Seeing red: illuminated reticle sights

by Dave Anderson

Illuminated reticle sights have had a profound impact on competitive handgun shooting. They're often called "'red-dot" sights, as the reticle is usually red and usually a dot (impeccable logic). However there arc reticles which are neither, so "illuminated reticle" is a more inclusive term, and at American Handgunner we're nothing if not inclusive. Still. "red-dot" is so much easier to type.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s practical handgun competitors didn't give much thought to optical sights at all. Accurate they might be, but the general feeling was they were too slow, too fragile and just not "'practical." A common witticism was: "What's this, a gunfight? Wait a moment while I turn my sights on, har har.'" Members of IPSC and its U.S. affiliate, the USPSA. initially paid little attention to optical sights. It was the staid old sport of bullseye shooting that first realized the potential of optical sights. In 1979 national bullseye championships were being won with red-dot sights.

The conviction was optical sights were "accurate but slow." Then came 1990 when Jerry Barnhart won the USPSA national title using a red-dot sight. When other hotshots like Todd Jarrett and Matt McLearn collected national and world titles it wits evident optical sights had arrived to stay. No innovation, not even compensators and high capacity frames, had such an impact on the sport.

On the plus side, once the technical problems of fastening the sight to the gun had been overcome, the level of shooting advanced to the point where it was clearly futile to try and beat optics with iron sights. Anyone who made the effort to transition from iron sights to optics (and it wasn't that hard) could shoot faster and more accurately.

On the negative side, this was more innovation than many competitive shooters could accept. Practical shooting, after all, had its roots in the use of handguns as practical tools for personal defense. The acceptance of speed holsters and compensators had been hard enough to take; the ascendancy of the .38 Super cartridge over the .45 ACP was seen as rank heresy. But the appearance of optical sights, followed by high capacity frames, was just too much. A number of shooters abandoned IPSC/USPSA entirely, splitting off to form the International Defensive Pistol Association (IDPA), specifically disallowing optical sights. IPSC/USPSA abandoned a long-held principle ("all guns compete equally") and formed new divisions in which optics were not allowed.

Why So Good?

Using a dot reticle is natural and intuitive, fast and easy. Simply place the dot on target and press the trigger. The greenest beginner can figure it out immediately. Understanding and achieving a correct sight picture with iron sights takes considerably more effort. Still, trigger control remains critical. Just because the dot is on the target doesn't mean it will stay there if you jerk the trigger.

With conventional scopes, eye relief (distance from the eye to the ocular lens of the scope) is relatively critical. You can have a rifle scope with 4" eye relief, or a pistol scope with 18" eye relief, but not both in the same scope. With red-dot sights eye relief is not critical. The same sight can be mounted on a rifle receiver 4" from the eye, or near the muzzle a couple of feet from the eye.

Red-dot sights are typically free of parallax, the apparent shift of the reticle relative to the target, as the eye moves away from the optical center of the sight. Riflescopes are set to be parallax-free at a specific distance, often 75 yards for rimfires and 150 yards for centerfires. With a parallax-free red-dot sight, eye position doesn't matter. If you see the dot on target you'll hit the target, assuming the gun is sighted in and you break the shot cleanly.

Current red-dot sights are lightweight, compact and tough. When they were first adapted to practical shooting, we found the cumulative impact of thousands of shots (and sometimes poor mounting systems) caused the wiring connections of some sights to break down.

Several Tasco models were very popular with competition shooters, and it was routine to first send them to "Doctor Dot" to beef up the innards. Such issues were addressed by the manufacturers long since. Other makes, notably Aimpoint and C-More, had a reputation for being built tough and didn't need the doctor's attention.

The usefulness of red-dot sights is by no means limited to competition. Modern red-dot sights are practical and useful on firearms intended for hunting, personal defense, police and military use. In an interview for Handgunner in the early 1990s I quoted Jerry Barnhart as saying red-dots would be commonplace on military and duty guns within a decade or so. I remember the prediction got a horselaugh from some of the self-styled martial artists of the day.

Barnhart's prediction has been borne out some 500,000 times. That's the number of Aimpoint sights currently in use by U.S. armed forces. Just watch news reports of soldiers serving in Afghanistan or Iraq and you'll see M16 rifles and M4 carbines fitted with Aimpoint sights and Surefire flashlights.

Trends Continue

Red-dot sights haven't caught on with civilian police forces to the same extent as with the military. Many officers tend to be extremely conservative about changes to equipment, for understandable reasons. If something works, why change to something that may not work as well?

However, I know individual peace officers who have carried duty guns with red-dot sights for over half a decade. Shooting buddy Steve Kukowski had his Glock 26 slide milled to accept a Tasco Optima sight several years ago, and has worn it every day while working with the detective division. Cleaning the semi-annual qualification course (especially the low-light course) is so easy, he says, it's like cheating. Several other plainclothes officers had similar sights fitted after seeing the results.

The fact these sights are battery-dependent is a legitimate concern. With current sight and battery designs, battery life is nearly incredible. Kukowski's little Optima sight has no switch; it is always on, though when capped for storage or worn under a jacket the sight draws very little power. He usually changes batteries annually (at a cost of a few bucks) though he admitted it's been over two years since the last change.

Current Aimpoint sights used by the military have a feature called Advanced Circuit Efficiency Technology (ACET), which gives an amazing battery life of up to 50,000 continuous hours, or about 5.7 years!

Sized Right

Red-dot sights for handgun use can be divided into two size categories, which I'll call medium and small. Even the medium sights are more compact and lightweight than most pistol scopes. They are large enough to include readily accessible elevation/windage adjustments, and on/off switches or dials and adjustable reticle intensity. Although bulky for concealed carry, they are excellent for competition, hunting and open carry.

Small red-dot sights are astonishingly small and light, weighing little more than the standard rear sight they replace. Because of their small size there is usually no on/off switch. Reticle intensity cannot be manually adjusted, but changes automatically with intensity of ambient light. The adjustment is very fast; on a bright day, drawing from under a coat, the reticle goes from dim to bright faster than the gun can be raised to eye level. Elevation/windage adjustments are less convenient. The small size makes them ideally suited to concealed carry.

Aimpoint

There are many quality red-dot sights currently in production. Aimpoint introduced the first popular red-dot sight in the mid-1970s. I've used several Aimpoint models over the last couple of decades and found them to be invariably of high quality. Aimpoint sights have an enviable reputation for toughness and durability.

The current handgun competition model is the Compact SM, built on a 30mm aluminum sight tube. It comes with a single large aluminum ring for mounting to Weaver-style bases. The Comp SM has a seven minute of angle (7-MOA) dot and a 10-position rotary dial for adjusting dot intensity.