imported post
Yes, lasers are gadgets that can fail. So are flight instruments, and pilots in the "golden age of flight" abhored them for that very reason. Who needs more gadgets than a magnetic compass (when has the earth's magnetic field failed) and the good, old, reliable Mark I human eye-ball? But today, we would consider a pilot crazy to think like that and we wouldn't dream of boarding a plane that wasn't equipped with those failure prone gadgets.
There are various pro's and con's to use of lasers, but I think the big issue is this:
In actual shootings, police and civilians hit the bad guy about 20% to 25% of the time with ordinary iron sights. One hit out of four or five shots, with the rest going somewhere unintended. With laser equipped sidearms, the hit rate in actual shootings exceeds 90%. That's far too big a disparity to ignore.
Whatever other disadvantages lasers might have (giving away your position, expense, etc.) the improvement in the ability to hit the target, even for an inexperienced shooter, outweighs it all, in my opinion. It's pretty easy to imagine a time when police and armed civilians will be considered negligent NOT to have a laser sighted sidearm, especially if one of your shots misses the bad guy and hits an innocent bystander.
Yes, lasers are gadgets that can fail. So are flight instruments, and pilots in the "golden age of flight" abhored them for that very reason. Who needs more gadgets than a magnetic compass (when has the earth's magnetic field failed) and the good, old, reliable Mark I human eye-ball? But today, we would consider a pilot crazy to think like that and we wouldn't dream of boarding a plane that wasn't equipped with those failure prone gadgets.
There are various pro's and con's to use of lasers, but I think the big issue is this:
In actual shootings, police and civilians hit the bad guy about 20% to 25% of the time with ordinary iron sights. One hit out of four or five shots, with the rest going somewhere unintended. With laser equipped sidearms, the hit rate in actual shootings exceeds 90%. That's far too big a disparity to ignore.
Whatever other disadvantages lasers might have (giving away your position, expense, etc.) the improvement in the ability to hit the target, even for an inexperienced shooter, outweighs it all, in my opinion. It's pretty easy to imagine a time when police and armed civilians will be considered negligent NOT to have a laser sighted sidearm, especially if one of your shots misses the bad guy and hits an innocent bystander.