Frontsight focus - target attachment

[impact]

Hi shooters.

 

I've got a question, that I haven't seen asked before.

There are pretty much 3 basic types of aiming utilizing iron sights on a Handgun:

1)Target focus (fast, hard to line up sights precisly)

2) intermediate focus (happy medium)

3) Front sight focus (slow, precise)

 

With shooting front sight focus, I guess most people also fully concentrate on the front sight (besides maybe trigger pull), and kind of see the target (or bullseye) blurry dancing around it.

Now, what I every now and then do during precision traning, on ISSF bullseye targets, is to focus on the X-ring, bring the gun lined up into my vision, so that line of eyesight becomes line of gunsight, and as I shift my focus back to the frontsight I finetune my sight picture/ point of aim. I found this helps me to get a more constant POA/POI, since focusing on the x-ring first makes me vertically line up the gun better to the target. Without, my group or single shots sometimes shift up a tiny bit (~1" @ 14yards). I line up the top edges of front and rear sight and ignore the fibre dots. POI is just a hair above that edge between 12.5 and 25m (~14-26yards).

What I found during experimenting with that, is that you even can mentally "focus" (focus in the sense of concentrating, perceiving, tracking, mentally attaching to..) while your technical visual focus is on the frontsight plane. Does that explanation makes sense to you? So you are seeing the frontsight sharply in focus, but are mentally attached to the target (centre).

 

Kind of like when you are shooting a parallax free optic on a pistol or rifle. You basically see both, reticle and target, in focus, but you can kind of choose to either attach to the target, and watch the dot/reticle float around it, or attach to the dot/reticle, and have the target float around. Kind of. It's more like a mental process. When shooting rifle, for example, I somehow shoot better when focusing on the target (mentally) insteat of focusing on the reticle.

So it's kind of similar with iron sights, but a little more complicated due to not having both target and sights in focus.

 

Does anybody have experienced shooting that way? Or actually does shoot like that on purpose? I just started experimenting with it and would like to know what some of the more experienced shooters here think. I found, that it definately needs some getting used to, but I have also been able to shoot some very very good shots that way, maybe because by beeing mentally attached more to the target I tolerate a little more wobble in the sights and pull the trigger a little more relaxed, but still have the sights in focus to be able to line them up very precisely.

Of course there might be limited applicability for that in practical shooting, since most stuff is high speed and shot with target or intermediate focus I guess. And it might influence your ability to track your front sight during recoil.

[B585]

I came from a rifle background (shot them for decades) and I am pretty sure I get what you are saying.  When doing long distance/percussion shooting with open sights or scopes, I experimented and figured out what I needed to perceive/focus on to get the most accuracy.  2 years ago I started shooting pistols and 4 months later, I did my first USPSA match and my life has never been the same.  What I quickly learned was that I had the accuracy to be competitive, but I was way too slooowww.   In my quest to get faster, I actually ended up doing a complete 180.… My accuracy went downhill while my speed was improving significantly.  It took a while for me to get into my thick head something that has been preached on this website time and time again.....you should never shoot faster than you can see in a match. Ultimately I have changed almost everything I used to do when shooting rifles for percission.

If this method is what you NEED to do to make hits on the harder targets right now, then that is what you should do.   Ultimately, if you want to be competitive in USPSA , you are probably going to have to come up with a more efficient method of making hits on the more difficult shots.  With enough practice I bet you will learn to make ACCEPTABLE hits on difficult shots without having to change what you are perceiving multiple times for each difficult shot.  This game is about speed with accuracy so you have to strive for being the most efficient possible when shooting a match.