Hitting A Moving Target While Focusing On Your Front Sight

Hey guys, I’m retired Navy SEAL Chris Sajnog and the founder of The New Rules of Marksmanship training system. In this post, I will teach you how hitting a moving target works while you are focusing on your front sight. Now let’s go ahead and get started.

I wanted to put this post together because I’ve got so many of you that understand that it’s important to focus on the front sight if you actually want to hit your target. 

I do get a lot of comments where people say, “Yeah, Chris, that works great on paper targets or Bullseye targets. But it does not work on moving targets or combat shooting.” I am here to give you evidence and prove to you that not only can it be done, but it should be done if you actually want to hit that target.

Ballistic Truths

Now before we get started, we need to agree on a couple of ballistic truths. 

1. When you shoot an open sight system or two-plane sighting system, every time you pull the trigger, you need to align the sights to be able to hit your target. 
2. There are only two ways that you can miss a target when you’re shooting. Those are Angular and parallel shift errors. An angular error means that from the time the bullet leaves the gun, you could completely miss your target very easily with an angular shifter. With a parallel shift error what’s happening is your sight alignment is perfect, but you are not aiming at the exact spot that you want to hit. 
3. Now the last thing that I hope we can agree on is that when you have a firearm with a short sight radius, the easier it is going to be to miss your target. That means that the further the distance gets, your misses are going to get bigger exponentially.

Bubble Test

To prove it and show the difference between sight alignment and sight picture and why it’s so critical to hitting a moving target. I want you to grab a level of some type, just something with a bubble in it. 

What I want you to do is try to track a moving target and also keep your level and bubble straight. The first way is to track the moving target by focusing on it. The second way is to focus on the bubble and track the moving target using your peripheral vision. 

I can guarantee that the bubble stayed steadier when you focused on it and not on the moving target. It going to work the same way with a firearm. Remember if it’s off of its mark thereby even an eighth of an inch, you can completely miss your target. 

Alright, so try hitting a moving target at home with these tips. Have somebody watch you doing both of those. Hopefully, this will convince you and prove to you that not only can you focus on your front sight when you’re shooting a moving target, but you should. So that is all I have for you today. Until next time, keep paving your path to perfection.