Adraper wrote:I'm planning on taking a carbine and pistol course this spring. I wear prescription glasses. I've worn them for my chl, range trips and the previous training. Would I be better off picking up a pair of prescription safety glasses? Has anyone had issues with regular eye wear? Do you use side shields? I will contact the trainers to confirm what they require but I would like to know what is generally considered adequate.
Boy, is this an issue that won't go away...in fact, it gets worse every handful of years as you get older.
First off, yeah, I would recommend going for safety glasses if at all possible. In 99% of the possible events while shooting, do you really need shatterproof polycarbonate ANSI Z87.1-2003 certified lenses? Nope. Not at all. Most modern eyeglasses are no longer glass, and typically won't shatter into shards like glass from an impact. But if you ever
do have one of the 1% events, safety glasses just might protect your eyesight.
I personally think side shields or a wraparound frame style is even more important than ANSI-certified safety lenses. Every training class where I've shot steel mandated side shields or equivalent coverage. Splash-back happens, the trajectories of those little flying bits of copper are unpredictable, but about the only thing it can seriously injure are your eyes. Even if you don't think you're shooting at a hard surface that might cause splash-back, there may be a rock or piece of rebar just under the surface of a berm, or someone in a bay yards away who shot a flyer that
sproinged off the edge of a steel plate or target stand. A teeny-tiny slice on your arm is no big deal; a teeny-tiny slice on an eye is a very big deal.
Modern eyewear styles have almost uniformly gotten smaller in size over the past decade or two. Newer lens materials have allowed smaller, lighter glasses; gone--for the most part--are the big ol' Coke-bottle lenses. But those smaller lenses leave a greater area unprotected and open to possible entry by foreign objects.
If you opt go with prescription shooting glasses, go with a wraparound style and make minimizing exposure to flying foreign objects a primary consideration when choosing the frame. Decent side shields are inexpensive, and though ugly as sin, do a reasonable job of protecting the sides of the eyes. The problem if used on "stylish" everyday glasses is that you may still have a significant gap at the top of the eyes. A much better option than not, however.
Oh, and just an FYI, I've tried the fits-over-your-regular-frame safety glasses with zero results. It may work fine for others, but I've never found a pair that would actually fit over my glasses...and my head's not
that big (though most people I know disagree vehemently with that): a 7 5/8 U.S. hat size. Even if I'd found a pair that would go over my street glasses, another consideration here is hearing protection. When you see NRR ratings for ear-muff-type protectors, they were invariably tested with a near-perfect seal against the "head." Any glasses at all makes that seal a little less than perfect; some glasses are worse than others. But if you go and stick a second pair of "temples" (the part of the frame that extends over and/or behind the ears), the fit of the muffs gets significantly worse. Just something to consider.
Okay. I'm fairly confident about my opinions of safety vs. regular glasses, and side-shield coverage or not. The rest remains a mystery, and a Holy Grail for some ophthalmological inventor.
We grow older and our eyesight begins to change in our 40s and,
woo hoo!, can continue changing as frequently as annually...and not for the better. The eye's lens starts to harden and become less flexible. The first symptom is usually presbyopia, where you begin to find it more difficult to focus on objects close to you. Minor compensation at first: you just hold that book a couples of inches farther away from your face; front sight is still good.
Other stuff changes as you age, too. Just as the eye's lens hardens, so does it become more difficult for the muscles around the pupil to control its size in reaction to light. Typically, that means the pupil becomes smaller and your night vision starts to go to pot.
Peripheral vision starts to go, too. After your healthy 20s, peripheral vision will--naturally and not as a symptom of a disease like glaucoma--start to shrink by one to three degrees in field-of-view for every decade. By your late 70s, it isn't uncommon to see a loss of up to 25%-30% in your range of peripheral vision.
You start to lose your color vision, too; at first mostly in the blue portion of the spectrum. The cells are simply declining in sensitivity as you grow older.
Let's not forget those pesky "floaters" that make their presence known the older you get: translucent blobs of stuff that float around in your visual field and are incredibly annoying if you pay attention to them. These are little bits of the vitreous inside the eye that, as you age, become more like a liquid than a gel and detach around the retina to float free in their little orbital world. There is opinion that people with myopia (nearsightedness) early in life are more likely to have a larger number of floaters when the age; too, contact sports that include head trauma seem to engender more floaters later.
Oh, and don't forget about cataracts. Cataracts used to be considered a disease of the eye, but as our life expectancies increased last century, the medical field decided that, nope, not really a disease but a pretty common consequence of aging. The Mayo Clinic now estimates that around 50% of all Americans age 65 or older have some level of cataract formation starting in their eyes. They estimate that by 2020, as the Baby Boomers age, more than 30 million Americans will have cataracts.
