Tactical Professor – “Sight misalignment, speed, and accuracy”

One of the sites I read as often as possible is that of Tactical Professor. Though his articles are rarely long, they are always cogent and never fail to provoke thought. Last Friday he posted a good one about the relationship between unaligned sights, speed and accuracy. It's not a new concept; I'm sure many of you (like me) have been told ‘If your group is that tight, you're not pushing yourself.”

Says the Tactical Professor,

“While I was teaching a private lesson last week, my student was struggling with improving his times, while maintaining an acceptable degree of accuracy. I could tell by the size of his groups, which were quite small, relative to the speed he was going, there was a fundamental that he didn’t understand. The front sight does not have to be perfectly aligned in the notch to produce good hits. So, I had him do a drill to demonstrate the acceptable degree of sight misalignment that will still result in hits on target…Once he understood that he didn’t need a perfect sight picture, the speed of his shooting picked up and his accuracy remained well within acceptable limits. As long as the front sight is close to the center of the target, a certain degree of misalignment will still produce a good hit. Not worrying about getting a perfect sight picture will result in a noticeable increase in speed.”

Read the entire article here for further explanation of the concept and details of the drill.