Red Dot Sights
My son Sam won’t be around much to shoot in club matches anymore. On July 1st, he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point where he began his Cadet Basic Training. I am still in shock and awe about that. In this modern age of smart phones with built in cameras and social media websites, we have received a number of photos of him and his squad mates in basic training. The cadets are issued M16A4s equipped with the M68 Close Combat Optic. To us civilians, the M68 is known as the Aimpoint CompM4. This is the Cadillac of red dot sights. Right now it is priced on the MidwayUSA website at $813.

Less pricey red dot sights have been popular with our club shooters for a number of years. I most frequently see them mounted on handguns at our club silhouette matches. For quick reaction work on a fighting carbine they are an excellent sighting solution out to about 100 yards. That illuminated red dot really catches your attention.

The EOTech holographic sights are even better. They typically have a large circle surrounding a central dot. For close and fast, you don’t even look for the central dot. Just plaster that big circle on your target, press, and move on to the next. Pricing is high, but less than the M68 CCO.

The other big advantage that makes the RDS a very fast sight is parallax forgiveness. You do not need to have the dot or circle perfectly centered in the field of view. As long as you can see the dot (or circle) on top of your target, squeeze the trigger for a hit.

For longer range shots, holographic sights and red dots suffer from the same lack of magnification as iron sights. (Note that the Army calls the M68 a CLOSE Combat Optic.) A popular solution for that is a separate magnifier device mounted between the RDS and your eye. These magnifiers are typically mounted on a swing mount which allows them to be out of the way for close work, but they can be locked into the line of sight for longer shots. This strikes me as a kludgey and cumbersome solution, but to each their own I guess.

Magnifying Rifle Scopes
In recent years, paralleling the explosion of interest in the AR-15 rifle platform, there has been an explosion of scopes that have come on the market targeted specifically for use on the AR-15 and other military style rifles. They have been of two basic categories. The first are the “tactical” target scopes with high upper-end magnification, usually mil-dot reticles, large exposed target turrets, and often a side mounted parallax adjustment knob. Since the topic of this article is quick reaction sights for fighting carbines, I won’t talk about those types of scopes here.

The other type of magnifying riflescope that has stormed the market are of low magnification, typically around 4x. Many use a straight 30mm tube with no objective bell. Then there are the prism sights which do not use traditional tube construction at all, such as the Trijicon ACOG (Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight).

Most scopes in this class have some sort of an illuminated reticle. While you can choose a mil-dot or other crosshair type reticle, you will find many non-traditional, non-crosshair type reticles in this class.

In August of 2011, I wrote a Gear Review of the Burris AR-332 optic which I have mounted on my fixed carry-handle AR-15. I won’t rehash that entire review here, but let me mention a few points. It is a fixed 3x prism sight with Burris’s Ballistic CQ reticle. This reticle presents a prominent circle with a central aiming dot, but with additional ballistic drop dots below the center dot.

Burris Ballistic CQ reticle

The low magnification level paired with the illuminated Ballistic CQ reticle is a very effective compromise between the need for fast targeting up close, and more precise targeting at longer range. For close and fast targeting, I really like the bold illuminated circle and believe that it is among the best answers to the problem.

Even better than the AR-332 is Burris’s MTAC scope. It is a 30mm tube scope of 1-4x magnification. It also uses the illuminated Ballistic CQ reticle. The MTAC has clearer optics than the AR-332, but it’s bigger advantage is variable power. At 1x, it effectively acts like a red dot scope or EOTech substitute for room clearing distances. Crank it up to 4x, bear down on the center dot, and you’ve got enough precision to hit small targets at 200 yards. Need to go farther still? Use the ballistic drop dots below the center dot. Now that’s versatility.

But I said that all the combat optics choices involve pros and cons. What is the downside for a 1-4x variable scope like the MTAC? If you are transitioning from a close target to a long target, or maybe more critically, from a long range target to a close target (unexpected sudden threat), it takes valuable time to reach over and crank the magnification power change knob.

You will see 3-gun competitors solve this problem in two main ways. The first is by bolting on a “paddle” on the power change ring. This gives you more leverage and a bigger thing to grab in a panic power change situation.

The second solution is to add a 45° offset picatinny rail section to the gun. Mounted on top of that is a small and compact red dot sight. With this, all the shooter has to do is cant the gun 45°, plaster the dot on the close threat and squeeze the trigger. The 45° offset mount ends up placing the RDS over the bore when the gun is canted. Then it can be zeroed just like any other sight, but the zeroing is done from the canted orientation.

There is another advantage to this kind of setup. The 45° offset RDS ends up located closer to the bore centerline than the primary optic. The basic design of the AR-15 forces the normal sighting plane to be anywhere from 2¾ to 3½ inches over the gun bore. This means that on close targets, your bullet will impact significantly lower than what your sights are telling you.

Bill is notorious for including a close hostage target in his Patrol Rifle matches to trip up the unwary. He puts the hostage in front of the bad guy with just the bad guy’s forehead exposed. If the shooter does not compensate for the sight height above bore, the bullets will go through the hostage’s forehead if you aim directly at the bad guy’s forehead. You are forewarned!

With a 45° degree offset RDS, not only is it closer to the boreline, but you can take advantage of its purpose as a close range sight only, and specifically zero it for say, a distance of 5 or 10 yards.

But even without an auxiliary sight, with a reticle such as the Ballistic CQ, you could practice at close range to determine how to hold (maybe the bottom of the circle?) to make precise close range hits. The reticle type on the 4x Trijicon ACOG M150 RCO (Rifle Combat Optic) used by the military has a longer ballistic ladder to allow hits out to 600 meters, but it can also be useful for those close up hostage shield head shots like Bill is fond of setting up.