Are Pistol Sights Actually Useful For Self-Defense?

hello people of earth i am chris baker from luckygunner.com today we are continuing our exploration of some of the myths and realities of armed confrontations last week we tried to figure out at what distance most justified defensive shootings take place the typical range seems to be roughly three to five maybe three to seven yards today we are now gonna look at whether we need to use our sights on our handgun in order to hit a threat at that range and considering the speed and chaos involved in these encounters is using the sights even feasible to begin with of course not every encounter is typical there have been incidents that took place at ranges closer than three yards and some that happened as far out as 25 yards and more some of you guys asked how a defensive shooting could possibly be justified beyond like 20 feet or so there are a lot of reasons that could be the case for example if you're being shot at or even just threatened by someone with a firearm from 50 feet away it might be reasonable to shoot back especially if there is no feasible way to take cover or retreat but most of the so-called long-range self-defense cases that i'm aware of were justified because the person was defending the life of another victim very often a family member or friend who was in much closer proximity to the attacker in those types of situations having some method of accurately aiming your pistol is a dire necessity but those situations are rare most people have limited training time and resources and they want to prepare for the most likely scenarios first since the majority of defensive shootings take place at that roughly 10 to 20 foot range that is where we are focusing our attention today what we're really getting into here is that age old debate between point shooting and sighted fire or you might call it instinctive shooting versus aiming or some other terminology there are several problems with the way this debate usually goes starting with the fact that nobody can seem to agree on what point shooting even means today i am going to use that term very broadly to refer to any shooting that you do without explicitly referencing iron sights an optic a laser or something like that i'm not saying that's necessarily the correct definition it's just the one that i am using for the sake of this discussion another issue with the point shooting debate is that we are often presented with a false dichotomy it's either always use the sights because that is the only way to get hits or always point shoot because in real life nobody can use their sights but all we have to do is listen to feedback from actual gunfight survivors to find that these two extremes are not a reflection of reality most people don't recall ever seeing their sights but oftentimes they still get effective hits and stop the threat anyway some people do vividly recall seeing a sight picture and that tends to get really effective results too a lot of people don't remember one way or the other both methods can be effective depending on the person and the circumstances one more nuance that often gets lost when we talk about sighted fire versus point shooting is that using the sights is not an all or nothing thing a difficult target at long range might call for a perfect textbook site picture when the target is extremely close we don't need the sights at all in between there's a kind of gray area where we might see an imperfect sight picture that we use as just a very coarse reference what we call a flash sight picture i did a whole video on the flashlight picture a couple of years ago with some helpful animations that you might want to check out if you are unfamiliar with that concept there are no strict rules for whether or how much you should rely on the sites at any given distance and distance isn't the only determining factor it's just the most obvious one we might have to deal with a moving target or bad lighting conditions or obstacles or bystanders there are a number of factors that determine the difficulty of the shot the harder the shot is the more we probably need to rely on the sights or some kind of aiming reference i'm about to demonstrate how i personally use iron sights on a pistol at various distances this is not meant to represent what everyone can do or what everyone should do pistol sites and vision work a little differently for everyone even among shooters who are far more skilled than i am i don't think i've heard any two of them describe in exactly the same way what they see when they're shooting my goal here is just to illustrate that there's a lot of ambiguity between always use a hard front sight focus and always point shoot i actually filmed this two different ways the first was with an airsoft pistol with the sights covered and a training partner kenneth here volunteered to be my bad guy and let me shoot at him i wanted to find out at what range i could no longer guarantee good hits without sights this camera perspective gives us a nice visual reference for just how much space would be between me and an attacker at these various distances the difference of just a few feet can be far more significant than i think we sometimes realize unfortunately the little airsoft pellets didn't really show up on our camera with our kudzu jungle backdrop there so to give you a better idea of where my hits are actually going i did a similar exercise at the range with a paper target i used a photographic target with an anatomical overlay because i really wanted to see the difference between a good fight stopping hit and a not so good peripheral hit in hindsight it's not an especially accurate anatomical overlay but it's close enough for what we're doing today at each distance i fired sets of three shots on the timer starting from a high ready position i did four sets of three with the sights covered and four sets of three without the sights