Whilst prescription glasses can help in everyday life, they are no substitute for shooting sports glasses, and attempting to shoot in normal glasses or sunglasses can put your health at serious risk.
There are so many ways that even imperceptible changes to your eyesight can fundamentally affect your aim, so it is not uncommon for shooters on the range to have a prescription.
However, if you plan to shoot regularly, want to hone your skills and cannot aim without your prescription, getting prescription glasses can be essential for both safety and performance reasons.
Why Are Shooting Glasses Safer?
The big problem with wearing glasses on the shooting range is safety. The glass or plastic that typical prescription lenses are made from is not designed to handle ricochets, impacts from bullet casings or debris.
Whilst all of these instances are rare on a range, they are not unheard of, and fragile glass or plastic will not stop a red-hot bullet casing from potentially hitting your face or even sending shards of glass into your eye.
Prescription glasses are made from much stronger material, and the frames themselves tend to be bigger and wider, specifically designed to protect fragile parts of the face from metal or clay.
Why Are Shooting Glasses More Accurate?
Prescription glasses are typically designed with reading in mind; they adjust your vision around the issues your retina has in order to make it easier to read text, sometimes even having bifocal modes to allow you to correct both short- and long-sighted issues in the same eye.
This is far less helpful for shooting, as these adjustments can warp your vision and make it hard to see everything you need to in order to make an accurate shot.
Alternatives To Prescription Sports Glasses
If you do not want to get prescription shooting glasses, you can either wear conventional shooting lenses with contact lenses, or you can wear over-the-top wraparound glasses that give you the best of both worlds.
