Old eyes and handguns

Thanks Mark, that was a good article, with some very valid points, especially for beyond the simple target shooting venue.

Knowing you can shoot reasonably well without your glasses to me, is more important than shooting tiny groups with them.

As was said in the article.....

"… if you want to improve and maintain your shooting skills, you do need to go to the range regularly for dedicated practice, just as you need to go to the gym regularly to stay in shape."

Doing so, increases the likelihood of doing well should you be without them, since you have the muscle and brain memory ingrained into your psyche.
 
I wear bifocals and I have to tip my head back to be able to focus on the front sight through the reading portion of the lenses, it's a pain and it makes the target much more blurry than it would normally be. A couple of posts mentioned red dots, I have a Trijicon RMR02 mounted on my FNP45 Tactical and it works very well. The thing to keep in mind is that shooting with a red dot requires you to focus on the target, not your front sight like you would with iron sights. Your target is in focus and you superimpose the dot on the target. Both the target and the dot are on the same focal plane so they will both be in focus at the same time. With this set up a can keep my head level and look through the upper/distance part of my glasses. I carried this rig on duty for a couple of years before recently retiring from LE, and have been very pleased with it, now it does night stand duty.
 
I have issues with glasses, whenever I try to see the sights with them I can't keep focus at all. I'm in my twenties so for me it was easier to just switch to contacts. Now I can shoot with no problem. To me this is the only real solution unfortunately. My father is pushing 60 and has good eyesight but just can't focus in dimlighting. He won't wear glasses so I'm thinking of just buying him a laser guide rod and calling it a day. :o
 
Just a follow-up, I tried wearing 1.25 diopter reading glasses (cheap from Walmart) at an indoor range this afternoon, and big improvement - maybe enough for now. That means I can't focus on the target, which is annoying since for precise shooting I go in/out, rear sight to front sight to target and back, before settling in on the front sight. But I guess at some point our ability to do that goes away forever, it's either close or far at least indoors, and getting the sights in focus is more important. Next time I will remove one of the lenses though, so I can see the target with one eye without taking the glasses off. Slightly lower power might work even better, but 1.25 was the weakest I could find.
 
I was teaching a shooting school recently. A female officer was doing ok, but I could tell she had more potential. I asked her "how old are you?"
She said 43. I said hold on a sec. Came back and handed her a pair of 1.25 readers. Instant massive improvement.

Said she was going to the eye doc the next week. That's all it took.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top