I would like to begin with the caveat that I am an expert at nothing.
I see a lot of people choose scopes over iron sights and when questioned about their choice in sighting system they claim “old eyes” as the reasoning. Some of those people really are old, some have corrected vision anyway, and many are younger than I am, which is saying something considering that I am holding my looks together rather well into my mid-30s. Hardly old eye territory. I posit that old eyes are really just an excuse. It’s an excuse based in the desire to simplify one of the tasks of shooting but often serves only to limit the growth of the shooter’s inherent skill, allowing them a marginal level of success but holding them back in many cases.
It’s not that the people claiming old eyes are wrong for doing so, they are just lazy, run of the mill reprobates who have talked themselves into believing that they have to have a scope to succeed and fear the effort required to achieve without it. Two of the toughest skills to develop as a shooter are trust in your Natural Point of Aim and the need to focus on the front post. Many scope shooters don’t develop these skills early enough in their shooting and limit or slow their development because of it.
I shoot with scopes. OH WHAT A HYPOCRITE I AM. Well….yeah, but that’s not the issue. I do shoot with scopes, and I shoot them well, often scoring better than I would with irons, but that is only because I train with irons that I am able to do it. To understand why, bear with me while I talk about why scopes work. Scopes work because they make Sight Picture easier. When shooting you must focus your eye on one of three planes, the rear sight, the front sight, or the target. Long discussions with my optometrist indicate that the natural plane of focus for the eye is an infinite one. (If you close both of your eyes and relax them in their sockets, when you open your eyes they will not be focused on anything. They are two separate inputs situated parallel to one another. Their natural, relaxed position does not allow them to intersect, therefore they are unfocused. It is with effort to observe something that we focus them. This reality can be demonstrated by the above trick. For an instant after you open your eyes they will not be focused on anything, it is only with direction from the mind that they choose something to focus on to gain their bearings.)
So, when you open your eyes you essentially have to focus them on something. Believe it or not it is actually easier for your eyes to focus on something far away because that is closer to their relaxed state of infinity. The experienced shooter knows that he/she must focus the eyes on the front post. So an iron sight shooter must focus their mind determinedly on focusing on the front post despite two things, the eye’s natural desire to focus on the target and the fact that the target will naturally become fuzzy or blobby. The scope is advantageous because it compresses the three planes we have to choose from, making them appear as one. The problem is that the shooter does not need to maintain the level of focus required for irons, and they end up settling for marginal success instead of persevering to develop that keener level of focus. In addition, the scope shooter will often use high levels of magnification to make it appear as though the front sight (in this case the reticule) and the target exist on the same plane and focus on the target (as they are wont to do anyway). This is an error. It is also an impossibility to present these objects on the same plane. Though it may not seem so, it is still inconsistent to focus your eye on the target. Though imperceptible to many, the reticule will blur should you focus your eye on the target and reduced accuracy will be the result.
As we age, the muscles in our eyes that are responsible for changing their shape and orientation begin to relax. Believe it or not this can start happening as early as early as ten or twelve years of age (school teachers will notice that many students get glasses for the first time around the 3rd or 4th grade). Because those tiny little muscles can’t contract like they once did the eyes do not focus on points where the muscles have to work harder to focus. Guess what, that is close to your face (it’s why it takes so much effort to cross your eyes according to the optometrist). This means the average person tends to get a little more farsighted as they get older. One of the cases that sticks out in my mind in relation to shooting is that of Hawkhavn, fellow INGOer and shooter. The guy has to read everything at arm’s length. I am not entirely sure he can read the gauges on his truck. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say he can indeed read the newspaper at arm’s length. How big is the byline? About the same size as the front post on his Garand. How far away is that front post? About arm’s length. Hmmm. What does that mean? Well, it means that a shooter who clearly needs a scope is still capable of getting the job done with irons. Old eyes are an excuse. Anybody who has seen this guy try to read something will say it’s a good excuse, and it is. It’s still just an excuse and I bet he would say the same. The real reason his irons sight shooting is diminishing, and I would guess he would say the same again, is that he does not dry practice enough, and he would be right.
The condition stated above can be remedied. All you have to do is retrain your eye to focus on the plane of your front sights. The best trick I have run into for this is to shine a bright light on a smooth white wall and dry practice with your irons against this wall. The lack of a target behind the post and the inability of your eye to pick out a separate target on the blank wall will train your eye to focus on the front post and condition it for that focal length. It’s a simple, neat trick that works really well. Other tricks exist for other eye conditions but the reality is still the same. You can shoot irons as well as you shoot scopes if you are willing to expend the effort and achieve the level of focus required to do so. The end result will make you a competent irons shooter and an EXCELLENT scope shooter.