covered okay back to our airsoft exercise kenneth is starting out at true contact distance in this case he is about two feet away he is a pretty tall guy six foot three i am five foot nine at this range it may not even be wise to draw the gun at all if it's not already out of the holster he can easily reach out and grab me or my gun so i definitely don't want to extend the gun let alone try to use the sights that is how my gun becomes our gun and that's a really bad place to be defensive shooting at extreme close range is a completely separate discipline all its own it's way outside my lane so i'm not going to go much into that today suffice it to say if you have to shoot from contact distance using your sights is the least of your concerns for more on that topic i suggest looking up some videos with craig douglas or cecil birch on close contact and retention shooting okay now let's back it up to about two yards six feet at this distance it is probably safe to bring my gun to full extension at eye level it kind of depends on what he's doing and whether he is attempting to close that distance i might need to pull the gun back in if he gets too close either way i don't need sights to get a good high center chest hit on my paper target at two yards it doesn't make any difference whether or not my sights are covered i'm not looking at them i can actually fire the gun at chest level from here if i really need to trigger control does still matter at this distance you can see i yanked a couple of shots really low but that has nothing to do with the sights for the most part i'm getting good hits some of them are a little higher than what we might consider ideal but there's still a lot of important anatomy up there now let's go to nine feet the proverbial three yards here i can definitely go to full extension without the risk of handing him my pistol i'm still not paying any attention to the sights at this point again you absolutely can miss completely at nine feet with bad trigger work you can see here on both my paper targets i yanked a shot low and to the right but overall there is not a significant difference in the quality of my hits here for sights covered versus uncovered visually i am vaguely aware of the orientation of the slide which some people would say is a form of aiming even this close up i do think it's easier to get hits if the gun is positioned between my eyes and the thing i'm looking at but this still feels pretty much like what i would call point shooting once we move out from three yards to five yards my ability to get accurate hits without the sights starts to decline i'm not missing him but some of the hits are kind of borderline on the paper targets things still look mostly good on both sides unsighted i'm getting more peripheral hits than i would like i've got one way up here on the ear that was almost a complete miss i've got another three in the shoulder that are not ideal for stopping an attacker at five yards i definitely have a sight picture it's a pretty rough one but i am using the sights sometimes my eyes will be focused on the target at this distance and the sights both the front and rear will be fuzzy usually though i prefer a front sight focus at five yards but that doesn't always happen that's just one of those things that varies a whole lot from one shooter to the next without sights the decline continues at seven yards i am hitting him but sometimes those hits are in the shoulder or down in the gut if he were to start moving around at this range i would have a much harder time hitting him at all on my seven yard paper targets we can really see the disparity between sighted and unsighted without the sights i technically managed to keep all the hits on the bad guy but just barely about half of those hits are peripheral hits the thing to really pay attention to here is the time difference it did not take me any longer to use the sights than to point shoot but the accuracy was much better most of the old point shooting techniques were developed way back when iron sights on handguns were extremely small and very difficult to see with modern high visibility iron sights there's really no reason i have to rely on point shooting at seven yards if i've already got the gun up at eye level i can see the sights the real paradox of the point shooting versus sighted fire debate is that learning to quickly acquire a sight picture essentially trains you to point the gun at the target if you practice sighted fire the correct way you will automatically get pretty good at point shooting at least at the kind of ranges where a lot of people claim you will not have time to see the sights if i was unable to see my sights for some reason or if my red dot on my pistol and my irons both have somehow failed i can just do what i always have done in practice and i'll usually get some pretty good hits practicing with sights doesn't mean i suddenly forget how to shoot if i can't see him on the other hand if you primarily practice point shooting it does not make you better at sighted fire if a situation calls for a higher level of precision you will have limited your ability to call on that precision on demand so there is a place for point shooting you might want to try it on occasion just to see if you can do it it doesn't hurt to practice it every now and then it is probably what i would teach a novice if they were realistically never going to practice again but if pistol shooting is a skill you intend to improve most of your time should probably be spent on sighted fire guys i hope you have found this to be a helpful spin on the point shooting debate if so hit that like button be sure to subscribe to our channel and buy some ammo from luckygunner.com because all i want to do is and uh take your money

Channel: Lucky Gunner Ammo

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Id: xfX0TmMMJFc

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021