If you’re someone who has recently taken up shooting or marksmanship as a personal interest or hobby, working on your aim is probably one of your priorities. Arms and ammunition as well as associated equipment has evolved a lot over the past few decades.
When it comes to aim, you’ve got all sorts of accessories to help make life simpler. From recoil reducing muzzle brake to red dot sights and high magnification scopes and optics, there’s no shortage of equipment to help ensure you hit your mark.
At the same time, being a good marksman is about the skills you possess and have worked on as well as the equipment you use.
The Advantages of Starting Simple
Iron sights are the most basic and probably the oldest aiming mechanism known when it comes to modern weaponry. An iron sight aiming system commonly comprises of two parts.
The front known as the poster blade that sits on the nozzle of your pistol or rifle bore. The second being the dual rear sights closer to the grip or handle of your firearm.
It is commonly believed among fire arm enthusiasts, military instructors and accomplished markspersons that using iron sights when starting out is a good idea. This is for a few reasons.
More to Attend To
Training with and improving your aim using iron sights requires that you be attentive to more than one aspect of your positioning. Where scopes simply require you to find the target within your crosshairs and red dot sights need only positioning of the laser mark, aiming with iron sights takes a little more.
For starters, you don’t use a scope. You use your naked eye to peer through the space between the rear sights to begin aiming.
You need to first align your target with the poster blade. You must then position your poster blade dead center in relation to the rear sights and align the three both vertically and horizontally. Depending on distance, you may even need to raise your barrel slightly to hit your mark (as you might with other modern optics).
Steadies Your Hand
Given the effort it takes, what aiming with iron sights does is it steadies your hand. This way, when you do switch to magnification scopes or red dots, you’ll find it a whole lot easier to hit your target as opposed to if you had to train on the latter from the get go.
It’s kind of like making the switch from billiards to pool or from driving stick to an automatic. For this reason you also perform better regardless of what kind of sights or optics you’re using.
Makes All the Difference
Many military markspersons and accomplished sports shooters will agree that starting your aim training on iron sights is really instrumental in how your skill develops. Most people who train on and perfect iron sight aiming can hit their marks further out and with more ease than those who don’t in the long run.
They are also known to be more reliable in combat situations when equipped with modern scopes and gear as the orthodox way (iron sights) was actually more complicated! Last but not least, even when modern equipment fails, falters or gets damaged, you can always rely on those irons!
