You only need to look through the sight, get a correct sight picture, align the sight to the target, and squeeze. With optics, that problem is taken off the table. In other words, rifle length iron sights are better about this than carbine sights, but neither is as quick or intuitive as an optic. The shorter the sight radius, the worse this effect becomes. Unlike what you see in video games, focusing on the front sight will make your target blurry.

When using iron sights, you need to focus on the front sight. After you go through the effort of aligning the iron sights, you need to pick your focus point. The small peep sight actually does an okay job of suppressing parallax, due to its small aperture, but the problem is the front sight. With irons, you have to correctly align the rear aperture and front sight post. Optics removes a difficult variable from the sight picture problem: focus. The simple truth is that using optics makes learning marksmanship much easier. In fact, it makes the learning process more difficult. Neither of these elements requires you to master the iron sights of your rifle first. Again, this remains true for either iron sights or optics. This also means accounting for windage and elevation. Sight Picture means putting the reticle, or front sight post, on the correct point of aim on the target. But it’s equally true for optics, where you need to center the reticle and get to the correct head position for minimizing parallax and scope shadow. For your iron sights, that means properly aligning the rear aperture and the front sight post. Sight Alignment is a correct image seen through your sighting device. You can further break down aiming into two elements: sight alignment and sight picture. Notice that you didn’t see iron sights listed there. The fundamentals of marksmanship are simple. So why have they obtained magical status? That is their sole purpose in life, the same as any other sighting device. Iron sights are merely a sighting device used to estimate the point of impact based on point of aim. Have you come across that? Maybe you’ve even said it. “Start them with the fundamentals, and then work them up to red dots and other optics.” – Said by someone who is wrong While looking for discussions about teaching new shooters, you find someone telling everyone else that you need to start new shooters off on iron sights. Let’s say you’re browsing the marksmanship board of your favorite gun-related forum. We can talk about those separately.īut for now, I need to get something off my chest. Of course red dot sights have different quirks than fixed power magnification or low power variable scopes. When I say optics, I’m referring to anything that isn’t an iron sight. What follows is a quick breakdown of the considerations you make when comparing iron sights and optics for your rifle. I didn’t think I was acting that way, of course. I treated them like some kind of magic voodoo that I had learned, and that magic made me a real rifleman. After attending an Appleseed shoot in 2014, I was all hopped up on learning and preaching iron sights.

A2 small vs big aperture