What & Why

Flashlights that are powered by a battery go back to the early 1900s and the first weapon-mounted light did not appear until 1912 when George A. Seely of San Francisco invented his Night Sight For Firearms. We have come a long way since then.

There are credible stories around of a laser aiming device being pointed at a felonious aggressor and stopping an attack. For some reason, some bad guys see a dot dancing on their body and decide that they might get shot. Since they want to avoid that, they stop any criminal attack.

Sometimes, to get a gun to function well or to shoot precise groups, a factory load can be found that yields better results than a different factory load. Fortunately, these days there are many factory choices for most cartridges.

A long time ago, people thought only of carrying the gun when considering slinging a rifle. But somewhere along the line of how these things evolve, someone figured out that the sling could also be an aid to precision shooting.

There are many factors in any gun that have an effect on precision, and two guns leaving the assembly line, one right after the other, made with the same batch of components and assembled by the same people, can have drastically different precision characteristics.

While accuracy and precision in a handgun or rifle are important, just how important are they? For most shooting, they aren’t as important as some people seem to think. It all depends on what the shooter plans to do with the gun.

Someone goes into a gun store and buys a gun for self-defense. That’s the primary reason most people buy guns. He or she takes the gun home and puts it away for the just-in-case time when the goblins come. That new gun owner imagines grabbing the gun and fending off the intruder. But the person who has trained for that day and is serious about defense doesn’t imagine that.

Both a red dot sight (RDS) and iron sights can often be installed on the same gun. One advantage of having both is that the iron sights can usually be cowitnessed with the RDS. And that can be done with a long gun or a handgun. The purpose is to facilitate a quick switch to the iron sights in case the RDS fails.

Series of articles that explains the question and discusses the answer. To a person who has experience shooting many types of guns, choosing one for carry does not sound like a tough problem. But for someone who has little or no experience with guns, it can be hard to decide what gun to choose. And there are so many opinions and myths about guns, some of them just plain wrong, that it is easy to choose the wrong gun. What may be right for one person is a terrible choice for another.