Gear Review: Advantage Tactical Sights

My mother’s from South Africa. My father was from Romania. So I’m hardly a poster child for inbreeding. But both my parents are/were Jews, and it’s no secret that members of the Tribes suffer from poor eyesight. Now that nobody drinks Coke from a bottle, and the Japanese have mastered the art of making thin plastic eyeglass optics, I don’t get dissed for thick lenses. But my eyesight is such that I’m beyond bifocals, into multi-focals. When it comes to shooting, this is a big problem. The target is far away. The sights are not. Nose down: the target’s clear and the front sight’s fuzzy. Nose up and the reverse is true. So I thought I’d give Advantage Tactical Sights a try. Did I mention that I’m also red green color blind?

This affliction doesn’t mean I can’t see red or green. It means I can’t distinguish between shades of red and green. What’s more (or less), hues are a bitch. Bright colors don’t “pop” for me. Nothing is fluorescent. (I know this because I occasionally wear a color correcting X-Chrom contact lens.) All of which means I had to find a color combo that allowed me to see a perfect pyramid with Advantage’s rear (base) and front (tip) sights.

That was about as easy as it sounds. Obviously, the most popular combo—red and green—was out. I tried a couple of other duos from Advantage’s most helpful color selector widget. Unfortunately, the website’s display is misleading; the hues aren’t that bright that in real life. Eventually, I settled on yellow/yellow.

Remember: every time you change sights, you don’t. Your gunsmith does. Well mine did. And then there are shims. To zero the sights, you have to use shims. Well, my gunsmith did. By the time I was set-up, I was $60 out of pocket, not including travel time and the psychological stress of not having my carry piece on my person.

I ended up with a gun whose sights help me shoot extremely accurately. I simply put the top on the pyramid, put the tip of the pyramid just under the target (at 25 yards) and pull the trigger. Slowly and gently. But—as you can see from the video above, if I do this quickly, the first shot doesn’t go exactly where I want it to. In combat mode, I need one bullet to get my bearings (i.e. figure out which part of my glasses to use). After that, away we go.

It’s me. As I pointed out above, I’m visually and color-challenged. No matter which combo I used, I couldn’t see both sights well enough to put the entire pyramid top on top of the base. Nor could I see them well enough to get them perfectly aligned left and right. At speed? Moving? Low light (reducing hues even more)? Not impossible. But difficult.

Traditional sights work better for me because I can see the relationship between the rectangular shapes or dots quickly, especially if there are good-sized gaps between them (e.g. Trijicon). The Advantage sights are no advantage for me—unless I take my time. As a self-defense shooter, that ain’t it.

All that said, I highly recommend Advantage Tactical Sights to people with reasonable to excellent vision. If you can see well and take the time to install the sights correctly, you will shoot with tremendous accuracy and, yes, speed. Check out TTAG’s terrorist zombie gopher hunter Dave’s very first time using Advantage Tactical Sights. Imagine what he could do over time. Sad but true: when it comes to hand – eye coordination, youth has its advantage.

[Advantage Tactical Sights provided $79.95 sights free of charge for this review.]