Red Dot Sights and Pistols: A Data Driven Approach

Everyone loves red dot sights, and they are becoming massively popular on pistols. There’s just one problem with that, they aren’t any better than iron sights, for one particular group of shooters. Keep reading to see who should be using irons and who can definitely benefit from pistol mounted red dot sights.

Now before I get crazy emails from dudes named Larry who are about to “pop off,” let me explain my position on pistol mounted red dot sights.

I think they are the future aiming solution for pistols. They are rugged enough for duty/tactical use and they do help the vast majority of the population shoot more precisely, which is always a good thing.

This brings me to my previous assertion that they aren’t inherently the best aiming solution for everyone. While they do help many people shoot more accurately, they tend to cause novice and intermediate shooters to slow down their speed of engagement due to over aiming. They also do not help expert shooters shoot more accurately nor any faster.

It’s a bold claim I know, but I do have some data to back this up.

Pistol Mounted Red Dot Shooting Data

Just as in any scientific endeavor this article started off with a question, “Are pistol mounted red dot sights better than iron sights?” To answer this question I needed some data, and I couldn’t just rely on myself, or on or two other shooters. I needed a data set, but where would I get such information?

As it happens there is a very large data set with shooters of all levels who have shot standardized courses of fire, with iron sights, and with red dot sights.

The United States Practical Shooting Association has a classification system that has their shooters shoot standardized stages which will give them a classification of their current skill level.

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They also have several different divisions to shoot in. For this article we will be comparing scores of Production shooters (the least modified pistols), to Carry Optics (slide mounted red dots with the similar modifications).

If you are a member then you have access to their dozens of classifier descriptions and their calculator which lets you compare scores across different shooting divisions. This is exactly what I did.

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The Comparison

I chose six different classifiers, and picked an arbitrary score, to compare those shooting pistol mounted red dots, vs a similar pistol with traditional iron sights.

See the chart below.

You can see from the chart that every single classifier is the exact same, apart from El Presidente. El Prez actually favored iron sights as the same exact score gave you a higher classification in Carry Optics.

In other words, for two shooters shooting the exact same speed and accuracy you are ranked as less skilled in production, meaning production takes a better score to achieve the same rank.

It can be a bit complicated, but the overall results are clear. For very skilled shooters, who practice regularly there is no appreciable difference in speed or accuracy with red dot sights.

It should also be noted that I picked stages that tested many different shooting characteristics. Some were one handed, some were speed heavy, and some required extremely accurate shooting.

This is an example where I would have assumed that a dot would produce higher scores since the furthest targets are 105ft away, requiring a high accuracy component.

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So that solves the issues right? Just throw those sights in the trash! Not exactly, they are extremely useful for the vast majority of shooters.

The Benefits of Red Dot Sights

Remember that these are scores for competitive pistol shooters. These guys and gals practice hours per week both live and dry fire. At the top end of the sport it’s fairly common for these shooters to shoot thousands of rounds per week and dry fire at least an hour a day. Needless to say this is not the average shooter you’ll find at your favorite range.

Check out this video of one of the top USPSA Carry Optics and Production shooters, Hwansik Kim.

For the vast majority of shooters, the red dot sight is going to increase accuracy at most distances, and increase lethal hits on target. Check out this four year study by Sage Dynamics, that thoroughly compared red dots vs irons for shooters of all skill levels.

For those of you with ADHD they found that all shooters from novice to somewhat advanced shooters increased accuracy both in a standard shooting tests and in a force on force scenario.

Conclussions

Where does that leave us? Are red dot sights both better and worse than traditional irons? Unfortunately the answer is not that simple. For those that have thousands of rounds and hundreds of hours of practice on irons there doesn’t appear to be an appreciable advantage to a red dot sight.

Think about it this way. If I gave a professional race car driver a car with very good traction control is that going to help them? Probably not, they already know exactly what to do to extract maximum performance from the vehicle.

If you give that same car to someone who has no experience on a race track that traction control will be a life saver and will increase their performance.

Either way if you decide to adopt a red dot sight for your pistol you will need to spend a lot of time practicing with it until you feel just as comfortable with the dot as you do with the iron sights.

I highly recommend checking out Kyle Lamb’s book Stay in the Fight (Amazon Affiliate Link). It is an excellent guide to combat pistol shooting and if you can’t learn something from this Delta shooter, then you probably think blue crayons taste like berries.

Now get out there and start training!

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