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Comment by fenring | Hacker News Reader

Yes, for pistol shooting iron sights (just learned the english term, that’s what I meant by “focus on pistol” ;) ) are what you have to focus on. The target is black bulls eye, clearly visible on a white background, even if it’s blurry.Then you aim just below the bulls eye - so what you se is black iron sights (vision focus, sharp), then small white gap, then blurry black bulls eye. And then you learn to have all those elements spaced exactly the same on every single repetition.

You don’t have to track target, as it’s always in the same spot.

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I know you must know this, but for others reading, this also is not a static view, like in a video game, but the sights are 'swimming' around usually in a figure 8 pattern as your heart beats. It is not just a matter of getting a good sight picture, but breaking the trigger when things aren't perfectly lined up, because by the time the mechanism fires and the projectile leaves the barrel you will no longer be lined up. This is worse for air pistol due to the slow velocity of the pellet.

In other words it is not like you are holding a tiny dot in the exact center of a circle, it is a messy blur of trying to hold 3 things in alignment where the front sight is about as big as the entire bullseye (hence why you aim below, so there is white visible, you would otherwise obscure the target entirely.

If you do it well, you are consistently hitting something the size of the period at the end of this sentence from 10 meters away (again, air pistol).

That’s for bullseye style shooting. In other pistol formats like ipsc sight focus shooting is too slow. Target focused is the way top competitors shoot.

What I’m curious about is the rapid fire Olympic event. It’s not particularly fast as these things go but very accurate (though less so than the other events).

It's basically the same, just with a lot more of a "good enough" attitude to aiming. So you really mostly on a muscle memory to have pistol somewhere in a target, then aim using iron sights. For whole 8,6 or 4s you focus vision on a iron sights. During the first phase - moving your arm up from the 45 degree position, you look in the target direction so you know when to start, then focus your vision on iron sights in the end phase of raising arm motion so you are almost immediately ready to aim and pull the trigger, then just move you eyes to the next target, but with "locked" focus (at the distance of iron sights, not target), so again, arm moves to the target area and you can aim and shoot.

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