Presbyopia & Solutions

Are you over 40 years old? Do you find yourself needing brighter light to read menus or see things clearly? Do you catch yourself holding that restaurant menu at the full length of your arm to read it? Do you squint to read print that was always clear before? You may have blurry near-sighted vision or something called presbyopia. It’s pretty common among adults over 40. In fact, according to a study published in the American Journal of Ophthalmology in 2017, over 128 million Americans deal with the challenge of presbyopia.

Most of us are familiar with the common “cures.” Bifocal glasses, multi-focal contact lenses, bigger print, etc. If you’re a shooter, you are probably familiar with this challenge as it keeps you from seeing a crispy front sight when you try to acquire your sight alignment and sight picture. Every firearms instructor you’ve ever met has told you to make sure the front sight is in focus while the target and the rear sight are slightly blurry. But what if everything is blurry? It’s hard to achieve “equal height, equal light” when you can’t focus the front sight.

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Sometimes bifocals are a sufficient solution when shooting. If you tilt your head farther up, then you can get that front sight in focus. However, that creates a very narrow field of view and while it’s not a bad temporary solution for the range, it’s not an operative solution for real world.

A laser/light unit such as the Streamlight TLR-6 is one solution to presbyopia challenges.

Part of the problem with corrective lenses is that the ophthalmologist is trying to correct your vision to 20/20 as far out as can be accomplished. But in doing so, they usually push your closest focal point out past the length of your arm. Think about it, your handgun is at the end of your arm—and that can be just inside the distance of closest focal point with corrective eyewear. There is a solution to this: When you have your next eye exam and the doctor is making adjustment to find your crispiest vision, after they’ve done so, put your arm out and your thumb up. Ask the doctor to dial the prescription back just enough that your thumb is in focus. If you can focus your thumb, and the sights of your handgun are always just the other side of that, then the sights are far enough away that they’re in the focal distance.

Another solution, becoming more common every day, is a red dot sight, or RDS. The RDS is mounted on the handgun just in front of the rear sight. The average dot in the RDS measures between 0.6 and 1.6 mil which is between 2 and 5 MOA (Minute of Angle). The thing is, let’s assume for a moment you have an RDS with a 0.6 mil dot. Even if it’s blurry as you look at it, it’s still probably under 2 mil. 2 mil would put it at about 6 MOA and unless you’re doing precision shooting, that’s sufficient to hit an eight inch target at 25 yards. For most folks that’s considered acceptable combat accuracy.

For defensive shooting, hitting an eight inch target inside of 15 yards is usually acceptable. How big is the average human torso side to side? For most folks that’s a 20” (or greater) measurement, so hitting an eight inch circle in the middle of it still equals a pretty good center mass hit.

A third solution is a laser aiming sight. The biggest challenge when using a laser aiming sight is remembering to turn it on or insure it’s activated when you draw. Nothing can slow you down as much as searching for a sight that isn’t there. One of the benefits of an RDS over a laser aiming sight is that the target can’t see the RDS dot. If you’re shooting defensively, the bad guy can see the laser beam, depending on movement and environment, and if they look down they can see it on their chest. That might be a great deterrent; or it might mean they realize they have to move laterally and quickly, making it more difficult for you to score hits.

No matter which of these solutions you select—corrected vision, RDS or laser aiming sight—you have to train accordingly and redundancy is never bad. An RDS with sights tall enough to be co-witnessed means you still have mechanical sights if something happens to the RDS. Mechanical sights you can see and use if the laser aiming sight breaks or the battery dies mean you can still put shots on target.

Presbyopia means you can't get that front sight in focus - and that creates aiming challenges.

Another solution is to have mechanical sights specifically designed not to require a front and rear sight—just one or the other. Meprolight makes the FT Bullseye sight—either front or rear — designed so that you only need the rear or the front and you can still acquire proper sight alignment. That’s accomplished by Meprolight combining a longer sight housing with tritium and phosphorescent paint creating a dot inside a circle. When you extend the weapon and line up the sight, if you see the dot inside the circle, you’re sight is straight; properly aligned. The FT Bullseye front sight has a much larger than “normal” dot and no rear sight is needed. Even with presbyopia, the dot inside the circle can be seen and even if they begin to blur together, if you see a properly spherical dot, that’s sight alignment.

That’s four potential solutions to presbyopia but they all have one thing in common: they require training to use properly. Experienced shooters with great basic marksmanship skills have seen their scores drop when they started using an RDS or a laser aiming sight. This is usually due to their own lack of attention to basic marksmanship. They see the “magic dot” and pull the trigger. They throw trigger control out the window, forget all about follow through and then can’t figure out why their shots are way low left (or opposite for a left-handed shooter). It’s because they saw the dot where they wanted it on the target and then jerked the trigger. No sight in the world can fix poor basic skills.

So, if you find yourself challenged with presbyopia, figure out which option best suits your needs. Understand that just because you execute the solution, doesn’t mean you’ve completed the solution process. Mount the sight(s) of your choice and then hit the range. Practice acquiring sight alignment and sight picture and then execute that smooth trigger press. Insure follow through. A couple thousand repetitions is a good start.