Red dot sights are becoming as ubiquitous on handguns as they are these days on rifles. And the cool thing is they’re getting smaller and cheaper for the everyday shooter and operators on a budget.
Shield is a company based in the U.K. that manufactures high performance military proven red dot sights, and we’re gonna have a little chat about two of them.
For your hand blaster (snicker): the Shield Sights RMS
Remember: At the risk of sounding orgulous, we must remind you – this is just a gear porn notification; a public service if you will, letting you know these things exist and might be of interest. It’s no more a review, endorsement, or denunciation than it is an episiotomy.
Grunts: Orgulous.
It’s built of aerospace aluminum (pronounce that the way the Brits do), with a side accessible battery drawer. Shield, who has been building Red Dots for 20 years, describes it as the ‘next evolution in mini red dots’, and while it’s designed for a pistol, you could just as easily throw it on a rifle or a shotgun.
They’re available in 4 MOA or 8 MOA versions. MSRP is £275.99 to £312.00 depending on which one you get, or if you purchase a package deal. Not sure what that is in US dollars? LMGTFY.
Shield says with their Glock MOS plate you won’t need suppressor sights to co-witness, explaining, “On all Glock MOSs the interchangeable plate screws directly into the slide, and the sight then screws into the plate. All we’ve done is created a plate with two posts that the sight goes over and the screws go into the pillars securing the sight in place. This allowed us to make the plate considerably thinner…with our mounting plate, which is sold separately, you can co-witness without suppressor sights.”
Learn more right here, or check their social media for an announcement of domestic distributors (links below).
For your long gun: the Shield Sights Switchable Interface Sight (SIS)
This is a red-dot reflex descendant of the JPoint and then the CQB (Close Quarters Battlesight) built for the U.K.’s MoD, which is the British version of the DoD. Shield says the new SIS is just as reliable, and will take just as much of a beating, as the Brit CQB. If that’s true, it’s likely to be a sight worth having.
There are over 50,000 of those out there “serving”. And if you remember, it earned the Best Target Acquisition Product for the Soldier at the 2013 Soldier Technology Awards.
The SIS features 4 switchable reticles and an automatic light meter to dial the reticle up or down to adjust to your environment, so you won’t have any flaring. (Note: you might think flaring is a term that belongs in the same lexicon as JOI or merkin, but you’d be wrong.)
It has 3 automatic levels and 12 manual levels as well. It’s powered by a single CR2032 lithium battery and weighs just a smidge more than 2 oz. Reticle is a 1 MOA dot or an 8 MOA dot in a 65 MOA ring.
As Shield tells it,
“The SIS CD (Center Dot) reticule was designed to offer the user the best of both worlds. With the touch of a button the dot can go from 8MOA down to 1MOA and back again. The 8MOA was found to be the best choice for UK Soldiers as it made them much faster and accurate in close quarter environments and the 1MOA now gives that same Soldier the ability to hit targets out to far greater distances than believe possible by a red dot.”
Getcha one here on Brownells.
Learn more online here. They’re on Facebook at /ShieldPSD/ and on Instagram (@shield_sights) as well.