Top Night Sights
A #nightsight comes in a couple different types…there’s the colored glass type and the tritium type, both with their own advantages. Regardless of which type or brand you choose, there are a couple things to consider when buying night sights: durability and visibility. Like most accessories, you get what you pay for. Night sights come in all price ranges. If you’re adding night sights to your carry #gun , spend the money. Your life is worth it. But if you just want a sight for plinking at dusk, you can get away with something on the less expensive side.
TRUGLO, if you’re interested, makes sights for a wide range of weaponry, including bows, rifles, and shotguns. For this article, though, we are going to talk about their handgun products. Where TRUGLO excels is their combination Tritium and fiber optic sight. This eliminates the shortfall of the fiber optic sight, which is needing a light source to shine through the sight to illuminate it. When you have your own light source – the tritium – you eliminate this problem. The housing for their fiber optics is also amazingly difficult to break. Breaking your fiber optic sight is a common occurrence, and many manufacturers send replacements in the package.
AmeriGlo sticks to making sights for handguns only and they do it well. Their night sights are available in fiber optic, tritium, and a combination. What I like most about AmeriGlo is that you’re not limited to one style sight. Many of the manufactures on this list only have one or two styles of sights. Most common is the front sight with a single-color dot and a white outline. The rear sight has the U shape with the colored dot on either side. There is nothing wrong with that. It works. However, if you want something different, AmeriGlo has options. 14 for just the Glocks. One of their options that I can’t say I see often elsewhere is a ghost ring rear sight and tritium front sight. The rear sight has a dot on either side to help you line everything up so you aren’t just guessing where it should be in the ghost sight. And to be fair, there are more styles available, but they aren’t illuminated. I like choice. Even if it’s just the option of choosing a different color for my front and rear sights. Use AmeriGlo to get more options than just your standard front and rear night sights.
The Meprolight has a night sight they call the FT Bullseye. It’s a rear sight only and it doesn’t need a front sight at all. Pretty sweet, huh? “How does that work?” you might ask. Well, think of it as if you were adding a reflex sight to your pistol, just low profile and no batteries are needed. It’s a combination of tritium and fiber optic, so again, it illuminates itself. As you aim, you’ll see a dot, and when you are on target, you will see a ring around the dot. It’s similar to lining up your front and rear sight.
Not everyone likes the same style sight. Not everyone feels the way you need to line up some sights is intuitive. Most sights have you line up the dots leaving the appropriate amount of space on either side and making sure you have it lined up top to bottom as well. What XS Sights has you do is “Dot the I”. Their front sight is a colored dot with a large white ring. The rear sight is a colored line. To take aim on a target, you need to place the white dot on the top of the line on the rear sight. That’s it. When you are shooting from different distances, you can easily estimate where your bullet will impact by using a different point of reference on your sight. When you are shooting from a closer distance, the dot in the front sight is your impact point. When you are farther away than 25 feet, you aim with the top of the front sight.
