We know…they do it because it looks cool and they’ve seen their little gangsta friends do it, too. And John Davis, a former Marine marksmanship trainer pretty much agrees with that. But he says that the sideways pistol grip is based on a sound principal — the “flash sight picture” technique. “It basically means that that picture you created when you took your time is now placed extremely fast over the target and fire. You don’t get exactly the right spacing between your sighting posts and you don’t get that picture in exactly the right place, but you get it generally in the right place.”
Davis says it can be effective in the right situation.
The important thing is that you’re close enough to the target and that you have enough experience to hit it without having perfect aligned and centered sights. This takes a great amount of time in training and use with the weapon before you will be any good with flash sight picture.
That’s time and training 99% of your garden variety hoods won’t bother with. Is Davis’s crediting them with wanting to take advantage of the flash sight picture technique giving your average street thug a little too much credit? Probably. “What [the sideways grip] is lacking is the ability to aim well and to fire the same shot twice.” Other than that, it works just great.