Optics or Irons for a beginner

Of the new shooters that I have taught they do consistently better with some sort of optic then with iron sights.

I believe it is better to learn to shoot a rifle with an optic or at least aperture sights as opposed to open sights. It will frustrate a newer shooter less and they will see what they are doing faster.

However at some point in development of shooting skills people really should learn the basics of open sights, especially if they have any hope of shooting the majority of handguns.

No advantage to learning with irons first.

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If your eyes are good, definitely learn the irons. If they are not, IMHO you are mostly wasting ammo and in for frustration, so just get a scope, don't look back, and have fun shooting!

Learn both, eventually. But for a beginner, I like optics.

Why?

Because it's easier and more fun. That will keep beginners interested longer, and build confidence which in turn encourages practice and builds skill.

Ahhh...I posted on this yesterday but it didn't go through. The novelties of middle eastern iisp's. Here goes another try...

To start with, 2 inch groups from a factory rifle using non-match grade 22 LR rounds with iron sights at 50 yards seems pretty good to me. If you hunt, you can kill a rabbit with it, and if you don't any coke can is going to get plinked over pretty well.

Still, to improve your shooting with iron sights, you may just need to change your sight picture. Your front sight needs to be totally in-focus when you squeeze your trigger. If you're holding your front sight in the middle of the target, then you may need to change your sight picture to a lollipop like look. Where the top of the lollipop is the black bulls eye and the stick of the lollipop is the front sight. By doing so, you can hold your front sight on a more repetitive position on target vs a best guess where the hold is by a mid target hold.

Anyways, be safe and keep practicing. The practice will improve your shooting ability more than anything else most likely.

L.W.

My eyes are terrible, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20/80 but with glasses or contacts they're fine (20/20) for the most part. I don't really know other than that what constitutes good eyesight for shooting or what else can go wrong with my eyes but anybody with glasses knows you don't know what your missing until its fixed.

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I'm nearsighted, and I shoot irons. I did have to give up on the open sights, which is why I recommended the Tech Sights. I couldn't make my eyes focus on the front sight any more with open sights. My eyes would involuntarily shift focus from the front sight to the rear sight, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do to control it. A military style aperture makes a world of difference, because it basically eliminates the rear sight plane from your field of focus.

A lot of folks will say start with optics because they think you will be a poor shooter at first and optics will make it easier, and you'll have more fun, and this that and the other. Then later, I suppose when you get serious about learning marksmanship, you should graduate to irons? Frankly, although I respect their opinion 100%, and I do believe there is some validity to it in some respects, I think like Leaky Waders said, if you are printing 2" groups with the stock sights on that Marlin at 50 yds, you are not a bad shot, and you can definitely improve that group with some better irons. If you just want some glass, that's one thing, but if you are really trying to learn marksmanship, I think you are on the right track shooting that .22, and your next purchase should be some good sights. You're young and your eyes will only get worse as you age. You have the rest of your life to shoot with a scope. JMHO, YMMV, etc., etc.

That being said, you can certainly still learn and become an excellent marksman using a scope, but I believe in driving the standard before the automatic.

Jason

you always start somebody out on the most advanced equipment available so they master that first and hence are that much further ahead of everyone else. My friend started out on a semi automatic shotgun where the rest of us had pumps. By 14 he was hitting blue rocks 3 times before the pieces hit the ground. He's still faster than most