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| If there’s a centerfire pistol more naturally suited to a slide-mounted MRDS than the soft-recoiling and flat-shooting FN Five-SeveN, I don’t know what it would be. |
While early adopters like Steve Fisher and Kelly McCann were experimenting with slide-mounted red dots as far back as the turn of the millennium, two things were necessary to get us to the widespread acceptance that the MRDS has achieved today.
First was a truly ruggedized sight with useful amounts of battery life. While a sporting sight can have fresh batteries installed before a hunt or a match, changing batteries on a carry or duty pistol (especially if doing so may involve re-zeroing) is an almost prohibitive pain if it needs doing more than once, maybe twice, a year. Also, while a CCW pistol is, by definition, protected from the environment by at least a layer of t-shirt cloth, a duty pistol is hanging out there where it can be whanged off door jambs and furniture and stuff.
Trijicon had been sticking a Docter Optic atop some higher-magnification ACOGs to give .mil dudes a backup sight that that could be used at close quarters, but in 2009 it was replaced with a new in-house optic: The Ruggedized Miniature Reflex.
The RMR had yoinks of battery life, was waterproof down to depths you don't need to worry about unless you commute to work using a Draeger rebreather, and was sturdy enough to withstand an entire loaded M4 landing red-dot-first when dropped from shoulder height.
These traits also made for a pretty darn good slide-mounted optic on a pistol, as it happened.
At the time, though, you still had to purchase the red dot and then send your pistol off to have the slide milled to fit the optic. (Or buy an aftermarket slide that was pre-milled, and caveat emptor, baby.)
The second key factor in red dot acceptance was the availability of pistols that came from the factory already set up to accept a slide mounted red dot, and FN America led the way there with the FNX-45 Tactical in 2012.
Within a few years, the Tactical FNs were followed by MOS Glocks and CORE Smith & Wessons and now you can get blasters already set up for red dots from manufacturers as diverse as Sccy and Kimber.
Also, however, there was a proliferation of sight footprints...but that's a topic for the next post.
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