A movable back sight is a constant annoyance and I never understand why makers put it so. You shoot badly and after wasting a lot of shots, find your back sight has shifted unobserved to one side. I lost a stag recently owing to the back sight of my rifle getting knocked off, being wedged only in a slot instead of being screwed in.
Have this back sight absolutely central. If you shoot to one side correct your way of letting off. Do not shift the back sight to avoid the trouble of learning to let off properly.
If you do, you will be like a man driving who, instead of straightening his horse’s mouth, puts one rein at the cheek and the other at the bottom bar and makes the horse go worse and more lopsided every day till the horse is incurably crooked.
If you keep on shifting the back sight to counteract your bad let off, you will end by not being able to let off properly.
If you shoot too high all you have to do is to file down the U in the hind sight, a little at a time, until it is right. If you shoot too low, you will have to get a higher back sight put in and file that down gradually till you get it right.
The place to aim at is exactly where you want the ball to hit, seeing the whole of the ball of the front sight in the U of the back sight. Keep on working at the back sight till you arrive at this result.
If in target shooting you aim at the bottom edge of the bull’s-eye, you will require a different adjustment of sights for each size of bull’s-eye.
A two-inch bull’s-eye at twenty yards requires the pistol to shoot one inch higher than the aim so as to put the bullet in the centre of the two-inch disc when aimed at its bottom edge, and if the bull’s-eye is four inches the pistol would have to be sighted to shoot two inches higher at the same distance to hit the centre.
As natural objects are not at all of the same size, and you cannot carry twenty pistols shooting to various heights to choose from, it is best to have the pistol sighted to hit the exact spot you aim at, and then it does not matter if you are shooting at an elephant or a mouse, you can hit the spot.
The tendency to “duck” and flinch at the noise and recoil makes beginners put their shots very low.