The evolution of handgun sights in personal weapons

Posted on by

When it comes to choosing the right sight for your personal handgun, there are lots of options available to you. Some sights are made of materials that can’t handle much stress, while some others can last you a life time no matter how rough it is used. Sight systems that are designed without taking into account the physiology of the human eyes, can lead to inaccurate shots. The aim of this post is to help you select the right sights for your personal handgun. There are certain factors that affect the accuracy of handgun during a combat. They are; sight design, movement, vision and application

Vision
Vision play an important role in gun combat, as it is what we use for targeting and scanning. To use a handgun properly, you need to mark a target, build the sight picture, and then align the sight with the target properly. Vasoconstriction (when the eye lacks sufficient oxygen) complicates our ability to focus on a target even when using the best sight

Sight Design
When searching for the right sight for your handgun, it is important to take into consideration the material which the sight is made of. Sights made of plastic or polymer should be completely avoided. It is true that most handguns come with polymer made sights. You just have to replace them with metallic sights. Tritium capsule is another efficient sight design you can consider.

Lighting
If the light isn’t right, using a sight will really be a difficult task. Bright light hinders our ability to efficiently make use of sights due to glare. The sight you finally settle for should be able to help you locate the front sight, with minimal glare problems

Movement
Movement affects your ability to align a sight, build sight picture and keep track of the front sight. Breathing heavily while aiming with a sight, causes the sight picture to shake. Moving rapidly while firing, leads to wobbling of the front sight which will in turn affect the sight picture. If you still fire with the handgun, the front sight will end up losing alignment with your sight during recoil.

Application
The best sight to settle for is the one capable of delivering precise surgical and distant shots. The sight should be designed in such a way that it allows for wide rear sight box, and a front sight that is easy to locate. Also, the sight should be designed in such a way that it allows you see the front sight even when out of focus so as to aid front sight proximity verification. This is very common during vasoconstriction in which a shooter has restrictions in focusing on a target while partially losing the ability to focus on a target using a front sight.
To effectively use a handgun sight, it is important to know how all this elements listed here works.

Presentation of the handgun
Before placing a handgun in line-of-sight, the first thing you will have to do is to fix your sight on the spot you want to hit your bullet with. Line-of-sight is the straight line that runs from your eyes to the area of target. After identifying the target area, the next thing you will want to do is to place your handgun in a straight line by aligning it to the line-of-sight. A straight line is what connects two points. Before a target can be accurately hit with a bullet, your eyes, front sight, rear sight, and target must all be aligned to the line-of-sight, as doing so makes the target clearer.

When aligning a handgun to line of sight, a shooter’s focus often changes from target area to front sight. Owing to the fact that the human eye can’t be multitasked, it is important to know how to put our eye focus in the right perspective, move the focus of our eyes to the front sight in the fastest possible time, and also how to keep the eye properly focused during rapid shooting.

One sure fire way of getting the eye to focus quickly on the front sight quickly, is by eliminating “busy rear sight”. Busy rear sight is a term used to describe the distraction such as dots, squares, colored circles and lots more, that easily catch the attention of the eyes. The bottom line is that anything that steals away the focus of the eyes from the front sight should be eliminated during combat.

Conclusion
If you use any sort of firearm as weapon of personal defense, then you are no different from a gunfighter, and you need to think like one. The right handgun you settle for personal defense, should be one you have faith in. You know you have nothing to be afraid of when your defense weapon is of high class. If your handgun has a well-designed sight, you are sure of speedy response when engaged in a deadly combat.

So the next time you are confronted, never run away. Like I always say, keep your eyes open at all times, play it safe, and never quit a fight.