What’s up shooters! If you have spent any time at all pursuing the goal of being a better pistol shooter you have heard a lot of things about the sights on a pistol. Many times you hear something like; focus on the front sight or the front sight should be sharp and clear and everything else should be blurry. I don’t subscribe to that theory for a few reasons. One reason is that pistol have front and rear sights, their relationship to each other and to the target are important things for shooters to factor in order to shoot accurately and in order to read the gun and know where the shot went. Another reason is it takes time for your eyes to truly focus on one out of 3 things. I don’t think that for any practical application of a pistol you have that kind of time. What I believe in and what I teach is to see the things that matter in the order that they appear when shooting; rear sight – front sight – target. What I suggest and have found that is very easy for shooters to do is to SEE all 3 and their relationship to each other. The next time you are shooting just put the gun in front of your eyes and SEE rear sight – front sight – target. Don’t over think it or TRY to focus on all 3 just let your eyes do what they are capable of and see all 3.

Another thing I talk about in courses and we explore as shooters is how much sight alignment you need. For most practical pistol shooting 15 yards and in ( I use 8.5” x 11” copy paper as targets) you don’t need perfect sight alignment. For the most part If can see your front sight through your rear sight and it’s on the target you will hit an 8.5” x 11” target 15 yards away. There are a couple factors that can effect this though. One of course is trigger manipulation. The core of marksmanship is to put sights on the target and press the trigger without moving the gun off the target. For most dedicated shooters that isn’t a problem. The other factor is the amount off possible error in sight alignment due to the size of the sights. Many pistol sights these days have really wide rear notches and some even have wide rear notches with a narrow front. These combinations allow for more possible error. Inside 15 yards misaligned sights that are placed in the middle of the target will hit. This is not the case as the target gets smaller or further away and therefore smaller. A couple issues I see with many pistol sights are as follows, a wide front sight say .125 or .135 (most night sights are in this range) the wide front will cover a lot of what you need to shoot at distance. With a wide rear to “ let in more light and make it easy to see fast and work with old eyes etc” you have more opportunity for slight misalignment that will cause big misses at distance. A combination of a wide rear and a narrow front creates a lot of opportunity for sight misalignment that can matter within reasonable pistol shooting distances ( I consider 50 yards and in reasonable). Also added into the equation is sight height. After a lot of experimenting with sights I’m not a fan of tall sights because of what I see as a very sloppy sight picture.

What I prefer and believe make things much easier is less difference between the size of the front and rear sight and nothing taller than .180 on the front. For my style of shooting I want to see through the rear to the front to the target and It be good enough from 10 yards to 50 yards. For the smaller/further targets I don’t want to have to take time to ensure that the sights are good enough by visually centering them. A few years ago I started working on what I call performance grouping at 50 yards. What I wanted to be able to do was deliver 5 hits on a 12” steel target at 50 yards as quickly as possible with accountability. What I found frustrating was misses when what I saw though the gun should have been good enough. The issue was the difference in the width of the rear sight notch and the front sight. I had to take more time between shots to visually center the sights that I felt necessary. Here is a great exercise to demonstrate the issue with small sight mis-alignment due to wide rear notches. If you have or know someone who has a pistol with a red dot and iron sights, this is a great tool! Put the red dot on a target at 25 yards or greater distance, now look down at the irons. Next mis-align the irons even slightly and see where the red dot goes. It’s an eye opener to see what the slight mis-alignment of sights will do at distance even though what you are looking at in the irons should be good enough, the dot tells a different story. Now here’s another experiment to see if it if sight alignment or your trigger manipulation is a bigger issue for smaller targets. Put the red dot on target and run the trigger in dry fire 5 shots in a row, run the trigger at different speeds even. If you are using a Glock use a zip tie to keep the gun out of battery so you can manipulate the trigger. What I have found is that most shooters can run the triggers fast at 50 yards and not move the dot off target. My conclusion after a lot of work and experiments with sights is that most modern pistol sights have a much looser sight picture than I prefer and more than I believe is necessary. If you go shopping for pistol sights you may read things like “ for old eyes or bad eyes or for fast shooting you NEED wide rear notches and or narrow front sights” I did some experimenting with sight sizes. I had a 5” pistol with a .125 wide front sight and installed a .115 wide rear sight on it. Now all the books would say this won’t work. What I discovered for myself was that it did work for all my shooting. I’m a big fan of fast and accurate shooting and this sight combination didn’t slow me down a bit running USPSA stages and when I went to 50 or 100 yards there was still a bit more air on either side of the sight picture than I wanted. But it was much easier to make 50 and 100 yard hits with this rear sight than with the .140 wide rear notch that was on the pistol. Now I do have decent vision at 40 years old so I had to test this theory with some “old eyes” I was training with a fella in his 50s that had never shot fiber optic front sights, so I let him shoot the gun I was just talking about. I should mention that this guy told me at the beginning of the day that he had “old eyes”. I didn’t tell him anything about the size of the rear compared to the front, we just shot. Through the day he performed very well across the board from super fast target transition work to smaller targets at distance. When we were done for the day I told him about the sights, he was surprised that it worked. I let several other shooters shoot that gun with similar results. I think they wouldn’t have tried it or would have said they had issues if I had told them about the sight specs before they shot. It would have all been mental limitations they imposed upon themselves based on theory that they read or heard without exploring for themselves. If you recall it was once believed that the world was flat…..

So after all my experimenting with sights and not being able to buy what I thought would work very well I decided to pursue having some made different. I was very fortunate and ran into a dude willing to build me something different. What I wanted was a set of sights that made it very easy to see what you need for fast and accurate pistol shooting from the muzzle to 50 yards. I now have my own sight design in production and you can check them out on my website www.wayofthegun.us.

Well that’s all the typing I can do for a day, I definitely have more info on this stuff to share come out to the range sometime and let’s explore! Thanks Y’all!

-Frank Proctor

Frank Proctor has served over 18 years in the military, the last 11 of those in US Army Special Forces. During his multiple combat tours in Afghanistan & Iraq he had the privilege to serve with and learn from many seasoned veteran Special Forces Operators so their combined years of knowledge and experience has helped him to become a better operator & instructor. While serving as an instructor at the Special Forces Advanced Urban Combat Course he was drawn to competitive shooting. He has since earned the USPSA Grand Master ranking in the Limited Division and Master ranking in the IDPA Stock Service Pistol division. He learned a great deal from shooting in competition and this has helped him to become to become a better tactical shooter. Frank is one of the few individuals able to bring the experiences of U.S. Army Special Forces, Competitive Shooting, and veteran Instructor to every class.

All this experience combines to make Frank Proctor a well-rounded shooter and instructor capable of helping you to achieve your goal of becoming a better shooter.

Gunfighter Moment is a weekly feature brought to you by Alias Training & Security Services. Each week Alias brings us a different Trainer and in turn they offer some words of wisdom.