Turning A Page
So what does an old geezer like me do to keep shooting some of my favorite firearms? You turn to optics, either the type you put on guns or the ones you put on your face. Actually, the ones on my face came first. They were needed for handgun sights. When the sights of my Colt SAAs, S&W Hand Ejector .44s, and various World War II military pistols turned blurry I turned to special glasses. My idea was to call around locally to eye doctors and ask this question, “Would it be possible to bring in an unloaded handgun so the doctor could fix me up with glasses specifically for seeing their sights?” In this day and age I was expecting to run into some balky receptionists. However, I was forgetting this is Montana. The gal on the phone said, “Hang on a minute and I’ll ask the doctor.”
He agreed. In an attempt to add a little flash to the occasion I took with me a nickel-plated Colt SAA .45. When I uncased it the doc said, “Oh, that’s nice!” and things went well from there. He made me a set of glasses with which handgun sights are razor sharp albeit the rest of the world is a bit blurry. Blurry targets can still be hit if sights are sharp. In those days I was active in the cowboy action game so I worried about transitioning from my single actions to lever gun sights. There certainly wasn’t time to take off one set of glasses and put on another.
I needn’t have worried. A lever gun’s front sight is about the same distance away as single action revolver’s sight and a fairly spacious peep sight aperture needs no attention because the eye automatically centers the front sight. So my special shooting glasses served me well.