Phil Wong: Reduced-Vision Shooters
Phil Wong of Gator Farm Tactical writes:
If my glasses get broken or knocked off in a fight, I’m down to 20/400+ vision (my optometrist wouldn’t get more specific than that, he just said that with optical prescriptions as strong as mine, it’s pretty much academic when you get higher than 20/400). Without my glasses, I can still distinguish shapes and colors out to 40-50 yards, but I cannot distinguish details like lettering or facial features past about 5-7 yards. Since my vision is correctable to better than 20/200, I’m not technically “legally blind” without my glasses, but it’s still pretty bad.
In November 2013, I shot the qualification course of fire for the Massad Ayoob Group MAG-40 class with my Glock 19, OEM Meprolight night sights, and non-prescription lenses in my shooting glasses, in front of about 25-30 students, staff instructors, and Massad F. Ayoob himself – just to see how I might be able to shoot under pressure without my corrective lenses. My final score was 297/300, which means that I had zero misses and only 3 shots outside of the A-zone of a standard IPSC cardboard target, over 60 shots fired at distances between 4 yards and 15 yards. I wasn’t nearly as fast as Mas and the other instructors, but I met the allotted time limits and still got the hits on target. Honestly, the hardest thing to do was to make sure I shot the right target – I had to consciously count targets from the end of the line before each string of fire, to distinguish between my target and a couple dozen other identical targets. As long as I don’t get attacked by a bad guy wearing the exact same clothes as an innocent bystander, I should be OK…
Bottom line – don’t assume that you know what someone else is or isn’t capable of, and don’t assume that you can or can’t do something until you try.
He also linked to an article called The Gun Debate, Why It Matters for the Blind by Greg Trapp at the National Federation for the Blind.