Did you miss that? The key-word is "PROJECTED".
We'll get back to that in a minute.
Disclaimer: I'm not bad-mouthing Crimson Trace, 'cause I dont know squat about them. I just figured that this was a brand name which would be familiar to most readers. As far as I know, it don't get no better than Crimson Trace!
But if you don't work with the laser sighting technology .. if you don't practice with it, you're not taking full advantage of the technology. So if you choose to go with that sighting system with your defensive pistol, you absolutely need to change your technique from using sight-alignment to point-shooting and then allow the dot-on-target to ensure target engagement.
A little bit of my meager and spurious background here, to help explain why I'm even writing about this.
A couple of years ago (okay, it was ten years ago) the TCGC Action Shooting program had a two-match-a-month schedule. The first match (Second Saturday?) was a normal/regular IPSC match.
The next match (second Sunday? I don't know, it has been a lot of years between then and now) was usually the same stage setup .. but with different rules of engagement.
That was an excellent way to (a) allow a club to present bi-weekly matches without a lot of administrative overhead, and (b) make the shooters really THINK about stage design and the best way to cheat within the rules. (Okay, a little bit of personal revelation there.)
One weekend, the club presented a fairly simple IPSC Course of Fire, and the participants went away with a very smug attitude.
The next week, the stages were EXACTLY the same, except ... you had to shoot with a Concealed Carry pistol!
This was a wonderful idea! It encouraged people to bring their Carry Guns to a match, and demonstrate their practiced techniques in a "real life scenario".
Some of the shooters performed very well with their carry pistols. But one shooter discovered that his "High Technology" approach didn't work for him at all.
His pistol (5-shot revolver, if it matters) was something that he kept at home, played with from ow and then to maintain his familiarity; but he regularly competed with a very high-tech "Open" gun with a red-dot sight and a huge-stack magazine.
The interesting thing was:
... when he relied on the red-dot-on-the-target sighting system, he spend more time waving the teensy revolver around, trying to find the dot, than he did actually shooting!
Who knew?
Apparently, if you're goimg to use Laser Sighting >tm< rather than iron sights, you need to spend all of your practice time working with the Laser Sighting>tm< technique!
Toward the end of the match, this competitor learned to concatenate "point sight" techniques with "don't use the frigging sight picture/sight alignment" techniques. Sadly, the learning curve was devestating: He did well by the last (sixth) stage, but he was at the bottom of most of the preceding fve stages.
The Moral Is:
If you're going to use a different sighting technology in your "personal carry" environment than what you "usually" practice with ... when the pressure of a confrontational engagement will cause you to rely on what you 'usually" do...
it will be confusing.
So if you have unusual sights on your carry gun, use THAT gun all the time, and NEVER use another gun which features a different sighting system!
2 comments:
Those laser sights are too new fangled for me. Besides what if you were caught in the deep and gooey, you went to shoot and your battery was dead?
Then ... it would be YOUR fault?
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