Red dots are all the rage and for good reason. Most of the major shooting sports have divisions that cover carry optics or production optics, plus they are even being used in concealed carry.
The best part is you can buy a pistol ready to go from your local dealer like this Performance Center M 2.0 Core, which stands for Competition Optics Ready Equipment.
In this pro tip I am going to go through the basic steps on how to make the most of your red dot optic and that starts with how to acquire your dot quickly and easily. A lot of people have a hard time finding their dot because it’s a giant window, but there is a little trick.
All you need to do is look at the front sight, or the tip of your muzzle, to help you find that red dot. You are going to bring the gun to the low ready position in dry fire and present it to target, watching for that front sight to come up into view and your dot will pop right up in there. You're going to practice this over and over in dry fire, so you learn that muscle memory, so you can acquire your dot faster.
Now let's address maintaining the sight picture or reacquiring the dot during recoil or transitions. A lot of times depending on the size of your red dot optic, you may lose the dot all together. That’s ok, but what we really need to work on is grip and recoil control.
Again, if we lose that dot in recoil or in moving side to side, we can look to the front sight to pick it up. But by having a really good strong grip and controlling recoil, we are going to increase the odds of being able to maintain seeing the dot throughout all transitions and throughout recoil.
Now, let's talk about co-witnessing and what that means. Co-witnessing is when you use your red dot as your front sight so you are going to settle it in the rear notch and you're going to use it as such and it’s a great tool to make sure that your red dot optic is zeroed properly so you can hit your target. But it's something that you want to avoid using when you're actually shooting because it's always going to be slower. Using your red dot as a front sight is always going to be slower than just trusting your dot on your target each time.
In this live fire demonstration, I am going to show you how long it takes to shoot these three targets using a co-witness technique.
Now I will show you how much faster it is to trust your red dot on the targets.
It used to be that red dot optics were reserved for rifles or race guns in competition but now they are more accessible than ever, for personal and home defense, as well as competition. Learning to make the most of your red dot is important, from acquiring it, to controlling it in recoil, so that you can eventually learn to shoot more accurately and faster.
