Originally Posted by
Mr_White
I quoted Clusterfrack’s post above because I think it’s pretty right on, and I bolded an important part.
Kinesthetic alignment (index from grip/stance/platform) supports coarse visual alignment (seeing the back of gun on target or going to the target, or similar) and coarse visual alignment supports fine visual alignment (sights/dot/etc.) The presentation is like a telescoping rod from kinesthetic to coarse visual to fine visual.
If a person doesn’t have much of an index, it can be slow/difficult/messy to get to fine visual alignment on the occasions that level of aiming is needed.
It’s definitely an important thing for people to learn (early on if possible) that aiming can be cheated far below equal height/equal light with a sharp and clear front sight. Less known but also a big thing is to figure out how far a trigger press can be cheated and still hit different targets.
If a person has a great index, they can often shoot with fine visual alignment at a pretty high speed if they practice to do so.
It’s definitely true that visual verification is what allows us to still hit well when index is all messed up (movement, nonstandard positions, orientations, circumstances, etc. – lots of persistent aspects of real world conditions.)
Ultimately, to develop to a very high degree, people need to recognize that it is important to transcend the conventional “more accurate = slower” and “faster = less accurate” paradigm of thought. There is a practical relationship there, but it often colors thinking in a developmentally limiting way.
I also agree with TC that “see what you need to see” is an empty cup. It’s true, but empty, and needs to be filled in with the perspective of a developed, experienced shooter. That person has actual concrete answers in “see what you need to see” and it is not an empty cup, but useful instead. This is something highly developed by competitive shooting, and anything else where you shoot lots of different stuff under differing circumstances and physical regimes and thus slowly gives you the answers to what you need to see. I think it’s an empty cup to a beginner.
A lot of the things we discuss here are most applicable to enthusiasts, and less so to everyone who doesn’t care, or are things better trained and applied in different ways to non-enthusiasts.
I could offer a couple of comments about the mode of shooting on the move in that video. I definitely consider that a fusion of index and vision. That is correct. Amazingly however, I did discover that I had developed an index at those tasks – break laterally into a gentle run while drawing and shooting basically perpendicular to the direction of travel. I didn’t know that I had, but one night while running the training group, we did low light pin races. (Two shooters break toward cover in opposite directions while drawing and shooting their target downrange, whoever hits their target first wins the race.) I gave us bowling pins that had been spray painted black, we had the lights down, and the bullet trap is mottled black and gray in color. I could barely see the pin at all – just the few white pock marks where it had been hit already – and was using Ameriglo Defoor sights at the time. I could barely see the target, and could not see the sights AT ALL. Yet to my shock and amazement, I hit the pin in one shot on the move several races in a row, under the conditions described. It was almost all index. I’ve been convinced since then that if you do something enough with a gun, even if it’s weird, you’ll eventually get an index doing that thing.
When I teach other people to perform that task, we lean enormously on conscious use of fine visual alignment (sights or dot) and very specifically to not use less than that. I make the assumption that people do not have an index at that task during the introduction. We jack up the investment on the trigger too. I’m no longer surprised, but am always pleased, at what a high degree of success people in class have in learning to do that. And they are enthusiasts. And they need to take it further. But give me a person who is a good trigger puller, like, can shoot a golf ball sized group at 10 yards, and doesn’t have a problem with the running, and I can tell you right now that that is who will do very well at it.