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The proliferation of red dot sights on pistols... It’s a topic of scorn to many people from the pre-RDS era, who feel that the red dot is unreliable, useless, and unproven for use with a defensive pistol. They hail from when USPSA and IPSC were in their infancy, and shooting competitors were gravitating to the 1911 with Novak sights. In the mid-70s, Aimpoint introduced the first red dot sight. It was a hunting rifle-style optic that was a hit with hunters. This opened the way for Aimpoint to develop more LED optics. The first red dot sights were unlike the compact ones we use now. Initially, they were large body tube optics bolted to the gun's frame. Competition shooters started using them in the early 80s since they could modify their pistols to improve accuracy. US Special Forces adopted it in the early 90s for rifles, but not for pistols.
Red dot sights on pistols were still impractical for law enforcement or the military at the time. Fragility was a big problem. Batteries were required, and if the optic failed, there would be no sight. Early red dots used giant batteries to run for a very short time. The diodes weren't developed to run for long, either. Perhaps the biggest reason duty pistols did not have red dot optics was that holstering a pistol with a red dot sight presented an issue.
Trijicon took notice that soldiers were piggybacking red dot sights onto ACOG scopes however they could, since the fixed 4x scope was not idea for close quarters combat. They saw a need and started fitting their ACOG (Advanced Combat Optic Gunsight) and red dot sights together using the Docter footprint to save everyone the trouble of having to custom rig the configuration themselves.
A couple of years later in 2009 they introduced the RMR, the Ruggedized Miniature Reflex sight. This was the first battery-free red dot. It was better suited for pistol mounting and, arguably, the quintessential piece that allowed the proliferation of optics on handguns across a huge spectrum. Because of its durability, you didn't have to mount your RMR to the frame, and it could take the beating of the slide cycling.
Almost immediately after the RMR was introduced, within the next 24 months or so, they started to show up on custom-milled pistol slides. ATEi was the premiere service for that. This was back in the Magpul Dynamics tactical training era, and there’s still a video online with Steve Fisher of Magpul Dynamics showing his Glock with a custom-milled slide by ATEi and a Trijicon RMR 07. In that video, he says it’s the gun of the future for law enforcement and military handguns. This was 15 years ago now, and it turns out he was very correct.
The Roland Special Glock 19 configuration marks an important milestone in the development of the pistol. It’s an indicator that Special Forces were starting to pick up some of the cues from the development of civilian pistols. You're not in an ideal combat situation if you're drawing your pistol. To maximize performance in a stressful situation, the Glock 19 with an RMR became more suitable as a base pistol, changing the standard round from 45 ACP to 9mm Luger. The bulk of the original pistols with red dot sights was now gone, the sight was more rugged and reliable, and the iron sights could serve as co-witness backup sights. Many hesitations and complaints about red dot sights from back in the day were now addressed and solved.
In Afghanistan around the 2012-2013 timeframe, late Cold War era Special Forces operators were carrying the 1911 in 45 caliber, whereas the newer guys were carrying pistols like the Roland Special, and this continued to the very end of the Global War on Terror era. General Miller, the last ISAF commander, carried a Glock 19 with a tactical light and a red dot sight. The military saw utility in the new pistols, and that was also the era of social media, where you started to see Instagram get off the ground and get big in the mid-2000s. Everyone started to want this new configuration, but you still had to send your slides out to be milled. Almost all the major pistol manufacturers started cutting their slides for an optic footprint, whether the RMR footprint or one of the many other footprints, such as for the Holosun sights. An early example of this would be the FN 45 Tactical pistol. Many manufacturers followed suit with the idea of cutting the slide at the factory, providing various plates that connect to the slide to accommodate various optic choices. Today, carry guns come milled from the factory. This transition for pistols resembles the AR-15 transition from carry handles to flat-top AR-15s with the Picatinny top section. Where you once had to pay extra for a flat-top, it became standard with the development of the M16A4 and M4A1.
One of the final things that tells us that red dot optics on pistols are here to stay is seeing more and more law enforcement agencies, even the old-school law enforcement agencies, giving the okay for their officers to use red dot sights on their pistols. So, when we talk about the development cycle, we say competition bleeds into special operations, which bleeds into more regular army and commercial space adoption, as people want to emulate what special operations guys are doing, especially in the age of social media. And then the last bastion of replacement cycling is with law enforcement. Why do we think that adoption by law enforcement is a big thing? Because you have police chiefs with bureaucratic leadership, who must go through the arduous and lengthy process of risk management assessment. If the reward of adopting the new system far outweighs the risk of continuing to run the old system, they will adopt it. To us, that is a strong indicator that red dot sights on pistols are here to stay.
We have not yet reached the era where the RDS is foolproof, and any kinks have been 100% worked out, but would we buy another gun that doesn’t come optic-ready? Even though we’re both comfortable and competent with iron sights, Josh has decided he won’t buy another pistol that isn't optic-ready, because of how much shooting he’s done with them and the performance gains he has seen as a result. As he introduces new shooters to the sport, they pick up shooting with red dots much more easily than with iron sights. Regardless of your preference, red dots are being developed and have matured to the point of reliability for use as duty pistols. Suppressor height sights to co-witness through the RMR is also increasingly common, so many pistols now have sight redundancy to mitigate risk even further.
That is a very brief history of red dots and why we think they are absolutely 100% here to stay. But we don't think that that's a hot take at this point. We think everybody would say that.
--9-Hole Reviews
