Front Sight Focus or Point Shooting–Which Is Better?

This debate splits shooters almost as much as the 9mm vs .45 argument.

Both sides make some solid points…
And some that don’t really hold up.

So let’s look at what each method actually does well, where each one falls short, and how to blend them so you get the best of both without wasting time or ammo.

Let’s define terms real quick…

Sighted shooting (front sight focus) is where you focus on the front sight and let the target and rear sight blur. People call it “aimed fire” or “sighted fire,” but that’s not always accurate. All shooting is aiming—whether you’re using sights or not.

Point shooting has a bunch of names: threat focus, combat focus, instinctive, unsighted shooting, hip shooting, and more. It basically means your eyes are on the threat, not the sights, and you’re driving the gun to where you want the rounds to go using alignment you feel instead of verify.

BOTH are aiming…one is primarily kinesthetic/proprioceptive (unsighted) aiming and the other is sighted aiming.

To add to the complexity, many threat focused shooters bring the sights to their sightline and use awareness of the sights to aim, even if they aren’t focused on the front sight.  JUST the name that people use to describe their method of unsighted aiming doesn’t tell you squat without a little explanation of what the words mean to them.

Here’s what each method brings to the table.

Sighted shooting has obvious advantages. If your sights are aligned and you don’t disturb them during the trigger press, you’re guaranteed to hit what you’re aiming at at typical self-defense distances. Sights have been on pistols for over a century for a reason—if they weren’t useful in fights, the military and law enforcement wouldn’t bother with them.

Once you know how to shoot with sights, you can pick up any sighted-in pistol and get accurate first hits. Calling your shots becomes automatic. And when all else fails, you can fall back on sight alignment, sight picture, and trigger press. Because sighted shooting relies on step-by-step fundamentals, most shooters get accurate faster with sights than with point shooting. Even after months without training, you can usually pick up a pistol and get your first aimed hits quickly. As long as time isn’t an issue, you can follow the steps and make it work, even with a less-than-perfect grip.

But sighted shooting has real drawbacks.
It’s not natural to shift your focus off a threat. Under stress, you may not be able to shift focus to your front sight at all. If you wear bifocals, trifocals, or readers, the sight picture gets even more complicated. Sighted shooting can also be slower, and for shooters with visual suppression or cross-dominance, it can be harder—unless you know how to train around it.

Point shooting has its own strengths. In many LE quals, the time limits practically force you to point shoot unless you’ve done serious vision-based training. It’s faster because you don’t have to wait for your eye to accommodate. It’s often easier for shooters with bifocals, trifocals, progressives, or convergence issues. And under actual life-threat stress, your eyes are going to be on the threat, not your front sight.

Cooper said it well:
“Pointer fire is not as hard to learn as sighted shooting, once you realize its range limitations,”
and
“its mastery is often the difference between life and death.”

Point shooting uses more than just your visual system—it also taps into your vestibular and proprioceptive systems.

And here’s a big one: despite what a lot of instructors claim, humans are not naturally accurate pointers. The research going back fifty years is clear. Pointing ability is trained and calibrated, not instinctive.

Of course, point shooting has its downsides too. The average person is not born with the ability to point a gun accurately. If you index your trigger finger on the slide and point at the target, your muzzle will be low. Straighten your finger on the trigger and point, and your muzzle will be high. The only way for finger and muzzle to perfectly match is with hand geometry that doesn’t happen in a correct modern grip. Point shooting takes more reps to develop, fades faster, and is heavily dependent on grip consistency. It also depends on your visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive systems being synchronized. And if you learned point shooting first—and did thousands of reps—it’s hard to switch to sighted shooting under stress if you didn’t build that bridge in training.

So which one is better?

People try to simplify it with “front sight for distance, point shooting up close” or “front sight when you’ve got time, point shooting when you don’t.” Those formulas are neat, but they’re built on the wrong assumption: that you’re supposed to choose one or the other.

If you go all-in on front sight focus, you cap your speed.
If you go all-in on point shooting, you cap your accuracy.
Train both separately and you waste time and ammo.

The real answer is integration…and multiple gears, just like you want/need on a car for different situations.

When you do it correctly, point shooting pre-aligns your sights for sighted shooting. And every sighted shot reinforces your point-shooting alignment. They feed each other. They build each other. And the combination gives you speed and precision faster than either method alone.

Here’s a drill you can try right now that makes this obvious:

Look at a target. Close your eyes. With an inert training platform or your unloaded and cleared pistol with a chamber block and a safe backstop, Draw. Present the pistol the way you always do. Stop when you think you’re aimed. Then open your eyes.

If your sights are aligned, your point shooting is lining up.
If they’re not, you would have missed at speed…possibly when lives depend on performance.

Fixing that alignment—getting your visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive systems to automatically agree—is exactly what I teach in Praxis.

If you want the fastest, most reliable way to blend sighted shooting and point shooting so you get both speed and accuracy without wasting reps, start here: 👉 Praxis Workshop .  You’ll thank me later 🙂

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