[MTT TL]

"Nobody uses sights in a gunfight."

This is of course not true.

"You won't have time to see your sights; looking at them could get you killed."

Depends. You might not have time if you had to react quickly enough. Then again you might, especially after the first shots miss.

"If he's far enough away that you need sights, then it'll never hold up in court."

This statement makes the least sense. I can't even tell what the speaker is trying to say.

"...the hit/miss rates of police in gunfights..." Is mostly caused by a near total lack of cops practicing or being the least bit interested in shooting and a lack of training.

This is also ignorant nonsense.

What often comes up too are figures about the hit/miss rates of police in gunfights, and these are usually dismissed as irrelevant to CCW because we aren't kicking in doors, and we won't likely be robbed from 15 yards away.

There is a little truth there. If police are kicking in doors they will most likely be using rifles and shotguns and not a concealed carry type weapon. This quickly makes that comparison irrelevant. But how often do the police kick in a door and subsequently get in to a gunfight? Almost never compared to all other police shootings.

Also police shootings happen more often on the streets and many defensive shootings happen at home where the defender has huge advantages. Practically no police shootings happen at home although there are a few.

Robberies take place at different ranges and attacks take place at all ranges. Most likely in a defensive shooting it will be closer than 15 yards.

One argument I hear (and increasingly believe) about lasers or especially red dots are that they put the sight and the target on the same focal plane. In using a red dot I've found I can be much quicker acquiring a sight picture. Even in what would be point shooting, I can still see that dot appear somewhere on the target.

Do you think (in principle) that "target focused" sighting systems are advantageous?

In regards to red dots the US military (and quite a few others) seem to think so. I've seen nothing that effectively counters that argument. Pistols of course are strictly back up and currently mostly are not equipped with a red dot, mostly for logistical reasons and their lack of usage in combat compared to rifles.

I know of no police agency that has equipped their standard carry pistols with red dot sights. These tend to be more fragile, or really expensive (and therefore beyond the reach of most departments) and less practical. The police are much more likely to be in a physical confrontation where the sight could get broken than ever use it in a shooting. Well made ones do work well.

With lasers this is different. Visible lasers on handguns at self defense ranges are much less useful than say an IR laser on a rifle in combat. This goes to the point of near uselessness in conditions when the laser is difficult to see.