- Unsighted fire happens, and more often than we often like to admit.
- Practicing sighted fire helps improve your shooting ability even if you don’t focus on your sights under extreme stress.
- Practicing sighted fire diligently can maximize your potential to see and use those sights under extreme stress.
Practicing sighted fire will improve your unsighted fire, but it doesn’t work the other way around.
Firearm User Network 
karlrehn
Jan 14, 2015 @ 11:40:27
If someone gets one sight picture and slaps the trigger 2, 3 or more times, seeing the top of the slide, or the front sight bouncing around during the follow up shots, but doesn’t wait for the sights to settle, just firing again as soon as fast as the trigger finger can move, is that sighted or unsighted?
Under stress you aren’t going to shoot your best. You will go too fast and you will fail to see a sight picture for every shot. The solution is not to practice shooting badly. The solution is to learn how to shoot A’s, push the speed as hard as you can until you can’t hit A’s, back off a few percent and work on consistency at the fastest speed you can hit A’s. That builds the best combination of speed and accuracy. It’s almost impossible to find a case in which someone was killed or injured because they were 0.1 or 0.3 seconds late, but there are plenty in which the time and ammo wasted firing misses had terrible consequences for the shooter.
To paraphrase Tom Givens: if you believe there’s not enough to time to aim, there’s not enough time to miss, either. If you think you don’t have that extra 0.1 to find an acceptable sight picture, you sure don’t have 0.5 to 1.0 seconds to fire a follow up after you miss.
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John M. Buol Jr.
Jan 14, 2015 @ 13:08:40
More sage advice from Karl Rehn.
>> …is that sighted or unsighted?
Did this someone get decent hits?
If yes, who cares? They saw what they needed to see.
If no, who cares? They didn’t see what they needed to see and/or excessively messed up fundamentals.
If you believe there’s not enough to time to aim, there’s not enough time to miss, either. If you think you don’t have that extra 0.1 to find an acceptable sight picture, you sure don’t have 0.5 to 1.0 seconds to fire a follow up after you miss.
This should be engraved or written in stone somewhere that gun owners can read.
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Anonymous
Jan 18, 2015 @ 20:53:30
Karl, good advice, I agree nearly 100%
Where I quibble is in the oft-made statement “Under stress you will (fill in the blank)”.
While humans have predictable tendencies in the main, there is no way of knowing exactly what a given person will do, or what effects they will suffer, in a given situation until it happens. I’ll go so far as to agree with something along the lines of “Under stress you MAY experience the following effects (fill in the blank) and you will PROBABLY default (fall or rise) to your level of training and cold skill.” There are too many examples of people rising to incredible ability under stress to make blanket statements of negative results. I guess one can only train hard in mind and body and strive for the best under any circumstance.
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John M. Buol Jr.
Jan 19, 2015 @ 09:41:20
Very well said, Anonymous.
One can only train hard in mind and body and strive for the best under any circumstance. Finding places to strive to perform your best among like-minded peers is a great way to tip the odds in your favor.
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Colorado Pete
Jan 19, 2015 @ 22:16:21
Oops, Anonymous was me. One of these days I’ll figure out this internet thing.
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John M. Buol Jr.
Jan 19, 2015 @ 22:58:04
No worries!
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