I was in a basic handgun class recently and we were explaining sight options. One of the students suddenly and excitedly started talking about laser sights. ‘You just need to shine the laser at the target, and whatever the laser is pointing at (assuming it is correctly sighted in) your bullets will hit’, he enthusiastically assured us. He’d seen a video on a laser sight supplier’s website and so ‘knew’ this to be true.
I wish I could say that is the only time I’ve come across such a misperception. I’ve had plenty of people come into the gun store and want to buy laser sights for their pistols to improve their accuracy.
Alas, this is all completely wrong. It is easy to understand how the misperception arises – there is no way to misunderstand where a laser dot is located, and so surely it makes aiming a gun a simplistic and impossible to get wrong thing.
To understand where the error in the logic of this misperception creeps in, we need to look at a broader picture of what constitutes accurate shooting. There are many different factors that go into good marksmanship, and a laser sight only addresses two of them.
Stance, grip, posture, breath control and all sorts of other factors are minor contributors to accurate marksmanship, and if you want to become a competition shooter and winner, you’ll obsess over every last factor that goes into improving your accuracy. But in a ‘combat accuracy’ self defense scenario, where you’ll be under time pressure and general extreme stress, there are only three factors that matter to getting rounds acceptably on target.
The three key factors are sight alignment, sight picture, and trigger control. And guess which of these three factors is the most important? Yes, trigger control.
At typical self-defense distances (ie anywhere from ‘bad breath’ distance out to perhaps 21 ft) and when shooting for ‘center of mass’ (ie not a small bullseye but instead a relatively large space about 8″ wide and 12″ high) you can have your sights only very approximately on the center of mass and still score hits within that zone. You don’t need and don’t have time for extreme precision with your aiming.
But what you must make time for, and what you do need, is good trigger control. To put it in the most simple terms, you need to be able to squeeze the trigger without jerking it or moving the gun as part of the trigger squeeze. This sounds easy in theory, but it is difficult in practice, particularly when you add some hard-to-control flinching into the process.
Here’s a video we created, using a SIRT training pistol, that demonstrates the challenge.
As you can see from the video, it is relatively easy to get the laser dot pointed at the center of the bullseye target. The challenge is keeping the pistol aligned at the center of the bullseye when you pull the trigger. The two big problems are not gently squeezing the trigger to get the ‘surprise break’ when the gun eventually goes ‘bang’, and flinching/jerking/anticipating the gun’s recoil and moving the entire pistol and its aiming point in the process.
Laser sights help you with the easiest part of good marksmanship – sight alignment and sight picture. But this is the part you least need help with. Unfortunately, they don’t help you at all with the hardest part – good trigger control.
To improve your trigger control, you need to practice extensively with dry firing, and then on the range, with your gun loaded with a random selection of blanks and live rounds (or empty chambers in a revolver) so that you never know, each time you pull the trigger, if the gun will go ‘bang’ or ‘click’. This exercise will clearly show you how much flinch/jerk you are putting into your trigger movements.