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Old 03-02-2016, 02:39 AM
commando552 commando552 is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: England
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Very recently you have started seeing some police with a red dot on their pistol. The reason that it is only happening relatively recently is that it has taken a while for the technology to get small yet rugged enough to work on a carry sidearm. When they were originally used in the 90s for competition shooting they were large enough that they could not be mounted on the slide and used mounts that attached to the frame. It wasn't until about 2000ish that you started getting sights that could be mounted on a slide.

I believe that the grand-daddy of all of them was made by a British company called Firepoint (sold in the US as the Tasco Optima 2000), who went out of business in 2002 and subsequently the same sight was made by JPoint, and a metal bodied version by Doctor. By the mid-2000s they were being used in combat by some Special Forces experimentally, however at this point in their development they were not particularly reliable. A sight mounted on a slide takes a bit of a beating, and the sights tended to suffer from wandering zeroes, coming loose of their mounts, or just breaking all together. In the early 2000s some companies did start actually mounting these sorts of sights onto their guns at the factory (you could get CZs fitted with Firepoints on the slide), but these tended to be more for competition rather than military/police use.

These days slide mounted sights are a lot more rugged and reliable, so they have gotten to the point where military/police are starting to actually trust them (for example regular uniformed police are starting to use them more, not because they are tacti-cool but because some older officers with not perfect eyesight prefer them). This wouldn't have been the case in the early 2000s though, they were still more of a novelty/competition thing.

If you want to give them something special, give them Crimson Trace grips. They have been around since the mid 90s and would be more likely to actually be used.
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