Sight Alignment and Sight Picture

Let's talk about sight alignment and sight picture. First, starting with the fact that sight alignment and sight picture are two different things. Now, this is whether you're talking about marksmanship, high-level precision shooting, competition shooting, defensive shooting, whatever, there is a difference between sight alignment and sight picture. So, let's talk about sight alignment first. Sight alignment is going to be the relationship between the front and rear sight on your pistol or on a rifle, it can work the same way. What we're looking for here is that there is equal amounts of light on either side of that front sight post inside the notch of the rear sight and that the sights are even across the top. And what that is gonna give us is an alignment of the gun along what we're looking at. Now, what we're gonna be looking at, of course, is the threat, and that's where sight picture comes in. So, when we talk about, let's say that we're gonna have this bad guy here, and talk about sight picture, now what we wanna do is take that front sight, and superimpose it over what we want to hit. We still have the alignment, of course, in the background, but now, our focus is going to be very specifically on the front sight. So, we've got a hard focus on the front sight, we're still looking for him, and I'm gonna make that a bit wider again, just compensating for my lack of art skill, now I've got equal amounts of light either side, even across the top, superimposed over that which I wanna hit, and when we're doing sighted fire, we're gonna maintain our sight picture throughout a smooth trigger press. Now, let's look at this in three dimensions this way. I've got my two rear sight posts, I've got the front sight, and then we'll stick with red for the bad guy. So, I've got my bad guy out here. So, my hard focus is on the front sight, and what you usually see in the artist's rendering, or any kind of photography that represents this, is that the rear sight is actually a little bit blurry, and the target is definitely gonna be out of focus, because you can only focus at one distance at any high level. The other thing that's important to remember is if we're going to try to align these three things in space in front of our eye, we need to make sure that we're closing our support sight eye, or the eye that's not behind that front sight, because if this eye is turned sideways, we end up with a double image, a ghost image, of the threat out there, and possibly even a hard time getting even sight alignment. We need that to be linear so whenever you're doing sighted fire from a defensive standpoint especially, go ahead and close an eye, we're not worried about peripheral information, we're very focused on that person that's trying to hurt us, or the person we care about. We need to get that hit. So remember, there's a difference between sight alignment and sight picture, and to have both working for you in a defensive situation, you're gonna wanna close one eye.