For more than 100 years, one of the more compelling questions regarding the use of the handgun has revolved around the way the “short gun” is best aimed at the intended target. Two distinct schools of thought eventually evolved.

The first school espoused the belief that the sights of the handgun were intended for use when there was no immediate threat to the shooter and there was enough time to employ them. Sighted fire, therefore, was best used while engaging targets at the firing range or when facing a threat from a distance or from behind cover.

These same adherents, however, believed that in close-quarter combat the shooter must be able to effectively aim the weapon with his eyes locked onto his adversary and not the sights. The argument for this approach--most often raised by people who had actually experienced spontaneous, close-quarter, violent encounters while armed with a handgun--was based on the fact that when faced with a human being who presents an immediate threat at fairly close distances, our innate responses will compel both our eyes to open wide and focus on that threat.

Compound this startle-based response with the usually fast time frames found in most violent attacks and you can understand why members of this school so strongly believed in developing both sighted shooting and point shooting skills. There have been many proponents of this school through the decades, but the dean was undoubtedly the late Col. Rex Applegate.

The second school of thought, most readily identified by the sobriquet of the Modern Technique of the Pistol, established a doctrine of 100 percent sighted fire under all but the most extreme, contact-distance conditions. The late Col. Jeff Cooper was the standard-bearer for this school, and his much-publicized belief in the use of the sights for all shooting activities--including close-quarter combat--was accepted and widely adopted by the majority of shooters in the U.S. and abroad for nearly 30 years.

However, in just a few short decades, the river of time has worn the glaze off the Modern Technique’s cornerstone. With the advent of a number of studies on how human beings react when facing a threat, advances in training practices and the study of combat physiology and psychology, many people began to reexamine this issue in a new light.

I count myself among their number.

My own experiences while serving as a state police officer and firearms trainer led me to adopt a new firearms training philosophy based on free thinking and critical analysis--and to question whether either the Applegate or Cooper schools of thought were based on solid foundations.

According to Elmer Keith, sights didn’t become standard equipment on handguns until after 1836 when the revolver came into general use. Since then, many different types of sight designs have been developed for the handgun. Like many other aspects of pistolcraft, many of these designs have also been “reborn” and reinvented over the years, with various modifications made to the basic established designs.

Approximately 116 years ago, a gentleman from New England named E.E. Patridge created a handgun sight design that would remain popular until the present day. Named for their inventor, these sights can be recognized by their simple and efficient design: a square front sight and square rear sight notch.

In A.L.A. Himmelwright’s book, Pistol and Revolver Shooting (first published in 1908), Patridge is quoted explaining how to use his sights.