Best Sights For Your Handgun
Handgun sights are popular aftermarket accessories for Glock-style pistols. The right sights can help you have more fun at the range, acquire targets faster for self-defense, or get the precision you need for competitive shooting. Finding the right gun sights for your weapon isn’t just about shooting smaller groups, however. It is also a gun safety modification. Every responsible gun owner needs a pistol sight they are familiar with and train with for safer gun use on and off the range.
Your Stock Sight Picture
A standard feature of most handguns, whether name-brand pistols or homemade firearms you’ve built from a kit, is sighting apparatus molded into or attached to the top strap of the weapon or to its slide. Usually featuring a notch at the rear of the weapon and a bead or blade at the front, this simple, effective sight had remained tried and true for generations. Notch and blade sights, often referred to as “iron sights,” are cheap and easy to engineer into the production process, provide a base level of aiming experience, and are low maintenance for the user should they choose to retain them.
If It Ain’t Broke…
Iron handgun sights are simple and effective. In their most basic form, you look down the length of your weapon through the notch in your rear sight. The front bead or blade lines up with your target, completing the sight picture. After lining up the blade on your target, keeping it centered and level with the rear notch, you squeeze the trigger, the hammer or firing pin strikes the primer of the cartridge, and a round fires. If you did good, the bullet hits the target, and if you didn’t, it’s time to keep practicing.
For many shooters, these handgun sights are sufficient. They’re familiar, allowing a minimum aiming proficiency with any similar weapon they try out. They’re easy to take care of, generally require little adjustment once set (if they’re even adjustable), and have a fairly low profile that avoids snagging them or bumping them against objects when the weapon is holstered or tangling in clothes when drawn. There are plenty of reasons these pistol sights have been the standard for generations of firearms enthusiasts.
…You Can Still Make It Better
Standard just isn’t good enough for everyone, though. That’s why finding the best handgun sights has been a passion of those who want to get the most from their guns they have pursued just as long. Modern pistol sights have come a long way and offer several options to help you improve accuracy under a variety of conditions and to meet the specific needs of as wide a range of shooters as possible.
Improving The Irons
The first upgrade many gun owners start with is simply swapping the stock sights with similar sights that offer an upgraded experience. For decades, some shooters have taken orange, white, or otherwise contrasting paint to the front sight blade of their gun to improve target acquisition, especially in low light settings. The latest evolution of this principle, replacement sights with fiber-optic dots, help gather ambient light and focus it into easy-to-see points of reference.
Shooting After Sundown
Night fire drills can be fun at the range, but they’re most satisfying when you’re successfully putting rounds on target time and time again. A variety of night sights are available that give you the utility of iron sights with a glowing upgrade. These sights use a small amount of radioactive material that gently glows, giving you the same familiar handgun sight picture even in complete darkness.
Shoot Reflexively
A particularly popular type of pistol sight, the reflex sight, gives you rapid target acquisition and reacquisition, even when maximizing your rate of fire. If you love our Model G Pull Release Trigger, which doubles your weapon’s output by firing a round for every trigger action–both on pull and release, then this may be the right handgun sight choice. Using a wide lens with a dot or reticle projected on it as an aim point. Like the Model G, these sights can be mounted on your existing frame and slide, making them both an efficient and economic weapon upgrade.
Dot It Up
A final sight, which can be used in addition to any of the others, is a laser sight that projects a point of light onto the target. Based on the distance from the target, this point is used to determine the aim point on the target. Laser sights can be attached via a mounting rail on some handguns, clamped to the trigger guard, or molded into replacement grips. While these can be difficult to use under dusty or snowy conditions, which rely on the light making it to the general area of your target to provide the reference point, they can also be good with rapid-fire trigger systems, like the Model G, where the focus is on the rate of fire and fun more than on marksmanship.
Drop-In Trigger System That’s Ready For Your Optics
The Model G is engineered to work with Glock-compatible slides, frames, and handgun sights. Unlike more expensive options that rely on additional machining or the purchase of a specialized replacement slide system, increasing your cost, it replaces your existing trigger group and works readily with your favorite pistol accessories and sights.
Get the most fun you can have at the range without the NFA paperwork that goes with a G18. Increase your rate of fire legally with the semi-automatic Model G for your Glock-type pistol. Set your sights on handgun fun with a pull release trigger from PR Triggers today.