I had the good fortune this week to be invited to a joint Remington and Trijicon Optics writers’ event. This event was held at the world famous Gunsite Academy in Paulden, Ar.

The Gunsite facility covers over 2000 acres of range facilities of all types catering to the civilian shooter, competition shooters as well as law enforcement and elite military units. There’s no better facility a shooter could ask for. This is why major companies in the firearms industry use Gunsite for many of their events. Any product the shooting sports industry wants to put through its paces can do so at Gunsite.

Being a joint event between these two industry leaders gave both companies the opportunity to showcase their products used together in this well organized event.

Four writers from our community of gun writers were invited to Gunsite not only shoot but to acquire more in depth information and knowledge about the weapons we would use as well as the Trijicon optics mounted to these guns.

RMR

SRS

Standard Reflex

The guns we used for this event were the Remington Versa Max Tactical shotgun,DPMS Gen II in .308 and the S&W M&P 9L CORE pistol mounted with the Trijicon RMR sight. The AR15’s used the SRS sight with the Versa Max utilizing the standard reflex sight.

After an orientation covering the three Trijicon reflex optics and the guns we would be using we loaded up and headed for the range.

I’ve included a large number of photos so please excuse the page possibly loading slowly.
We started out by firing a few hundred rounds among the four of us to allow those not familiar with the M&P Pro an opportunity to get used to the Pro’s trigger and using the RMR optic on them. After this it was time to get down to business and see what we could do with this gun/optic combination.

Now I have to be honest when I say I’ve never really been all that fired up about adding a small optic on a handgun. I don’t believe I was alone in this opinion. After shooting several cases of ammo between the four of us I can say with some confidence that our 50/50 split went by the wayside. We all saw the benefits of using the RMR sight not only on this pistol but also on Glocks as well as other handguns. I think it can be used for more than competition to include hunting, defense and just plain old fun on the range.

Does it take getting used to shooting a handgun with an optic such as the RMR? Yes indeed it does. We all are so used to looking for the front sight and basing our sight picture on that it took us awhile to switch over to seeing the red dot placing it on target and firing. You don’t entirely disregard the front sight since you sight the pistol in with the red dot riding on top of the front sight. You do have to learn to use the red dot as the primary reference though.

It takes a fair number of rounds to get to the point it begins to feel natural. By the noon hour we pretty much had it down and were getting excellent accuracy and our speed was picking up a significant amount. Not that anybody would admit it but I got the feeling some were shooting better with the red dot than the usual iron sights.

We did move around to different ranges. One had use firing from 25 yards in to 3 yards. The next range had all steel targets of several types. I do love shooting steel so that was one they had to drag me away from. This range really allowed us to work on our speed.

We did switch to the AR15’s later in the day and will shoot them tomorrow as well. The Versa Max shotgun will also get a workout. Tomorrow evening I’ll report on the results of using the SRS and standard reflex Trijicon on these weapons.

Yes we did crawl into a cage!

Finally I’ll conclude with an overall impression not only of the optics but the guns themselves and why these optics were chosen for these guns. We also intend to switch optics between these three guns and see how well the RMR works on a shotgun as an example of one switch we’ll be making. I fully intend to obtain an RMR for review while mounted on the very short Kel-Tec KSG. That’s for another time though.

I would encourage readers to post any questions they may in the comments. I’ll check these questions through the day and have the Trijicon and Remington representatives answer them. Of course I’ll post the answers they give.