BUT WHEN I SHOOT IRONS I CAN’T SEE THE TARGET WHEN I FOCUS MY EYE ON THE POST!?! I hear that one a lot. I know others do too. It probably isn’t said in as whiny and petulant a voice as I just said it in my head, but it is said nonetheless. Here’s the rub, I can’t see it either. The 4-H club I coach has several nice target rifles of an older vintage. They have an old model of the Williams FP on them. The front sight inserts are a variety of globes and post sizes and a few silhouette shaders. If I insert the smallest globe available I can only see a very small blur in the center of the ring if the target is 6MOA or smaller. If I use a post I cannot see a target that size or smaller at all.
This reminds me of an anecdote that makes me sound awesome, so let’s step back into Memory Lane. A while back The Bubba Effect got a new pistol and wanted to break it in. He couldn’t get down to the farm until later in the day so he, I and a buddy went tromping out into the back field. We took turns running rounds through the pistol until he was satisfied with its performance and, the hour getting late, we decided to adjourn for dinner at Joe’s Pizza. Following Thomas Jefferson’s advice, I had taken my AR along for the exercise. As we walked away in the waning light I stopped and looked back. We had been shooting at an 8 inch plate (thanks Bobcat Steel) all day and had knocked just about all the paint off of it. That made it rust colored and it blended well with the background. I could just make out the black frame it hung on. Though I couldn’t exactly see it, I knew where it was. It was about 7 or 8 in the evening in the early summer. I judged the distance to be about 125 or 150 yards. I unlimbered the AR and clicked to my 100 yard zero and gave it two clicks for God and King George and settled in. I could not see the target, and could barely see the frame, but I set my NPOA on where I knew the target to be and trusted my position, I started to squeeze and when the shot broke I called good. DING!
At first I was afraid, I was petrified. Did that just happen? Of course it happened. I called good didn’t I? The setting was good wasn’t it? I did and it was (this time) and being able to see the target was not as important as knowing where it was. Bubba’s hearty “Good Shot!” and our buddy’s choking, coughing laugh were punctuation to the realization that being able to see the target is not as important as knowing where it is. If you know where your target is you can focus on the front post and still focus on keeping your marblebox on keeping the sights on the target. This skill is necessary for trusting your NPOA. If you don’t do this, you are a Fusser.
People that fuss their shots aren’t bad people, just bad shooters. Sometimes they aren’t even bad shooters, just not as good as they could be. Recently I had a shooter on a line that was a good shooter and a good fusser. The shooter was Rayne, one of the grande dames of INGO, and her problem was an easy fix. I had received a message that she would be at the shoot. “Look out, she’s a fusser,” the message said. The first of her shots I observed were neat, 2 MOA cloverleafs with the holes close but not quite touching. Pretty fancy shooting, better than the men who think Nightforce and Timney can wash the dumb off. I asked what the problem was. I was informed, “They aren’t one hole. With a scope, they’re one hole.” Those are pretty high standards.
The problem with a fusser is that they want to be perfect, and the lack of perfection frustrates them and only serves to increase group size and prevent trust in NPOA. Women seem to be more able to handle this properly and Rayne was no exception. As a coach, fussing is easily diagnosed by looking for small movements of the hands or head between shots, squinting of the dominant eye between shots, minor variations in muzzle jump from shot to shot (it can sell out muscling), and a variety of small issues. With this shooter the group size was already so small the visible symptoms would be as well, small muzzle jump to the left indicated that she was muscling left almost imperceptibly. This told me we needed to get deeper into our position. A solid position is critical to trusting NPOA. If you are loose, you can’t do it at all. A very modest amount of coaching and a shooter egoless enough to accept and digest a little coaching and willing to expend the effort was able to achieve that one hole accuracy with seeming ease. Trust yourself. Build a position that you can trust that is YOUR position. Trust that you have the mental discipline to focus your headjelly on keeping your sights where you know the target to be.
I could go on and talk about ways to tighten a position and how that reflects in focus and different strategies for maintaining focus but I reckon that those of you with the endurance to get this far down are probably ready for my prosecution…or lunch. I hope its lunch. All I ask is that you don’t give up on irons. Sure its tougher. Most of the things that make you better are tougher to accomplish than the things that make you a fat couch potato with bad gas. I should know, I’m a fat couch potato with stinky butt syndrome. The gun world has a lot of people in it, but not enough shooters. Don’t let the skills erode and don’t give the old eyes excuse anymore. Develop trust in your NPOA and the ability to focus properly with iron sights and you will be glad you did.
