For years the rule was automatic: put a dot on your carry gun, add suppressor-height backup iron sights behind it, done. Lately I’ve been rethinking that, and I’m not alone. I’m Lance Rankin, owner and gunsmith at Western Sport in Roanoke, Texas, and I install carry optics and sights on customer pistols every week, so this is a debate I have with people in person all the time.
The case for skipping backup iron sights
The honest starting point is that miniature red dots grew up. Ten years ago they were fragile electronics that died at inconvenient times. The current generation of quality optics is durable, and battery life is measured in years, not weekends. The catastrophic dead-dot failure that backup iron sights are supposed to solve has become genuinely rare on good hardware.
Meanwhile the irons themselves aren’t free. Tall backup sights add snag points on a concealed gun, narrow your holster options, and eat up space in an already small optic window. And here’s the part people don’t like hearing: in a lot of real failure modes, irons don’t help anyway. If your lens is fogged, caked in lint, or smeared from riding against your body all day, you can’t see through it to use the rear iron sight either. The failure that irons fix is narrower than the slogan suggests.
There’s a training argument too. Instructors keep noticing that shooters with irons in the window use them as training wheels, hunting for the front sight instead of learning to present the gun consistently so the dot just appears. Take the irons away and the dot skills tend to come faster.
What to do instead
If the dot ever does die, the optic body itself is a usable sight at defensive distances. Put the target on top of the housing, sometimes called the guillotine hold, or simply center the window on the threat. Practice it in dry fire a few minutes a month and you’ll find it’s plenty accurate inside typical self-defense range. That skill costs nothing and covers the emergency the irons were bought for.
The other half is boring maintenance. Wipe the lens regularly, blow the lint out, and change the battery on a schedule (every birthday works) instead of waiting for the dot to dim. A maintained optic almost never surprises you. Most “optic failures” I see at the shop are really dead batteries and dirty glass.
Where I land
My honest position: on a dedicated carry gun with a quality optic, backup iron sights are optional, not mandatory, and plenty of serious shooters are now better off without them. That said, if your slide already has good sights that co-witness cleanly and don’t cause holster problems, there’s no urgent reason to remove them either. What I’d stop doing is spending $150 on tall irons for a gun that doesn’t need them, before you’ve spent that money on ammo and practice.
If you’re setting up a carry pistol from scratch, optic-ready guns make this easy now; the Glock 43X MOS is a good example of the breed, and my home defense handgun guide covers the bigger picture. I do optic cuts, sight installs, and zeroing in the shop here in Roanoke, north of Fort Worth. Bring your gun by appointment, or reach me at [email protected] or 817-393-4000.
Lance Rankin is the owner and Chief Gunsmith of Western Sport, a family-run Type 07 FFL and Class 3/SOT dealer in Roanoke, Texas, serving shooters since 2007. Born and raised in Texas with over 50 years of experience handling firearms, Lance purchased Western Sport in 2017 and turned his lifelong passion into his profession. He specializes in AR-15 and AR-10 platform rifles, manufactures Western Sport’s own AR-15 line under the Rankin Industries brand, and runs the shop’s in-house Cerakote coating operation. When he’s not behind the counter or the workbench, you’ll find him on his ranch deep into the night, hunting coyotes with an AR-15 and thermal optics. Lance holds an MBA and personally shoots and tests the products Western Sport sells.
