Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Why do they do that?

I was intensely bored today, so I decided to swap out my 50x9 scope on my rifle for my red-dot reflector sight.

It's something I've been wanting to do for a while, but swapping them is a major pain in means removing the Weaver-style rail to fit the red-dot's dovetail mount.

Anyway, I swapped them out and zeroed the red dot.

Now, I absolutely adore my red-dot because it's turns my rifle into a whole new weapon. With a 9X scope, my rifle's all about setting up a target at a hundred yards, getting down in the prone position, controlling my breathing and firing that one perfect shot right through the center of a one inch target. With the red-dot mounted, it's about setting up a line of cans, slapping in the 30 round magazine and seeing how fast you can knock the cans over (or better yet, filling the cans with water and using hollow points so they leap into the air and explode when you hit them).

Sure, playing sniper is fun, but tin cans and a red dot have a sort of hi-tech shooting gallery feel. You see, shooting a .22 at a hundred yards with a powerful scope is like a math lesson. You have to calculate bullet drop, wind deflection and all kinds of things that affect the path of the bullet. With a red dot at 25 yards, you just look through the reflector, put the red dot where you want the bullet to go and pull the trigger.

If you're not sure what a red-dot sight is, think of it as a 'laserless laser sight'. You're basically looking through a piece of glass that has a red dot projected onto it. If you've ever played COD: Modern Warfare, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Now here's the thing, I adore my red-dot sight because it holds its zero well, and it was extremely cheap at about forty bucks (and you can get the same model now for $20 from Walmart). However, using it today reminded me of a user review of it that I read just before I bought it.

"This sight gives amazing accuracy! I'm talking about shooting bottle-caps at a hundred yards!!!!!"

Ummmm, no….it doesn't… and you can't.

You see, anyone who knows anything about shooting will tell you that a red-dot reflector sight isn't about pin-point accuracy, it's about fast target acquisition…it's why the army uses them on their assault rifles where the name of the game isn't pin-point accuracy but putting a bullet in a chest-sized target at less than a hundred yards as quickly as possible.

I don't understand why people feel the need to lie about the products they buy. If you like something, tell me you like it, but don't make shit up. This sight is awesome for short range plinking, but flat out useless for long range accuracy. You're reviewing a product and claiming it can do something that it not only can't do, but something it was never designed to do.

Ah, I can tell you're getting ready to comment already. Ah, but Paulius, maybe he can hit bottle-caps with that sight at a hundred yards! Just because you can't doesn't mean it's impossible!

Well, actually…you're wrong. Not because I can't do it, and I'm not saying it's impossible to get lucky, but you simply can't hit a bpttle-cap sized target consistently using this sight.

You see, the model sight this guy reviewed has a 5 MOA (Minute Of Angle) dot. In simplest terms this means that the projected dot you use to aim with covers a five inch circle at a hundred yards, meaning the dot is covering an area roughly five times the area of a bottle-cap.

Basically, set up a bottle cap at 100 yards and putting the dot on the target means you're completely covering it as the dot is over five times the size of the target.

So, the moral of the story, like the moral of so many of my stories is…

Don't lie, don't be a dick and make sure that if you're so full of shit it comes out of your mouth, don't burden me with it.

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