I see a lot of people choose scopes over iron sights and when questioned about their choice in sighting system they claim “old eyes” as the reasoning. Some of those people really are old, some have corrected vision anyway, and many are younger than I am, which is saying something considering that I am holding my looks together rather well into my mid-30s. Hardly old eye territory. I posit that old eyes are really just an excuse. It’s an excuse based in the desire to simplify one of the tasks of shooting but often serves only to limit the growth of the shooter’s inherent skill, allowing them a marginal level of success but holding them back in many cases.
It’s not that the people claiming old eyes are wrong for doing so, they are just lazy, run of the mill reprobates who have talked themselves into believing that they have to have a scope to succeed and fear the effort required to achieve without it. Two of the toughest skills to develop as a shooter are trust in your Natural Point of Aim and the need to focus on the front post. Many scope shooters don’t develop these skills early enough in their shooting and limit or slow their development because of it.
I shoot with scopes. OH WHAT A HYPOCRITE I AM. Well….yeah, but that’s not the issue. I do shoot with scopes, and I shoot them well, often scoring better than I would with irons, but that is only because I train with irons that I am able to do it. To understand why, bear with me while I talk about why scopes work. Scopes work because they make Sight Picture easier. When shooting you must focus your eye on one of three planes, the rear sight, the front sight, or the target. Long discussions with my optometrist indicate that the natural plane of focus for the eye is an infinite one. (If you close both of your eyes and relax them in their sockets, when you open your eyes they will not be focused on anything. They are two separate inputs situated parallel to one another. Their natural, relaxed position does not allow them to intersect, therefore they are unfocused. It is with effort to observe something that we focus them. This reality can be demonstrated by the above trick. For an instant after you open your eyes they will not be focused on anything, it is only with direction from the mind that they choose something to focus on to gain their bearings.)
So, when you open your eyes you essentially have to focus them on something. Believe it or not it is actually easier for your eyes to focus on something far away because that is closer to their relaxed state of infinity. The experienced shooter knows that he/she must focus the eyes on the front post. So an iron sight shooter must focus their mind determinedly on focusing on the front post despite two things, the eye’s natural desire to focus on the target and the fact that the target will naturally become fuzzy or blobby. The scope is advantageous because it compresses the three planes we have to choose from, making them appear as one. The problem is that the shooter does not need to maintain the level of focus required for irons, and they end up settling for marginal success instead of persevering to develop that keener level of focus. In addition, the scope shooter will often use high levels of magnification to make it appear as though the front sight (in this case the reticule) and the target exist on the same plane and focus on the target (as they are wont to do anyway). This is an error. It is also an impossibility to present these objects on the same plane. Though it may not seem so, it is still inconsistent to focus your eye on the target. Though imperceptible to many, the reticule will blur should you focus your eye on the target and reduced accuracy will be the result.
As we age, the muscles in our eyes that are responsible for changing their shape and orientation begin to relax. Believe it or not this can start happening as early as early as ten or twelve years of age (school teachers will notice that many students get glasses for the first time around the 3rd or 4th grade). Because those tiny little muscles can’t contract like they once did the eyes do not focus on points where the muscles have to work harder to focus. Guess what, that is close to your face (it’s why it takes so much effort to cross your eyes according to the optometrist). This means the average person tends to get a little more farsighted as they get older. One of the cases that sticks out in my mind in relation to shooting is that of Hawkhavn, fellow INGOer and shooter. The guy has to read everything at arm’s length. I am not entirely sure he can read the gauges on his truck. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say he can indeed read the newspaper at arm’s length. How big is the byline? About the same size as the front post on his Garand. How far away is that front post? About arm’s length. Hmmm. What does that mean? Well, it means that a shooter who clearly needs a scope is still capable of getting the job done with irons. Old eyes are an excuse. Anybody who has seen this guy try to read something will say it’s a good excuse, and it is. It’s still just an excuse and I bet he would say the same. The real reason his irons sight shooting is diminishing, and I would guess he would say the same again, is that he does not dry practice enough, and he would be right.
The condition stated above can be remedied. All you have to do is retrain your eye to focus on the plane of your front sights. The best trick I have run into for this is to shine a bright light on a smooth white wall and dry practice with your irons against this wall. The lack of a target behind the post and the inability of your eye to pick out a separate target on the blank wall will train your eye to focus on the front post and condition it for that focal length. It’s a simple, neat trick that works really well. Other tricks exist for other eye conditions but the reality is still the same. You can shoot irons as well as you shoot scopes if you are willing to expend the effort and achieve the level of focus required to do so. The end result will make you a competent irons shooter and an EXCELLENT scope shooter.
