AndyC wrote:Take every advantage when shooting for groups eg target-shooting; however, to my way of thinking it's critical to practice for self-defence with whatever one wears normally, too - and even completely without, if it can be done safely.
I've said this time and again, but I'll say it once more - 99% of people will never focus on their front sight during their first armed encounter at halitosis distance; they will instinctively focus on the threat. Our brains are just wired that way.
Everyone is told "focus on the front sight" when shooting at the range, simply because it works - that is, it works well on the range..
On the two-way range it doesn't happen that way - so do some practice focusing solely on the target, as well. The easiest way to do this is to try to see where the bullets are hitting as they occur. Use your sights by all means - register where they are (the front sight alone is fine), but focus past them and shoot, because that is what is going to happen during a fight.
Yeppers. Gabe Suarez refers to it, somewhat inelegantly, as "meat and metal" shooting: what you see is a piece of undefined metal in your hands, interposed upon the body of an attacker. And a body that is most likely moving, at that.
Not to cause topic confusion, but one of my personal soapboxes is that very few CHLers practice true "halitosis distance" defensive shooting. If you're at zero to three or four feet from your target, you probably shouldn't be able to see your handgun at all: it should be indexed high and tight against your ribcage in a close-contact ready position. And the best data we have say that if you ever need to use a handgun to protect your life, 81% of the time it will be six feet or less from the bad guy; 34% of the time it will be three feet or less.
Conversely, this doesn't mean you should Dremel the sights off your handgun and never shoot at anything less than six feet away.
I think all the skills are necessary, from slow-fire marksmanship at 25+ yards to close-distance, moving target and moving shooter force-on-force training. But it's a continuum, a progression: new shooters need to develop basic marksmanship skills like reliable gun handling, sight picture/alignment, and trigger control first, then move on to practical elements like draw-from-holster, moving off the "X", moving targets, rapid fire, close-quarters defense, etc.
Bringing this back on topic, if you can't clearly see your front sight
and your target (but not at the same moment) when you practice, it may be difficult to develop the visual recognition and muscle memory skills necessary to speed up the process under extreme stress...or to take an accurate hostage shot at distance.
That's why I advocate training both with and without eyesight correction. I think solid, repeatable competency
with eyesight correction and static targets in a slow-fire mode comes first. Getting comfortable shooting tight groups at your own pace is a first step. If your vision is a problem, then it becomes difficult achieving those first steps and it hinders further progress.
The legendary football coach Vince Lombardi used to start his speech to the players each and every new season exactly the same way, irrespective of whether the players were rookies or three-year veterans. He would hold up a football and, after a long pause, say, "This is a football." He would go on (paraphrasing here) to describe that the objective was to move the football beyond the opposing team's goal line, while preventing them from passing yours.
The point is that any physical skill (that I can think of) is about fundamentals. It doesn't matter at what age you begin learning that skill, it still must be based on fundamentals. And it doesn't matter how many years you've been practicing that skill, it still must be based on fundamentals.
Ldy AlliDu, now that we understand a bit more, I strongly suggest doing whatever you need to do in order to arrive at being able to move your eyes quickly from a reasonably crisp target picture to a reasonably crisp sight picture. Develop that eye-body-gun alignment. Ingrain it. Then, as Lombardi might say, you can move on to develop pass-plays and quarterback-sneaks.
