Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #250...

At the range the other day getting red dots dialed in. That 509 Edge longboi shoots like a laser, and if you went back to 1996 and showed me that FN Reflex with the enclosed emitter Holosun EPS Carry and a tiny five hundred lumen Streamlight TLR 7 Sub, and then popped out the magazine with eleven witness holes, I'd have thought it was some kind of sci-fi space magic.

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #249...

The Fabrique Nationale Five-SeveN with a Trijicon RM08G and a magazine full of very angry bees.

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The Shape of Things to Come

Enclosed optics, direct mounted via standard footprints, in such a way that they don't require ridiculously high sights are the wave of the future in the slide-mounted MRDS field.

No adaptor plates or suppressor-height sights are required on this FN Reflex micro-nine with an enclosed Holosun EPS Carry and a Streamlight TLR-7 Sub.

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What's in a Name?

In my latest column at Shooting Illustrated, I discuss the notion that the trend to names rather than alphanumeric designations for commercial American firearms is neither new nor nefarious.

"[I]n the early 20th century, the Doughboys and G.I.s might have been issued an M1911 or M1911A1 pistol, but if they didn’t smuggle one home in their duffle bag as a souvenir after the war, when they felt the twangs of nostalgia for their wartime sidearm, they’d go into the local gun store and find that there were no handguns of that name from Colt.

See, “M1911” was a purely military designation. However, the Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company sold all manner of variants on the commercial market in the 1900s under names like “Government Model,” “Gold Cup,” and “Combat Commander” without anybody fearing it would send people’s plates spinning off their sticks."

It's a "Reflex", not an "FN5xx"

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Juice Worth the Squeeze?

Compensators on carry pistols...true expansion chamber comps, not weedy little ports EDM'ed into the barrel...have a few downsides and only one really practical upside. 

I mean, yes, they reduce split times, but raw split times hardly matter in a private citizen's defensive handgun usage, where each and every bullet fired is a use of force for which the firer will be held accountable.

What it does do is reduce muzzle flip to the point that, with proper technique, the dot will remain in the window during recoil.

It also complicates takedown and reassembly, vents gasses upward when shot from retention, and can be noisier for the shooter in some environments.

Most importantly, it makes the gun more ammo sensitive. Comped guns will often struggle to run with el cheapo 115gr ball ammunition, which frequently has barely enough energy to cycle a regular pistol.

Just a thing to be aware of if you decide to run a comped gun.

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Hey, look!

"The new Reflex from FN America hit the market in the spring of this year with basic stats similar to the other inhabitants of the category. It’s a 9 mm pistol that measures slightly larger than 6 inches in overall length and crams a flush-fit 11-round staggered magazine into a sub-5-inch height. Attentive readers will note that these dimensions drop it roughly into the overall concealment envelope of a J-frame-size revolver, albeit with a width much narrower than that imposed by a wheelgun’s cylinder.

At launch, the Reflex is available in two basic variants, regular and MRD (which is FN-speak for “cut to accept a slide-mounted micro red dot”), differing by 60 bucks in the MSRP department.

At first glance, they look like 509s that someone has left in the dryer too long, but a closer examination reveals that these are actually two very different pistols, and they are far from just another “me too” P365/Hellcat clone."

Click through to RTWT.

Turn your targeting computer back on, Luke.

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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