There is a lot of dogma in the training community – both on the Gun side as well as the martial arts side – with a lot of black-and-white statements being made. Examples like “95% of fights go to the ground”, “No private citizen ever gets into an entangled fight with weapons”, “If you carry a revolver You’re gonna get killed because you’re going to run out of ammo”, “No private citizen will ever reload in the middle of a fight (strange how those last two things get said by the same people over and over again and they don’t quite see the disconnect in their own statements)”, and many other similar pronouncements.

The problem is that there is no data behind any of those assertions that meet the standard of the scientific method. Generally data that is presented as the truth in the training community results from either self-selected cherry picking that always seems to meet the preferred narrative of the selector, or it’s anecdotal – In other words “I watched a lot of videos”. Neither of those are empirical evidence. There are very few people in the training community that Has a depth of background with knowledge and experience In the scientific method, and they don’t understand how to gather data or to analyze it. I’m in the middle of writing an extended article explaining the scientific method in Layman’s terms, but for now let’s just leave it at this.

One point of contention in the community though can actually be solved fairly easily with evidence that meets the standard of the scientific method is the argument that pistol mounted optics (PMO) make it easier for a new shooter to get good at shooting quicker than iron sights. 

This debate rears its head fairly frequently with the virulently Pro-PMO people saying of course that’s true, while those who may or may not  be favorable to PMOs will argue that either iron sights are easier or there is no practical difference in the learning curve. However,  rather than continue this debate ad infinitum with just raging arguments and no facts, we can solve it without a lot of hassle or extensive preparations. 

Here’s the science based solution. We need a decent size group – I’d say anywhere from 20 to 50 people – and then using a random number generator we can split them into two equal groups. All of them will need to have no experience in shooting handguns, and preferably they have no experience in any shooting of any kind, but that may be a bit difficult to arrange. Sometimes reality makes true data gathering a pain in the posterior. Then we can pick a time standard for how long their instruction will be. For example, we can say we will do an instructional period of 16 hours. Then we decide on a handful of metrics that we can use to track progress. Perhaps a combination of the FBI qualification, An El Presidente, a Bill Drill, and possibly a Vickers Test. We would need a few different metrics to ensure completeness, but 3-5 along these lines would be an excellent choice. 

Then we take one of the groups and put them with an experienced PMO instructor, and the other group is put with an instructor with long experience teaching people to shoot with iron sights.

Put both groups through the 16 hours training, run them all through our metrics, and then compare the results of the two groups. That is not a difficult experiment to run and that actually meets the rigorous standards of the Scientific Method. With that you now have data to say one way or the other, yes PMO’s make it easier for new shooters, or no, there’s no real difference. 

Again to be clear, the group learning on iron sights must be taught by someone without a bias against iron sights. This is where the data can easily get corrupted. Having an extremely pro-PMO instructor teaching the iron sight group violates every aspect of true data collecting. 

The study is not that hard to run as long as you have at least two instructors who are seriously interested in the truth and are willing to put just a bit of time into it. As a true student of what works in the real world, I for one would love to see this. Unfortunately in today’s Social Media driven Paradigm, controversy and Clickbait rule supreme.  I doubt a study such as this will ever be done, even as simple as it is.Too many instructors (on both sides of the debate) don’t actually want to know the truth, they just want to present the narrative they prefer. 

But I can dream…..