Red hot delight

American Handgunner, July-August, 2009 by Dave Anderson

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The most important element of accurate shooting is trigger control, period. I know of no way to learn trigger control other than by repetition. Dry firing is just as good as live fire for teaching trigger control perhaps even better--since in dry fire there is no recoil to mask shooter-induced movement.

It's in "gun indexing" that modern technology can really make a difference. I'm referring to optical sights, specifically red-dot sights. This is one area where technology can help average handgunner's shoot like, well, maybe not quite like champions, but pretty dam good.

Iron sights on handguns are a proven indexing tool and have many advantages. They're compact, strong, simple, relatively inexpensive and don't need batteries. But they do require training and experience.

With front and rear sight close together, sight alignment is critical. A small error in sight alignment has a relatively big effect on bullet impact. The human eye cannot attain a sharp locus at different distances at the same time. The key is to locus sharply on he front sight. For most of us the rear sight will be slightly out of focus while the target will be blurred.

Focusing on the front sight is not as easy as it sounds. A common tendency, even when shooting on the range, is to look "through" the sights, with the point of sharpest locus somewhere out in no-man's-land between the front sight and the target. Of course in practical terms, if the target is a deadly threat the urge to focus on the target is even more compelling.