Grant Cunningham - Gun Digests Revolver & Pistol Sights for Concealed Carry eShort

If youve been shooting for more than about five minutes, youve no doubt heard all kinds of opinions about sights and what constitutes a good sight picture. For what is a simple concept there sure are a lot of misconceptions.

In my early days of handgun shooting I was bothered by the almost magical properties attributed to the sight picture. All one had to do, intoned instructor after instructor, was to focus on the sight picture and everything would magically take care of itself. Focus on the front sight! was the repeated mantra, and the prescription was always to dry fire while focusing on the front sight.

Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesnt. As it turns out there is more than one way to aim a revolver, and its your job to pick the way most appropriate to your goal. What is appropriate in a formal target shooting contest may not be appropriate to all other types of handgunning, yet the front sight mantra is still sold as gospel for everything.

As Ive aged and become more wise (or at least learned a few tricks), Ive been moving away from talking about sights and sight picture, at least in the traditional way these terms are used. Take this simple observation to heart: hitting your target requires nothing more than aligning the barrel of your revolver on that target, and keeping it aligned until the bullet has left the bore.

Of course its not necessarily easy to do that, and the more demanding the target (the more precision needed) the more careful you need to be in your alignment. At very close distances, with very forgiving targets, just bringing the gun into and parallel with our line of vision is often enough to get a decent hit. If the target is smaller or further away, we need more precision alignment. When we need precision, we use alignment guides commonly called sights.

Sights are nothing more than precision alignment guides. Thats it, and theres nothing magical about them. They allow us to align our gun more precisely than we could without them. We can use them to get relatively coarse alignment, though better than simply having the gun in our line of vision, and as the targets get more demanding we can use them more carefully. The more carefully we use the alignment guides, the more precise our shots become.

There are two aspects to using these alignment guides: sight alignment and sight picture. They are not interchangeable, and understanding both will help you unravel their mysteries and become a better shooter.

Sight alignment refers to the positional relationship between the front sight and the rear sight.

Proper sight alignment is where the front sight is situated inside the rear notch, flush on the top edge and with an equal amount of light on either side of the blade. Thats perfect sight alignment. Alignment other than that high, low, left, or right has traditionally been deemed to be incorrect.

Over the years Ive learned that those imperfect alignments are simply less precise, but that doesnt mean theyre not useful. There are those who will tell you that sight alignment must be perfect, but even imperfect sight alignment can still produce an acceptable hit on the target if its suitable for the target size or distance. If the target is smaller or further away, you may have to be more careful to get to a traditional perfect sight alignment. Again, its all about degree: less precise alignment is still alignment!

For instance, if Im shooting the large 18x24-inch plates on the Smoke and Hope stage at a Steel Challenge-type event, a slightly less precise sight alignment will still get a solid hit and be a lot faster than holding out for the perfect sight alignment. At the same time, the 10-inch round stop plate at double the distance on that same stage is going to require something closer to the ideal alignment if Im to be certain of a hit.

Remember: sights are simply alignment guides. How much alignment you need, how precise it is, depends on you and what youre shooting.

Sight picture, on the other hand, is the relationship of the sights (as a unit) relative to the target. What is proper is very dependent on your shooting style and the nature of your shooting activity. Many people learned the six-oclock sight picture, but today the point of aim/point of impact (POA/POI) sight picture is most often taught.

The six-oclock picture only works perfectly at a single distance and a single target size, because its based on a fixed amount of offset that varies if the target is moved or changed. Its useful for certain kinds of formal target shooting competition, where the targets and distances are always the same, but for anything else it requires the shooter to apply elevation corrections on the fly.

For the majority of competition, and for all defensive and hunting uses, the POA/POI sight picture is preferable. It requires less conscious thought on the part of the shooter, and it doesnt change with distance. Simply put the sight on what you want to hit, and smoothly stroke the trigger!

Interestingly enough, and contrary to what most instructors will tell you, your alignment guides do not need to be in perfect focus in order to be used.

I discovered this some time back. As I entered my late thirties my eyesight began to deteriorate. Nothing untoward, mind you, just the normal effects of aging. Frankly, I thought that I was immune to such nonsense, and it disturbed me to find that I found I could no longer focus at objects held at arms length. After a bit of an argument with my optometrist I got bifocals. (My optometrist originally prescribed trifocal lenses, a decision that I could not bring myself to make at such a tender age. Perhaps when I reach the half-century mark very soon now Ill be less vain, though I sincerely doubt it!)

All during my shooting career Id been taught, like so many others, to focus on the front sight. My aging eyes wouldnt let me do that any longer, and my shooting was suffering for it.

Those bifocals I fought against were not a solution for handgun shooting. Theyd probably work in a benchrest environment, where everything stays put and one can tilt the head to use the auxiliary lenses, but for competition or self defense they were useless. It wasnt possible to tilt my head back in a good standing shooting stance, even if I somehow could find the time to do so. Competitions are about speed; in self-defense, bad guys are notorious for their lack of patience.

I could have had glasses ground for that specific focus distance, but if bad guys werent going to wait around while I used my bifocals, what chance would I have that theyd cheerfully let me change my glasses? Again, perhaps for some kinds of shooting competitions this would be workable, but as a day-to-day measure it just wasnt practical.

I muddled along for some time until I hit on the solution. (In retrospect, considering my evolved opinion of sights as alignment guides, it now seems obvious. It wasnt at the time!) I discovered that if I focused on the target, instead of trying to focus on my front sight blade, I could shoot surprisingly accurately. Heresy!