Author Topic: Vision and the Older Shooter  (Read 608 times)

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Offline Elderberry

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Vision and the Older Shooter
« on: July 20, 2021, 09:47:29 pm »
Sporting Classics Daily by Dick Jones | Jun 10, 2016

It’s a common statement on the range: “I just can’t see the sights anymore.” The problem comes with age, and you don’t have to be retired to experience it. As soon as you notice you need reading glasses, your ability to see iron sights is deteriorating.

As our eyes age, the fluid in them becomes less clear, the muscles that shape the eye to focus get a little weaker, and the iris, the aperture that adjusts for optimum vision in different lighting conditions, gets lazy. All this doesn’t have much effect on our vision under perfect conditions, but it contributes to problems relating to low light and focal distance.

Focal distance is critical when you shoot a gun with iron sights. We begin to have trouble reading the buttons on the remote as we get older, and the front sight seems to grow whiskers. This normally happens in our 40s and can wreak havoc with our ability to shoot well with iron sights.

A good sight picture consists of a sharp focus on the front sight, well aligned in the rear sight, and centered in the target. Even with the eyes of a teenager, the target will lose some of its sharpness due to the eyes’ inability to focus on a close and a distant object at the same time. With good distance vision or corrected vision your eyes will begin to lose the ability to focus in on the close front sight when you hit 40. This may happen so gradually you won’t notice it, but your shooting will suffer noticeably.

Many competitive shooters have known about this a long time, and they often have glasses made with the correct prescription to allow seeing the front sight clearly. I learned this in my mid-40s shooting NRA High Power. I shot a service rifle, and as I got older, I began to have difficulty seeing the front sight. I bought a set of Knobloch shooting glasses and had my optometrist prescribe lenses for them with +.25 and +.5 magnification over my normal distance prescription.

More: https://sportingclassicsdaily.com/vision-and-the-older-shooter/