As a firearms instructor, I spend a lot of time explaining the importance of proper sight alignment and sight picture. There is a reason these aspects are part of the core fundamentals of marksmanship. If your sights aren’t aligned correctly, your bullet impact is going to be somewhere you did not intend for it to be. In training, when shooting at paper, this is a minor issue that can be corrected. In reality, if you had the same sight misalignment in a self-defense shooting situation, it could mean the difference between hitting your attacker or accidentally hitting an innocent bystander.

I’m not going to go into detail about all the basic fundamentals of marksmanship in this article – just understand that proper sight alignment is extremely important. If you are a firearms instructor, you have probably spent a significant amount of time drawing pictures on targets, holding up your fingers like castles, and drawing in the dirt to try and explain the concept of “equal height, equal light” to a group of novice shooters.