The red dot on the pistol has become normal—but it still fails in the one way irons don’t. This tension lurked beneath the company’s most recent SHOT Show display: optics are faster and easier to acquire for many shooters, but a window powered by a battery installed on top of a slide introduces a dependency that a fixed front and rear sight never had. With an increasing number of handguns being sold “optics ready, ”the practical question has shifted from“ can a dot be installed?” to “what still works when the dot is not?”
XS Sights’ solution is to integrate the optic, the mounting system, and the backup iron sights into a unified whole. Rather than leaving the compatibility to a stack of third-party components, the company is now including iron sights along with an optic plate built around those iron sights, intended for clean co-witnessing. The point is simple: if the optic becomes damaged and can’t be used, the iron sights will still be visible through the window without requiring abnormally tall sights that would be awkward to shoot. Since the plate and the iron sights are designed together, the co-witnessing becomes a design parameter rather than a happy accident, and it eliminates much of the guesswork about what will clear an optic body, what will catch, and what will vanish behind a housing.
The same compatibility issue rears its ugly head throughout the red-dot market in “footprints,” the bolt patterns and recoil systems that determine if an optic will mount to a gun. Several handguns now come with direct optic mounts, while others use modular designs and adapter plates. A case in point for how complicated this can become is Glock’s Slimline MOS series: the standard SLIMLINE MOS mount is the Shield RMSc footprint, while others use the MOS-K mount that accepts RMSc and K-pattern optics without an adapter plate. Such minutiae as M3 vs. M4 screws and whether they’re cover-plate only or optic-mounting screws becomes important when recoil and removal are part of the equation.
XS Sights also recognized the immediate issue that many shooters are already wondering about: co-witnessing a micro red dot sight on the latest Glock generation. The company indicated that it is developing a fix for the Gen 6 Glock model that employs an ACRO base, with the aim of maintaining a functional iron sight picture through the optic rather than as an afterthought.
On the long gun side, the XS Sights lever gun accessory line follows a larger trend: the traditional lever gun is increasingly being outfitted with modern accessories such as lights and optics interfaces. The “middle way” of the lever gun, in which traditional gun handling meets modern mounting points, has become a popular theme, and this in turn puts pressure on handguards to provide more functionality than simply protecting a barrel. The current XS Sights lever gun line focuses on full-length handguards for Smith & Wesson and Henry lever guns.
For Smith & Wesson’s Model 1854 rifles, XS Sights has released a new 19-inch handguard model scaled to the rifle’s 19-inch barrel. The handguard features M-LOK slots at the 3, 6, and 9 o’clock positions, as well as other cuts for lightening, reflecting the reality that a “modern lever gun” is built around where to place accessories and how much bulk they will add. XS Sights reported that more calibers and models are planned, continuing the theme on the pistol side of the business: reduce incompatibility, and make the backup plan part of the primary plan.
