Pistol dots as training aids

While telling parvusimperator how easy dry-fire practice is when you have a red dot wiggling over your point of aim1, it hit me that you can make a similar dry-fire training aid for quite a number of pistols, and you can do it for less than a lot of actual training aids.

All you need is a pistol with a Picatinny rail and an Amazon account2. With the latter, you buy two things: a Picatinny rail pistol dot mount (the cantilevered sort, which gives you rail estate atop the gun), and a little red dot. In both cases, you buy the absolute cheapest knockoff crap you can, because, remember, this is a dry-fire training aid. It doesn’t need to stand up to any impulse more severe than the striker or hammer falling.

As it turns out, I have a cheapo micro-red-dot which occasionally lives on a frame mount on my Beretta U22. I shook the Many Words Press petty cash piggy bank, replaced a tenner inside with a note saying ‘IOU $10’, and chipped in $2 more for the cheapest polymer sight mount I could find on Amazon.

Two days later, and it was in hand. It is an appalling piece of crap. This was not entirely unexpected in kind, but I certainly underestimated the magnitude. ‘Appalling piece of crap’ is going to be my Amazon review headline. Just how is it so bad? Let me count the ways.

First, it’s entirely made from polymer. Even the hardware. Even the heads of the screws. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to turn a polymer screw before, so I’ll tell you how it goes. First, you take your nice gunsmith’s screwdrivers. Then, you carefully choose one which fits the polymer screw correctly. Then, you gently turn the screwdriver. Lastly, you instantly strip the screw.

Happily, the sight mount is also too narrow for my Px4 and P-09s, so just shoving it on over the rail until the friction holds it in place works too. You can’t move the slide, but that’s fine. Thanks to hammer-fired guns, I don’t need to worry about it. So, does the sight-and-mount combo work as a training aid?

Yes and no.

On the yes side, watching the dot wiggle is a wonderful way to see in what way you’re pulling the trigger wrong. It’s extremely clear. You can see both where and how you’re moving the gun when you pull the trigger.

On the no side, I don’t think I would recommend using it all the time. The problem with a dot is that it sits higher than the ordinary sights, and the problem with this dot and mount in particular is that they’re not zeroed correctly. Both issues require you to hold the gun in a way that won’t work with iron sights. Do that too much, and you risk breaking your muscle memory.

Still, at $30 or so in total project cost, it doesn’t cost you a lot of ammo money to set up, and it’s easier to see exactly what mistakes you’re making and how to fix them than it is with dry-firing on iron sights alone. I give the idea a thumbs up with reservations.


  1. He knew already. 
  2. AliExpress works too, but I can’t imagine there are many places in the world where you’re a) practicing with handguns and b) unable to order from Amazon. 

2 thoughts on “Pistol dots as training aids

    1. Fishbreath Post author

      Good thought. Even the bigger barrel-and-arbor ones would work. (Bushnell’s is $35, so not even much of a savings on the dot-and-mount.)

      Plus, in that case, you have a laser boresighter which might possibly be useful in other situations.

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