Surprisingly a gifted shooter says no?
Aiming is useless.
According to Rob Leatham 6x IPSC World Champion!
That’s right coming from Rob Leatham. When it comes to shooting, few are at Rob Leatham’s caliber so when he’s got something to say about shooting, we should pay attention. Or, shouldn’t we? Without questioning Rob’s shooting ability, there has been debates on the different school of thoughts when it comes to “instinctive” shooting to precise shooting, or, accuracy shooting to speed shooting.
Probably one of the best marksmen, FBI agent Delf A “Jelly” Bryce was an incredible shot without using sights. He actually confided to a friend that he had developed his eye muscles to adjust his focus to follow and “see” the bullets clearly as they travelled to the blurred target. This allowed him to see where his bullet would land, right before he pulled the trigger, sort of like an imaginary laser sight.
A long time ago I crossed paths with a former Spec Ops guy. What was interesting about him was he didn’t bother to adhere to the recognized techniques or instructions when doing things, and he clearly didn’t believe anybody necessarily knew better than he did how things should be done. Basically when he had something to do, he did whatever felt best to him.
In one incident, he took an adventure cruise, and on each event he ignored all instructions, and did whatever he wanted. At a river crossing, he listened dutifully as the guide took five minutes and laid out exactly how each person would rig their harness, and then hold the ropes they were going to shimmy along to cross over the river, slowly and carefully. Each person went to great lengths to please the guide by following his instructions perfectly. Then his turn came, and he sent the guide apoplectic by just doing whatever he wanted and ad-libbing it, as he zoomed across the ropes.
His tendency stuck with me because I had long before learned the same thing about shooting, and seen it reinforced in other areas. I had grown up shooting from a little kid and became a pretty good shot. Then I had to take a course for a license, and in it they went all the way back to inhale, let half out, align sites, pause, and squeeze. I tried it, and I found I wasn’t a quarter as good as when I simply put the sights on the target and squeezed off the shot.
You see the same thing in weightlifting, where everyone has an idea what the best exercise for something or other is. Everyone is different, and nobody knows exactly what is best for you. Anybody who tells you they know what you should do is full of shit. Some guys get freaky legs off of squats, others need to do lunges, and others can only get them off of leg presses. How do you know what to do? You experiment and find what works for you.
You are your laboratory, and nobody knows better than you how to maximize your unique set of abilities. Never be a slave to authority. Often the authority which asserts itself most strongly is the authority that knows least what it is talking about. Only you can find your path.
To me, this is the phonics vs whole word thing in schools again. To a guy like Leatham or a specops shooter, aiming is a waste of time. It’s a waste of time the same way that phonics are a waste of time for you or I when reading this page.
That doesn’t mean we didn’t start there. It really doesn’t mean new people shouldn’t start there. New shooters should aim. They should aim every shot. At some point, they’ll want to crank a string off quickly, and they will discover that they stopped looking at the sights halfway through. That is when they are ready to move on, just like how a reader knows they are ready to move on when they are reading silently and not sounding words out anymore.
But, like in reading, Dunning-Kruger “experts” see how the best do it, say, “this is what we should teach everyone to do!” and skip right over the fundamentals that allow you do get to that point.
In WW2, when the actual objective was victory, and the military had to get results, point shooting was the method taught to US/UK spies and commandos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_shooting#Fairbairn.2C_Sykes.2C_and_Applegate