a lighted part of a room to a shadowed part of a room. You can still see that it's him and still tell whether he's got the same weapon in his hand even if you can't read the serial number anymore...
The camera is focused on the background so the foreground is blurry enough that the tritium dots didn't come into focus. Also, because of the way cameras see/meter light -- which is much different than the way our eyes & brain manage the same task -- the glow from the tritium got lost. That's exactly why the picture worked so well, in fact. Even though they were really night sights, in the photo they were essentially all-black sights. As I was taking the picture I thought I was going to get a photo of how the night sights were the only thing I could see, proving night sights were useful.
Ok, got it. Thanks for the clarification!The camera is focused on the background so the foreground is blurry enough that the tritium dots didn't come into focus. Also, because of the way cameras see/meter light -- which is much different than the way our eyes & brain manage the same task -- the glow from the tritium got lost. That's exactly why the picture worked so well, in fact. Even though they were really night sights, in the photo they were essentially all-black sights. As I was taking the picture I thought I was going to get a photo of how the night sights were the only thing I could see, proving night sights were useful.
Getting enough DOF to capture rear & front sights and a target, even a close one, is tricky. Doing it in light dim enough for the night sight glow to be visible is beyond my capabilities entirely (short of photoshopping, which sort of defeats the purpose of showing "evidence" of how things look).
I think individual eyesight also needs to be a part of the conversation. Leaving aside all the other points made previously, the bottom line here is that everybody sees the world uniquely through the limitations of their own anatomy. A dude in a PD hasn't encountered a situation in which there was enough light to identify a threat but not enough to see the sights...great.
I have.
I've done a fair bit of low light training and a fair bit of sims/airsoft training (including going into a building about to be torn down for a few hours working on paper targets and people with airsoft guns) trying to figure out what I need to make hits.
Bottom line: I need night sights. To have absolute certainty that I can place shots accurately in any lighting condition, I need night sights. Placing shots accurately seems to matter more when I'm faced with a living, breathing opponent who can move and shoot back as they tend to not present wide-open shots.
During AMIS I met a guy who was able to use the standard sims Glocks in pitch black darkness with unbelievable accuracy. With only a portion of my head peeking up over cover, he placed three shots in my face when I tried to kill him. I don't know how the hell he did that, and at the time I can only assume he was here from the future and mistook me for John Conner. He seemed to do OK with blacked out sights...but I don't have his superhuman powers. (Seriously...if you could be in that situation and see what it was like you'd ass how in blue hell he managed to hit me and strongly suspect he's got at least a chip installed in his head)
I, on the other hand, barely managed to graze him with my shots, and I was laying in wait for him. I knew where he would be coming and I fired first...but because I couldn't see my damn sights I had no way of actually intelligently placing rounds on the guy.
I need night sights.
The first time I saw the VTAC sights with fiber and tritium I thought they were stupid. When I actually started thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that maybe a sight that incorporates tritium and FO is the best idea anyone has ever had in handgun sights.
3/15/2016
This weekend's CTC Midnight 3 Gun match will be interesting. Stage lighting runs from darker than... something something well-digger something midnight... to "dim".
I'll be using the same pistol as last year, my CCW M&P 9 with Lasergrips and Lightguard, but I'll also have the Ameriglo I-Dot Pros on it this time. I plan on taking notes.
I'll also throw time in as a consideration. What's the threat I'm responding to? If it's a suspicious person I might well have plenty of time to get my flashlight out and get it aimed in on the suspicious person I'm interacting with and so my night sights may be moot.
...but what if it's not a suspicious person. What if the first clue I have to the presence of a threat is incoming gunfire?
Cliff's notes: Patrol car rolls into an ambush and gets lit up by the bad guy. The officer not driving bails from the moving vehicle and engages the bad guy from his back. He doesn't have time to grab a flashlight when there are already bullets incoming and his partner has already been injured.
And, hey...look at the muzzle flash from that officer's weapon. Even with much milder muzzle flash than that I've had my night-adjusted vision zapped enough to make it hard to find my sights after the first shot. I found it much easier to find them for a followup shot if they glow. I think that's kind of important when one is in a hurry...like one might be if there's someone trying to kill you.
If I can get in a perfect stance and adopt my usual index and I've got a big enough target, sure...I can point shoot and maybe make a solid hit. From my back against a bad guy leaning around a corner? I'm going to need some sort of visible sighting cue.
3/15/2016
That's also a very specific-to-the-individual kind of thing. I have a story that goes with this, but it'll have to wait 'til it's not 0100.
One issue I see is who is using the sights?
If you look at CCW type defensive shootings those almost always happen in some sort of decent light. It's hard to rob a person you can't see because you are both locked in the ninja closet. Tom Givens data, which I think it pretty representative of what a person who CCWs will face outside of the home, shows a person needs their gun in a situation where there is enough light for people to see each other.
Coppers on the other hand often have to go looking for bad guys after they have scattered into dark holes. Completely different dynamic.
Working nights, and I have done so for about 23 of my almost 27 years on the street, I have found a number of situation where I can se and PID a bad guy but my sights were not visible.
Even if you use a light then what we teach at Strategos, light-move-shoot-move, is a really good idea IMHO, so you may have IDd your bad guy with the lights on and then have to shoot them in the dark. Or the bad guy may be partially lit up by another officer but my angle leaves my sights blacked out on the suspect if I don't have night sights.
I have not yet seen a downside to tritium sights except for cost compared to any other sighting system.
Ref special guys doing special work; they may face a threat that also has night vision capability, and some of them plan for that, hence no glowy sights on their blasters.
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