BUT WHEN I SHOOT IRONS I CAN’T SEE THE TARGET WHEN I FOCUS MY EYE ON THE POST!?! I hear that one a lot. I know others do too. It probably isn’t said in as whiny and petulant a voice as I just said it in my head, but it is said nonetheless. Here’s the rub, I can’t see it either. The 4-H club I coach has several nice target rifles of an older vintage. They have an old model of the Williams FP on them. The front sight inserts are a variety of globes and post sizes and a few silhouette shaders. If I insert the smallest globe available I can only see a very small blur in the center of the ring if the target is 6MOA or smaller. If I use a post I cannot see a target that size or smaller at all.
This reminds me of an anecdote that makes me sound awesome, so let’s step back into Memory Lane. A while back The Bubba Effect got a new pistol and wanted to break it in. He couldn’t get down to the farm until later in the day so he, I and a buddy went tromping out into the back field. We took turns running rounds through the pistol until he was satisfied with its performance and, the hour getting late, we decided to adjourn for dinner at Joe’s Pizza. Following Thomas Jefferson’s advice, I had taken my AR along for the exercise. As we walked away in the waning light I stopped and looked back. We had been shooting at an 8 inch plate (thanks Bobcat Steel) all day and had knocked just about all the paint off of it. That made it rust colored and it blended well with the background. I could just make out the black frame it hung on. Though I couldn’t exactly see it, I knew where it was. It was about 7 or 8 in the evening in the early summer. I judged the distance to be about 125 or 150 yards. I unlimbered the AR and clicked to my 100 yard zero and gave it two clicks for God and King George and settled in. I could not see the target, and could barely see the frame, but I set my NPOA on where I knew the target to be and trusted my position, I started to squeeze and when the shot broke I called good. DING!
At first I was afraid, I was petrified. Did that just happen? Of course it happened. I called good didn’t I? The setting was good wasn’t it? I did and it was (this time) and being able to see the target was not as important as knowing where it was. Bubba’s hearty “Good Shot!” and our buddy’s choking, coughing laugh were punctuation to the realization that being able to see the target is not as important as knowing where it is. If you know where your target is you can focus on the front post and still focus on keeping your marblebox on keeping the sights on the target. This skill is necessary for trusting your NPOA. If you don’t do this, you are a Fusser.
People that fuss their shots aren’t bad people, just bad shooters. Sometimes they aren’t even bad shooters, just not as good as they could be. Recently I had a shooter on a line that was a good shooter and a good fusser. The shooter was Rayne, one of the grande dames of INGO, and her problem was an easy fix. I had received a message that she would be at the shoot. “Look out, she’s a fusser,” the message said. The first of her shots I observed were neat, 2 MOA cloverleafs with the holes close but not quite touching. Pretty fancy shooting, better than the men who think Nightforce and Timney can wash the dumb off. I asked what the problem was. I was informed, “They aren’t one hole. With a scope, they’re one hole.” Those are pretty high standards.
The problem with a fusser is that they want to be perfect, and the lack of perfection frustrates them and only serves to increase group size and prevent trust in NPOA. Women seem to be more able to handle this properly and Rayne was no exception. As a coach, fussing is easily diagnosed by looking for small movements of the hands or head between shots, squinting of the dominant eye between shots, minor variations in muzzle jump from shot to shot (it can sell out muscling), and a variety of small issues. With this shooter the group size was already so small the visible symptoms would be as well, small muzzle jump to the left indicated that she was muscling left almost imperceptibly. This told me we needed to get deeper into our position. A solid position is critical to trusting NPOA. If you are loose, you can’t do it at all. A very modest amount of coaching and a shooter egoless enough to accept and digest a little coaching and willing to expend the effort was able to achieve that one hole accuracy with seeming ease. Trust yourself. Build a position that you can trust that is YOUR position. Trust that you have the mental discipline to focus your headjelly on keeping your sights where you know the target to be.
I could go on and talk about ways to tighten a position and how that reflects in focus and different strategies for maintaining focus but I reckon that those of you with the endurance to get this far down are probably ready for my prosecution…or lunch. I hope its lunch. All I ask is that you don’t give up on irons. Sure its tougher. Most of the things that make you better are tougher to accomplish than the things that make you a fat couch potato with bad gas. I should know, I’m a fat couch potato with stinky butt syndrome. The gun world has a lot of people in it, but not enough shooters. Don’t let the skills erode and don’t give the old eyes excuse anymore. Develop trust in your NPOA and the ability to focus properly with iron sights and you will be glad you did.
Probably explains why I can't shoot any better than Minute of Man...
