Don’t fool yourself. Even “big” sights don’t cover an appreciable percentage of the target at reasonable distances.
What’s that old saying? A lie, told often enough, becomes truth?
We gun people are often guilty of a related thing. That would be passing along hearsay comments over and over, until they become assumed fact.
Some of the things that I’ve heard a thousand times relate to gun sights. You know, observations like “Big Dot sights are too big to be useful”or “they’re not precise enough!”I got a bug up my butt to put some of these handgun sight myths to the test so I could start to separate truth from hearsay.
Let’s take a look at a few of the more common handgun sight myths.
Big Sights Aren’t Precise Enough
To test this potential myth, I figured it was a good time for the first annual Shooting Illustrated Math Fair. In this inaugural event, we’re going to use really basic geometry to see exactly how big that Big Dot sight looks down range. In other words, at realistic handgun shooting distances, how much of your target is covered by the Big Dot sight?
Since this is supposed to be fun and informative, I won’t be a buzz kill and share the math in excruciating detail, but it’s pretty simple. We know that the shooter’s eye is the starting point. We also know that this particular Big Dot Sight is .18 inches in diameter because I measured it with my reloading calipers. We also know, that in my specific case, the front sight is about 24.5 inches from my eye when I’m shooting. Seriously, I measured with a yardstick. So now we have a proportional relationship. At a distance of 24.5 inches, the sight is .18-inch wide. As a result, we can easily figure out how big that sight appears at other distances.
Here’s how much the Big Dot covers at various ranges. Keep in mind that the Big Dot is a circle, so “coverage”of the target down range is also circular. The sizes I relate below reflect the diameter of that circle.
Point Blank (Touching the target): .18 inch
3 yards: .8 inch
5 yards: 1.3 inches
10 yards: 2.6 inches
15 yards: 4.0 inches
25 yards: 6.6 inches
50 yards: 13.2 inches
100 yards: 26.4 inches
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