Trijicon's HD Sights Start Shipping

Around SHOT Show this year, Trijicon announced their latest sight design, the HD.  Short for Home Defense High Definition Hefty Dots Hard Duty, the sights are sort of a hybridization of express sights and more traditional irons.  And now they’re shipping.

If you need to do some precise target shooting, you can just line up the tops of the sights and blast away; all you’re encumbered with is a particularly fat front sight post.  But with its bright, large yellow or orange circle, if you need to say, track a moving target, all you have to do is focus on the dot and put it over your target; you’ll hit center-of-mass if you’re holding the gun right enough.

Course, these are Trijicons we’re talking about, so they’ve got a certain amount of that delicious isotope of radioactive hydrogen, tritium, front and back, for all your tactical night-stalking needs.  With a half-life of twelve years before it decays into plain ol’ helium, these sights will stay bright for a decade or more if you don’t crack a vial.

Which would be hard to do anyway.  Just guessing here, none of us are materials engineers, but we have to believe that the extra-fat front post has to provide some kind of structural integrity not common to all sights.  And like all Trijicon sights, the vials are housed in rubber tubes and capped with a super-hard sapphire lens.  Seriously, the sights are designed for you to be able to do that tactical one-handed belt-charging thing, they’re cool with taking hits.

Trijicon’s reputation and competitive design will probably sell quite a few of these sights, particularly with what early hands-on reports are showing off.

Still, this could be rough news for XS Sight Systems, makers of express sights for handguns for some years now.  Until the HD, they had the market cornered (yes, Novak has theirs, too but their audience is, well, select) and now they’re going to have to deal with a little competition.

Which is almost never a bad thing for the consumer.

So yeah, Trijicon’s shipping, go Trijicon!  Bad luck for more than a few, though: the Hard Duty sights are only available for Glock, SIG Sauer, Smith & Wesson, and Springfield XD and XDm pistols (and even then, check the list to see if your model is supported).

If you’re gun isn’t on the list, well now you know what it’s like to own a CZ, don’tcha.