We see a lot of people new to red dots (whether rifle or pistol) struggle with “finding the dot.” The challenge with this is twofold. The first and most obvious is that if you can’t see the dot, you don’t have an aiming solution. The second is a little more nuanced and many find themselves unknowingly in this position, they… “find the dot.”
The trouble with finding the dot is that it takes away considerably from the benefits of the tool. If you are actively searching for that little red glow, in many respects… it may as well be a front sight. The likelihood of you switching back to a real threat (or target) focus afterwards are pretty slim.
To avoid both of these problems, we have to build a presentation that delivers the sight (and therefore the red dot) to our eye. The good news is that this is relatively simple.
We start aiming the gun when we establish a visual relationship with the target. Think of this as a line drawn between your eye and wherever it is that you want the bullet to strike. Our next task is to interrupt that line, with the gun. What we’ve typically done with iron sights is interrupt the line enough to “pick up” the front sight and then refine the direction of point by comparing it to the rear sight.
To make the most of a red dot sight, we have to remove the need to “negotiate” with the gun to get it aligned with what we are looking at. We do this by creating a presentation that puts the pistol or rifle on a course that intersects the center of our focus without actively directing it there. While there are a lot of words being used to describe it here… it’s a very easy thing to do.
For most of us it means that we have to consider our grip if it’s a pistol and the stock position if it’s a rifle.
So now that you understand the “why,” let’s talk about the “how.”
Neutral Presentation: Pistol
The strength of a red dot sight is that it largely removes the “negotiation” requirement from the shooter. We no longer have to find the front sight and nest it in the context of the rear sight. That complex job has been reduced to simply making the red dot available somewhere along our visual plane. This is an important distinction: available versus driven. If we are “actively” driving (delivering inputs based on information from the gun) the red dot to our target, we are reducing the effectiveness of the tool.