7 Secrets You Didn’t Know About Laser Sights

Putting a laser sight on your handgun provides peace of mind for home defense and self-defense. They’re not just for police and military use. Millions of people use them at home.

This is because laser sights can help to drastically improve your shooting accuracy. So long as the laser sight is properly aligned, your gun is going to shoot wherever the little dot of laser light is pointing. The laser does the hardest parts of aiming for you when you don’t have time to do it yourself. And when you do have more time to aim your shot, a laser sight can provide you with additional verification that your shot will land true.

If you’re thinking about adding a laser sight to your home defense plan, here are 7 secrets that you didn’t know about laser sights to help you get a better idea of what they offer and how best to use them.

1. Laser Sights Can Speed Your Reaction Time

Most people know that laser sights can improve their accuracy, but didn’t realize that lasers can also help you take shots faster. This isn’t necessarily obvious at first, but it makes sense when you think about it: A lot of the delay in taking a faster shot has to do with taking the time to aim properly.

With a device such as a laser sight that can help you acquire your target faster, your reaction time is naturally going to improve. This is an extremely important benefit of laser sights.

2. You Don’t Need to Raise the Gun to Eye Level to Aim

You will often take your best shots when you raise your handgun to eye level, so that you can look down the barrel of the gun and aim as accurately as possible. But in a tense home defense situation, this might take extra time that you don’t have. It also requires you to hold the gun in a specific position, which may not be natural or easy for you.

Laser sights give you a lot more freedom in terms of where you hold your gun as you’re firing it—such as from the hip or the chest—by maximizing your shooting accuracy across all firing positions.

3. Grip Activation Technology Makes Lasers Respond Instantly

“Grip activation” is an optional technology that comes with some laser sights. When enabled, all you have to do is pick up your gun and hold it as if you were going to use it, and the laser sight will activate automatically—sort of like how your phone will turn on when you pick it up. You don’t even have to think about engaging the laser. It just happens.

This technology can make your response times even faster, and can also be disabled in situations where you don’t need it.

4. Green Lasers Offer Better Visibility than Red Lasers

Green light is far more visible to the human eye than red light is. This causes a green laser beam to look brighter or “fuller” compared to a red laser beam, even when the two lasers are of equal power. Green lights make better laser sights, period.

So then why do so many people still use red ones? To make a long story short, the green ones are newer and cost more. It took longer for green laser sights to be successfully miniaturized for use in handguns, and at first they were much more expensive.

Today, green laser sights are still more expensive than red ones—which explains why red ones are still made—but the cost gap has come down a lot. Nowadays, if you are going to buy a laser sight at all then you should probably spend the extra money and go green.

5. There Are Many Laser Sight Mounting Options

No matter what kind of handgun you own, or what your personal preferences are, the perfect laser sight is out there waiting for you. In general, there are three main types of laser sights:

In Guide Rod Laser sights, the laser actually mounts inside the gun itself, specifically inside the recoil spring. Being internally mounted, these kinds of sights take up very little space and give extremely accurate alignment—which is a good thing, since by design they cannot be adjusted.

Trigger guard laser sights are the easiest to mount and are also very convenient to access for battery replacement. They have a larger size, allowing for features such as bigger batteries with longer battery life, but they may not always fit in your existing holster. They also lose alignment faster than rail mounted sights, requiring more frequent realignment.

Lastly, rail mounted laser sights offer the flexibility of being able to mount the sight anywhere that your gun rail has enough free space. As with trigger guard lasers, rail mounted lasers are bigger and have room for larger batteries or other features.

6. Laser & Light Combos Give You More Power

When conditions are pitch dark, a laser sight by itself might not be enough for your home defense needs, because laser beams don’t light up the room: They just cast a beam with a red or green dot at the end. You still might be firing at shadows. In a home defense situation where you’re woken up from sleep and aren’t thinking clearly, the lack of visibility can lead to deadly tragedy. Safety is always important, from driving to gaming, but nowhere is it more important than around a deadly weapon.

The solution is to get a laser sight that also comes with a conventional beam of light. This will light up whatever it’s pointing at, letting you identify what you’re shooting at. All laser and light combo sights can be operated either in laser-only mode, light-only mode, or dual mode where both are active at once.

The regular light beam is usually white or mint green in color, which maximizes your visibility while helping to blind the intruder.

7. Laser Sights Don’t Work Well in Broad Daylight

Consumer-grade laser sights are best used in low-light conditions. This is because the laser beams aren’t strong enough to stand out in broad daylight. For that you would need high-power lasers. Those are available but are rarely worth it, since they are overkill (too bright) in low-light environments, cost a lot more, drain batteries rapidly, and are dangerous to use. Not practical at all! Stick with a regular laser sight and you’ll be much better off.

What counts as “low light” can be a little bit confusing, so here are the different low-light situations where having a laser sight on your gun is most likely to be helpful:

• Indoors. This is because indoor lighting is actually pretty weak compared to sunlight. A laser sight will be clearly visible when used indoors except under extremely bright lights (like spotlights).

• Outdoors when it’s dark. This can be at night, dawn or dusk, or during bad weather at any hour of the day.

• Outdoors in shaded areas. This includes covered porches, wooded areas, canyons, and anywhere else where direct sunlight is blocked.

For home defense you are most likely to need your gun indoors, and a laser sight would be a good investment for many people. But for self-defense when you’re out and about in public, you might not benefit from one, or at minimum you might want to disable the automatic grip activation that some laser sights feature.