I was wondering because was reading Ambrose Bierces “In the midst of life” short stories where he often comments that grey-eyed guys make the best sharp-shooters.
If it ain’t so, why was this beleived?
My guess as to why it was believed would be a connection between gray and being uncaring. Steal gray eyes and stealy determination could easily get linked.
I don’t know for certain, but I can’t see any way that the color of the iris could make any difference in sight whatsoever.
For the record, I have gray eyes, and my vision sucks 
Warning: no science in this post
“gunfighter eyes”
The idea is that the clear iris lets in more light and that works well for sharpshooting. (Yes, more light does get in - people with pale irises suffer more ultraviolet damage to their retinas than dark-eyed people.)
People who work at shooting ranges, hunting guides, and the one SWAT guy I’ve spoken with, and some people in the military claim this is true. (I was once shown page after page of photos of the sharpshooters, most of whom had gunfighter eyes - but the guy who showed me the photos was unable to tell me what percentage of the original class was light-eyed so the fact that almost everyone on the photos was light-eyed didn’t mean anything.) But people like to see things that conform to their beliefs. Look at this way - if you showed up at a hunting lodge, and they guide told one guy, “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Smith, you have gunfighter eyes, I think you’re gonna do well on this trip,” don’t you think that would have an affect on Mr. Smith and the brown-eyed members of the party? And then enforce the idea of “gunfighter” eyes in the mind of the guide, Mr. Smith, and the rest of the party.
The myth goes back to the earliest accurate guns, but is it just something fun to say because light blue eyes are so striking (as jharmon suggested), or was it born of observed statistics? I’ve never found a responsible study. If there was good evidence, I’d expect military and police to recruit the blue-eye folks for these roles - anyone know anything about this?
Additionally, military forces without many blue-eye people manage to produce snipers, so even if it’s more likely that a light-eyed person will be a talented sharpshooter, brown-eyed people are not excluded.
Entirely anecdotal - I have gray eyes, my dad has gray eyes, and we are both excellent shots. Guns and bows, but not much of a knife-thrower (you do not want to play split with me).
I have grey eyes (just checked with She Who Must Be Obeyed) and I have always suffered from short-sightedness, with an astigmatism so bad that I cannot wear contacts.
But I was a pretty good darts player in my distant youth.
Very grey eyes here. Vision 20/220 and 20/240.
Blows that theory straight to hell.
I’ve been told that I have grey eyes, but to me they look light blue. Anytime someone tells me they have grey eyes, they also look light blue to me. I’ve never seen anyone with grey (to me) eyes. I’ve seen grey eyes in animals.
So, maybe grey eyes is a symptom of color blindness.
I gonna go look in the mirror one more time.
Peace,
mangeorge
Hmm. I have grey eyes, definitely not light blue eyes. My eyes are dark grey. I may not be an anecdotal argument against “grey eyes = good eyesite” afterall, at least not using the “light irises let more light in” argument.
Heading back to the mirror to see if I’m just deluding myself…
Letting in more light should cause blurrier vision, not better vision. The light that passes exactly through the focal point will give a perfect image on the retina, but only with a lot of light will that produce a good signal. A larger pupil will allow more light through, allowing a stronger signal, but will consequently produce a blurrier image. Any light passing through the iris wall would cause only noise, no signal.
First, I think j.c. is on the money so far, though I would love to see someone show up with science, too.
Next, may I ask how we choose to define “better” eyesight? Since it is in reference to sharpshooters by Ambrose Bierce circa 19th century, are we to assume “better” means good distance vision, sans scope, under low light conditions, with good image resolution?
If I had to go out on a limb and say it’s false, I’d say that the gray-eyed people thing is selective perception claptrap. For one, in Bierce’s time, most of the people who were able to afford weapons, and permitted to wield them, and likely hung around with Bierce, were white. Comparatively fewer Native Americans, Spanish, and African-American citizens have gray or gray-blue eyes; was his observation a product of an insulated background, or a segregated society? Was it based on the political economy of the time? Bierce was with the 9th Indiana volunteers during the Civil War as an engineer; how relavent were his observations of gunfighters? The relative immigrant population, in Bierce’s time, predated the massive influx of Irish and Italians in the '20s and '30s, and his observation may have predated the influx of the Chinese laborers in the 1880s. (Bierce is thought to have died in 1914, according to one site.)
Does this belief predate Bierce? If it was “common knowledge” that gray-eyed men made better sharpshooters, would not armies select for them, as j.c. suggests? Would not this prove the belief to be true? Is this tied to the blue-eyed Irish cop phenomenon?
I’m sorry, but I have problems with this as a factual question. I don’t see exactly where the standards of “better” vision lie, or even what “gray” is for that matter.
FISH
[nitpick]It’s “steel”, not “steal”[/nitpick]
It was a subtle comment on the “gray” vs. “grey” spelling–so subtle, in fact, that I didn’t notice it when I typed it