The Ultimate Handgun Training Handbook

Lastly, we should further explain what Cooper meant by “Accuracy, Power and Speed.” These are the three critical elements you must juggle to produce the desired result on target. If you miss, you cannot hope to stop the attacker. If you hit but your hits were slow in coming, you might stop your attacker, but it may be too late. And, if you do not hit your attacker with enough authority (power) it may not matter how fast or accurate you were.

Defining a minimum for each of these elements is almost impossible. In short, you should be accurate enough you can always hit what you need to. You cannot be too fast and, at least as far as defensive handguns go, you can never have enough power. Accepting these definitions, you are left with trying to find a balance of all three. The training exercises that follow will help you make some decisions about your abilities with your handgun, and even the type of handgun you should use. You will also learn how to practice to improve your skills.

As stated in the introduction to this book, my intent is to integrate the modern handgun and tools like express sights, lasers, lights, and ammunition into the philosophy that has driven the art of the defensive handgun since Jeff Cooper first developed the Modern Technique. To become proficient in defending yourself with a handgun, all you must do is integrate the secret — sight alignment and trigger control — the principles of personal-defense, the Modern Technique of the Pistol, and a little common sense.

Chapter 6 Sights and Sight Picture

Using the sights to aim the gun gives you a means of verifying where the gun is pointed. To shoot without using the sights is to engage in guesswork. While it may be possible to shoot effectively at very close range, it still takes an enormous amount of practice for your hand and arm to learn to point the gun consistently in the direction your eyes are looking (a topic I will cover later). While a shooter with extensive practice will be able to hit at close range (say, under 10 yards), with reasonable consistency, for a beginner, the time required to learn to hit consistently at short range without sights will almost certainly be far greater than the time required to simply learn to use the sights correctly and quickly to get accurate, dependable results at ranges both near and far. Any sort of precise shooting requires the use of the sights and, with practice, their use can be so fast as to render moot any time difference between sighted and unsighted fire — the upside to sights is that, with their use, accuracy can be guaranteed as long as the shooter does his part.

The two most important components of sight use are to focus the eyes on the front sight and then verify the alignment between front and rear sights. The eyes can only focus in one distance plane at one point, and the front sight, rear sight, and target will all be at different distances from the eyes. The reason we pick the front sight as our focus object is that this little stub of metal tells us where the gun is aiming.

^{Incorrect sight focus. Note the blurry front and rear sights versus the sharply focused target. This is a common cause of inaccurate shooting.}

^{Another form of incorrect focus. Note the blurry front sight and target versus the sharply focused rear sight. This also will cause inaccurate shooting.}

^{This is correct focus. Note the sharp front sight and blurry rear sight and target. This is what you must see for accurate shooting.}

When we focus on the target, the front and rear sights will both be blurry. In this case, a small misalignment of the gun (which would be visible as sight misalignment) will not be noticed, and the gun will be looking along a different line of sight than our eyes are looking. It does not take much of an angular misalignment in the gun barrel versus our eyesight line for the shot to miss the target completely, and since this misalignment represents two diverging lines, the amount of error will grow rapidly with increasing distance to the target.

So, again, we focus on our front sight. This puts the target out of focus, just as it does the rear sights, but, in this case, it’s not a drawback, since just about anything we will be shooting at with an iron-sighted pistol will be easy to see in general. Any error caused by aiming at a slightly blurry target will only be as big as the blurry edge of the target, which is actually a very small amount of space; truly, it is negligible, especially compared to the potential of the misalignment error allowed by not looking at your sights. So, we focus on the front sight and let the target blur slightly.

Now, how exactly do we use the sights to aim? First, we must create proper sight alignment. This is the line-up between the front and rear sights. With conventional pistol iron sights, we have a straight, square-topped post for a front sight, with a flat-topped rear sight blade that has a rectangular or square notch cut in its middle. The front sight post should be aligned in the rear sight notch so that the top flat surface of the front post is even with the top flat surface of the rear blade, and also centered side to side so that there is an even amount of space between the left side of the front post and left side of the rear notch, and the right side of the front post and right edge of the rear notch.

^{The six o’clock hold sight picture on a bull’s-eye target. Focus on the center of the top edge of the front sight post. Let the target blur.}

^{The center mass hold sight picture on the same bull’s-eye target. Focus on the center top edge of the front post and let the target blur.}

^{The center mass sight picture on the criminal trying to kill you. Focus on the center of the top edge of the front sight post. Let the target blur.}

This is proper sight alignment. What your eyes should be focused on is the center of the top flat surface of the front sight post. It is this exact point that you use to place the sights on the desired impact point on the target. It is important to note that even a tiny, visible misalignment between front and rear sights actually represents a considerable angular misalignment of the gun barrel from our line of sight to the target. Thus, it is very important (especially if you are a beginner) to be a perfectionist in your sight alignment.

Proper sight alignment is achieved through your hands. As you will see later, training your hands to bring the handgun up into perfect sight alignment is one of the skills you must eventually master. This is extremely important. No one can hold a gun perfectly steady, but we must strive to eliminate error from our sight alignment. It is better to have the gun wobbling around a bit with the sights in excellent alignment with each other, than to have the gun seem steady but have the front sight off-center in the rear notch. The reason is that, if our sights are aligned on a wobbling gun, our shot will hit right where the tip of the front sight happens to be aiming at the instant of discharge. As long as we can keep our “wobble zone” in an area where we would like the bullet to hit, we can fire at any point in our wobbling. On the other hand, if our sights are in misalignment at the moment of discharge, the shot will hit a considerable distance from the point where the sights are superimposed on the target, because the gun is “looking” in a different direction than our are our eyes. At close range this doesn’t matter so much, but, at long ranges or on small targets, we need the most perfect alignment possible. It will be reiterated later, but get used to the notion right now of not firing a shot until you are satisfied with the sight alignment. Failure to follow this principle will result in poor accuracy.