I'll disagree with most here and stay firmly in the triggercontrolisthemostimportant camp.
I also believe that the "7 Fundamentals of marksmanship" are nonsense for what 99.99% of the shooting people do. If you're not shooting offhand at the Olympics, your stance and breathing are the last of importance to me.
Grip the piss out of the gun, more or less align the sights, and press the trigger well. That will resolve 90% of people's misses.
I posted a thread here recently with a target that I shot with intentionally misaligned sights. Out to 7 yards I barely need the front sight anywhere in the rear notch at all to get an A Zone hit. Even to 25 I can intentionally misalign the sights and get hits. IF I have good trigger control. But it really doesn't matter how well my sights are aligned if I snatch the trigger, I'll easily miss.
And when we preach hard front sight focus for all shooting we end up inducing poor trigger control. People get so focused on the sight picture that they snatch the trigger when everything is "just right". And they miss. And they're told to focus on the front sight. And they do. And they snatch the trigger harder. And they miss. It's a viscous, unnecessary, cycle.
Ive seen time and time again, for hundreds of students, that when you demonstrate how little the sight alignment matters they immediately relax and begin to shoot better. But too few instructors have gone through the process of learning it for themselves.
But all this is really too dependent on what you're trying to hit, and how you're trying to hit it, to make any of this discussion super useful. "Accurate" is a pretty vague term that means a lot of different things to different people. And until you define exactly how accurate you want to be, in what time constraint you have, the answers you get will be all over the place. And since the goal isn't well defined all the answers may actually be right.
