Summary: I’m against it.
Longer version: I have been a sights using pistolero my entire shooting career. I have noticed that when I remember to stare at my front sight in the middle of the blurry target, I make the hits. When I am lax in focusing my attention on the front sight, I don’t. I think there may be a correlation!
I once shot an entire IDPA match without looking at my sights, and placed as I usually do, in the middle third of competitors (I manage at least one costly brain cramp per match). Sharp minded readers may have already guessed that the courses of fire all took place in the 1-7 yard range. Note that not looking at and not using sights are different things. Had I taken the time to slow down and look at the sights, they would have been aligned and on target. Like Saint Cooper said, “The body points. The eye verifies.”
This is not point shooting!
I do not buy the justifications that “Nobody uses their sights in a real fight” nor “Nobody has time to use their sights in a real fight”. They’re as much a load of crap as “Everybody shoots from Iso under stress”. Hogwash! You may think you won’t have time to use your sights, but will you have enough time to miss? Likewise, point shooting in a crisis is a failure of training, not an instinctive reaction that needs to be encouraged and nurtured.
Experienced pistol shots can make excellent fast, close range hits using body indexing or sighting down the top of the slide. But they always practice with their sights lined up! Training to point shoot without using the sights is like trying to learn heel-and-toe clutch control without knowing what the gearshift pattern is.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Ask John Farnam, who knows a thing or two about teaching people to shoot. HERE, HERE, and HERE.
There can be call for unsighted fire in both competition and lethal force encounters. Your draw stroke should incorporate a close-range retention stage from which you can make unsighted hits in the 0-5 yard range. If you have time to get both hands on the gun, gross sighting along the top of the slide may save you some vital time if the target is close.
But I don’t “point shoot”.
Paul Simer | 23-May-07 at 12:09 pm | Permalink
A person trained for sighted fire may regress to acceptable point shooting under stress. A person who has only trained point shooting will never be able to use sighted fire in a fight, and that is a severe handicap.
If your draw stroke, grip, and stance are correct, your sights should be lined up before your eyes before you think about it anyway. If under stress of combat you forget to “front sight, press”, that is forgivable, since you should still be on target.
pax | 24-May-07 at 11:43 am | Permalink
Anyone who is serious about learning to shoot for self-defense must have some sort of plan for what they will do in less than optimal lighting conditions.
Less than optimal lighting conditions doesn’t mean, “Too dark to identify the attacker,” by the way. It means, “Too dark to quickly use your sights.” The two are not the same thing at all — as anyone who has ever fought late-afternoon glare at the range would know.
When the sights are not readily visible, for whatever reason, you need a backup plan for how you are going to hit what you need to hit and avoid hitting the innocent.
I don’t actually care what you call the backup plan. You can call it pointshooting, or using a body index, or sillhouette index, or geometric point, or unsighted fire, or … fill in whatever your method of choice might be. Whatever it is, you need to know it and be familiar enough with it that if you are attacked in a dimly-lit hallway in the middle of the night, you know you can use that technique to good effect.
That said, it’s very foolish to act as though the backup plan is the primary plan.
Analog: Learning to shoot from a downed position, in case you get knocked off your feet, is a smart move. But it wouldn’t be smart to plan only to shoot from downed positions if attacked. A smart person would not plan to throw himself to the ground at the attacker’s feet, no matter how well-practiced he may be at shooting from downed positions.
But pointshooting advocates, in their zeal, often do pretty much the same thing. Pointshooting is really a backup plan to be used when the main plan cannot work, when a specific set of less than optimal conditions exist. It’s a necessary backup, but that’s all it is. A backup.
Don’t get too wrapped around the axle either way, pdb.
Roughedge | 24-May-07 at 7:46 pm | Permalink
My plan for “too dark to see my sights” I call Meprolight tritium night sights.
I have them on all of my serious handguns.
$100 ever 7 years is cheap insurance that I’ll be able to HIT whoever I need to shoot.
Of coarse, for reasons known only to the idiots that build them, most wheel guns are not easily compatible with night sights.