Gettin' older does not help your shooting proficiency. But, as they say, it sure beats the alternative.
With respect to shooting and eyesight, I'm a fairly representative aging guy. When I was younger, I wore single-vision glasses for myopia; always read comfortably without glasses. I developed some astigmatism in my late 30s. By the mid-40s, presbyopia was added to the mix, and has gotten worse over the intervening decade-plus, as have my little stable of floaters and the reduction of night vision. I wear variable-lens everyday glasses; would be trifocals if the variables weren't invented. Distance vision is good with correction, but anything from about 36" and closer is, pardon the pun, a moving target. Wherein, do you suppose, lie the sights and optics on firearms?
And the prescription changes almost every year. If I had a dime for every dollar I've spent on my vision...
I've never found a good, single answer for all my shooting needs.
Here's a great article Charles posted a few years ago about stick-on bifocals he found useful:
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For pistols, what ended up working best for me was getting a pair of specialized (safety-lens, wraparound) single-vision, shooting glasses. I'm right-eye dominant, and my ophthalmologist worked with me to get the right lens to be a crisp focus at 27", where the front sight normally lines up for me, and the left lens to be distance-vision only. I need to wear the glasses for about ten minutes before I shoot to let my slow-functioning brain get comfy with the new visual orientation, but after that it was near perfection. Pistol comes out, front sight is the clearest thing in my visual field, and with both eyes open I don't sacrifice any acuity with distance vision and the target. I say "
was" because, natch', my vision changed over the course of a year or two and the front sight started encroaching once more into blurdom. A new lens fixed that, but I'm in need of another fix now. So the solution has a recurring cost.
The other problem comes with rifles. With a traditional scope, not so much of an issue because I can adjust the diopter focus on the scope. However, all but one rifle I own are in a combat setup, not for long range or hunting. Holographic red-dot sights are amazing...but the reticle is floating out there as a projected image, and with my pistol-shooting glasses on it looks like a fuzzy mass unless I switch and shoot left-handed...which is not the best option for me: I shoot poorly enough right-handed and with my dominant eye.
Using the iron sights with the pistol glasses isn't as bad as with the EOTech-type red-dots. At least, not with carbine-length rifles or 18"-barrel shotguns. Anything longer, it gets progressively worse with each inch in length. But if I close my left eye, I lose the detail of my target; if I need to reconfirm the target, I can't simply shift my focus from front sight to target, but instead have to open my non-dominant eye, reorient, then close that eye again. Partly for this reason, both eyes stay open (except with a scope) until I get out past 100 yards. Something that finally helped me here was getting a flip-to-side magnifier that sits behind an EOTech. The magnifier has a (limited) range of focus adjustment like a scope, so I can keep it off to the side at CQ distances, and flip it up if it's a longer shot where the fuzzy reticle ain't gonna cut it.
Another caution has to do with polarization options on your glasses--found in a lot of sunglasses, and which your optometrist might want to push for a bigger-ticket sale--when used with a polarizing scope. The two simply don't go together. I was in a John Farnam class once where the student really needed his glasses to see, and he had a 1x4 scope whose lenses were polarized. The only option for him to reasonably continue in the class was to remove the scope, and another student who had a spare carbine took off his flip-up BUIS to lend them to the poor guy so he could actually shoot. I'd recommend shooting glasses that are not polarized.
A final note here is that I'm better off shooting a pistol--at reasonable pistol distances--without glasses at all than with my everyday variable lenses. There's only a narrow slice of the variable lens that brings the front sight into clear focus, and it puts my head into an awkward, nose-in-the-air position where I can't even see the ground six feet in front of me. That's a non-starter. So while I use the special shooting glasses for a lot of range work, I also practice with the everyday glasses, dry-fire and live-fire, declining my head slightly as the muzzle comes on target so that I'm looking over the top of the frame to get the sight picture. That actually puts my head in about the same position as I shoot with the special glasses; my everyday glasses have smaller lenses so looking over them requires no real tweaking of the head.
While you're still young, you have more options. Odds are you can see the front sight pretty well without carrying 12 different pairs of glasses with you at all times.
But if you do wear prescription glasses and want prescription lenses when you shoot, it's a definite expense but I think looking at a separate pair of for-purpose glasses can make a lot of sense...and it allows you to select frames and safety lenses that will meet all the range criteria no matter where you shoot. At a minimum, I'd recommend getting used to sliding side shields on your everyday glasses when you shoot. That's a tiny expense and a minimal hassle that can pay a huge dividend should the day ever come when you feel something
ping! off that side shield.
