I have BUIS on every 'serious' rifle I have but not every rifle. Here are some thoughts I've had on the matter:
Optics are 'technology' and can fail, keeping up on batteries and checking contacts when you change batteries can help. That being said my biggest fear in a two-way encounter would be damage from gunfire, debris, or rough handling.
We always seem to imagine how our gunfights are going to go in a way the never ends in 'and then I died.' In our imaginary gunfight we will always have time to go to our BUIS. Going to BUIS can mean several things - dropping head down to pick them up in a lower third cowitness (may not be possible if tube has taken a round), rolling rifle to side in order get angled sights into play, or flipping up a front and rear combo. Point being, with it going fast and furious within, say, fifty yards, what will you really have time to do?
For example, I used to have a couple of CSAT apertures installed on rear sights. I liked the idea of being able to use the traditional pistol sight system - rear notch, front sight blade - for close in shots in order to avoid having to hold over for CNS shots. In practice I found that unless I started out on the notch, my dumbass was slower than with regular aperture and holding off. Because if I was looking through the normal aperture I had to decide, 'hey, this guys closer than 25' and then 'hey, I need to shoot him in between the eyes' and then 'hey, I need to go from the aperture to the notch' well by the time I did all that, found a sight picture in the notch, I was about 1 second off from just raising the front sight to his hairline. But that's just me.
The bottom line is we may need to get the next shot off too quickly to bring iron sights into the fray if our optic gets disabled. Train using the tube of the optic as a sight. If you've got a FSB rifle, where does it hit if you center it in the tube?
If your tube is a jagged hunk of metal you cant see through, traditional railed mounted BUIS aren't going to do you much good. If you have nothing else, how well do you shoot 'stance-directed' looking alongside the barrel?
BUIS or a MRDS are great if you have time to put them into play and/or the damage to your primary optic isn't such that they are out of play.
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President... - Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln and Free Speech, Metropolitan Magazine, Volume 47, Number 6, May 1918.
Every Communist must grasp the truth. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party Mao Zedong, 6 November, 1938 - speech to the Communist Patry of China's sixth Central Committee
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