Weapons training wednesdays!

Ok ladies and trolls. Im back! this week’s topic is optics. now I know few people talk about it, but they could either help you or hurt you. so im going to cover different types of optics. cqb, midrange, and long range will be the 3 categories we will be talking about.

CQB optics or close quarter battle optics are defined as a 1x magnification type with battery powered type of reticle. usually some sort of holographic sight, red dot, or reflex. these sights have unlimited eye relief. which means you can mount them anywhere on the gun and no matter how far away from the face the optic is, the sight picture will remain the same. the great part about these is that if you ever find yourself in an awkward shooting posture like supine (on your back), laying that rifle against your belly and looking through your end of the glass will allow you to put rounds on target accurately, and quickly. so this means no longer having to align a set of front and rear sights and acquiring proper sight picture. put the dot or the donut where ever it needs to be and go to work. now with these sort of sights, i recommend finding one with a very long battery life. mainly because if you forget to turn it off, you can come back to it 6 weeks later, shoulder it, and that dot will still be there. now sights like the aimpoint comp m4 are notorious for that sort of battery life, but other sights like the eotech series and c-more sights are also great options as well. one thing to also keep in mind is battery commonality. now some of the eotech series run on a single AA battery, while some aim points run on cr123 and cr2032 cells. it might seem a bit odd with the aimpoint offerings but in an sthf situation, if you were dumb enough to not stock up on them, your odds of still finding them might not be as bad as taking your chances with AA’s.

next are the medium range sights. these usually are of the 2-5x magnification with an objective lense no bigger than 35mm. and are ideal for engaging targets out to as far as 400 meters. they usually have an average eye relief of about 2.5-3 inches. which is usually sufficient for most tactical applications. now with the aimpoint type of sights, the reticle is not illuminated with a battery, but with fiber optics, tritium, or both in the case of the ACOG’s issued to the united states marine corps. they take all kinds of abuse and retain zero fairly well. but here lies the problem with them, in urban combat they are kinda useless against targets close up because the zoom limits your field of vision.

now finally, are the long range optics. these type are usually more expensive than their shorter range counterparts. they are usually constructed with high quality glass, nitrous filled to keep them from fogging up on the inside, and the prisms made of the clearest crystals available. this attention to quality is key in a long range optic because sitting behind a scope for extended periods of time creates eye fatigue, a shooter’s worst enemy when stalking his targets. these types of scopes vary in magnification from 8x to as high as 15x with massive objective lenses. now the mounts also need to be spot on as well, because they are usually mounted to the top of precision high powered semi auto and bolt action rifles. so the forces of recoil need to be kept in check with heavy scope mounts. or you’ll get what is known as the “wandering zero”. the eye relief on some of these optics is roughly 2-5 inches depending on the application in which the scope was built for.

training tip: before working with any type of optic, i strongly recommend mastering iron sights. because at the end of the day, they dont break, and dont need batteries. so learn your limits with iron sights before you move on to optics. failing to do so will be doing yourself a great disservice as a shooter and could prove to be a fatal training error.

so as always, stay frosty and godspeed