A good home defense red dot can improve your ability to protect your home and the people you love. Unlike concealed carry self-defense weapons that need to be small and light enough for discreet wear under your clothing. Your house gun, however, doesn’t face those same limitations. You’re also facing any potential aggressor on your literal home turf, where you have the ability to tailor your firearm and home defense plan to best suit your needs. From reflex sights to prism scopes, you have quite a few practical optics options, so let’s take a look at choosing your best.
Defense on Your Terms
Before you can choose your home defense red dot, you need a home defense gun you can count on. While a handgun can still be a viable defensive weapon in a home setting, many gun owners choose to upgrade their firepower. Some of the most popular home defense guns are:
Pistols and Revolvers – Handguns are primarily defensive weapons used to take or regain control of tactical situations. These firearms are accurate and powerful at close ranges and can be used with one or both hands. Pistols are popular with shooters on a limited budget who may need a gun that does double duty as a carry and home defense gun.
Shotguns – Featuring a large, smooth bore, these guns are extremely powerful close-range weapons. While they can be loaded with slugs, larger buckshot pellets, or loads featuring a large amount of smaller pellets, they lack accuracy at longer ranges, and the scatter pattern of a shotgun can cause significant property damage and injury in a wide area around the target. Shotguns are great home defense guns due to their flexibility. Loaded with shot, they’re devastating at close range without risking over-penetration, but buckshot and slugs can be used for rural settings where predators and critters may be a bigger risk to your home than robbers.
Rifles – Rifles use larger, more powerful rounds that shoot farther accurately. Usually fired from the shoulder, they can be less maneuverable than handguns or shorter tactical shotguns and carbines. Rifle rounds can also over-penetrate at extremely short ranges, again leading to the risk of property damage and injury. Rifles are great ranch guns, where you may need longer range precision to protect your herd or send potential attackers packing.
PCCs – Pistol caliber carbines are meant to bridge the gap between handgun and rifle. While significantly larger than a handgun, they are lighter and more maneuverable than a rifle. Chambered for rounds usually found in pistols, there’s more manageable recoil and less risk of over-penetration, but the longer carbine barrels tend to increase the velocity and stopping power of a bullet compared to the same round fired from a standard pistol. PCCs are a great all-around weapon, doing well in most home defense settings.
Choosing Your Home Defense Red Dot
The good news is that there’s a home defense red dot for just about any gun. We work hard to make sure there’s a practical optic that’s priced so every gun owner has a better sight picture to improve their speed of target acquisition, accuracy, and precision. By taking a look at your weapon and the threats you’re most likely to face, you can narrow down your selection to the optics that meet your needs.
Range – Most red dots will offer plenty of accuracy to help you hit a target across the room. If you’re in a rural setting or a state where your home defense rights extend beyond your walls to your property line, you need a home defense red dot that gives you accuracy that matches the range of your weapon.
Mounting Options – You can’t mount every optic directly to every gun. If your handgun has one mount footprint and your micro prism has another, you’ll need an adapter to make the two work together. Our red dots also come with a 1913 Picatinny rail mount, so you have the option to attach them to a gun featuring this popular scope and sight mounting system.
Closed Vs. Open – Open-emitter red dots use an LED reticle reflected off a single lens to create your sight window. This keeps them small and lightweight but also exposes your emitter and aiming point to the elements. Closed-emitter reflex optics and prism scopes are sealed at each end. This does lead to more weight and larger sizes, but they’re better protected from environmental conditions, dust, and lint.
Reticle—When choosing a home defense ed dot, you also want to make sure the reticle supports your weapon’s use case. Larger circle reticles improve the speed of acquisition but are less precise. Small dot reticles are precise but may take longer for proper shot alignment. Combination and multi-reticles give you the best of both worlds, offering both speed and accuracy.
Lighting – Lighting is an important consideration for your home defense red dot, as you may need to defend your property, family, or animals in the dead of night, inclement weather, or both. Adjustable illumination can help ensure your reticle is both visible and doesn’t blow out your low-light vision, but some red dot styles are better than others at making the most of bad lighting for the target as well.
The Best All-Around Home Defense Red Dot
The best home defense red dot is the one that works best for your weapon, shooting skills, and preferences, which are as individual and unique as every gun owner. A good place to get started, however, is with our all-around home defense red dot champion: The Advocate 1X Micro Prism Scope.
An All-Purpose Micro Prism Built for Performance
The Advocate prism scope ticks all the boxes for a home defense red dot. Featuring an etched and illuminated tactical circle and triangle reticle, shooter-friendly 85 mm eye-relief, and parallax-free operation out to 100 yards, it gives you better speed, accuracy, and precision at both short and moderate ranges. It mounts directly to any T1/T2 mounting footprint, and adapter plates are plentiful to mate this optic to slides machined for other optics footprints. It also comes with a 1913 Picatinny riser that can be canted forward or back to adjust the mount to put your eye-piece in the relief sweet spot. The adjustable windage, elevation, and brightness ensure you can find zero and your aiming point cleanly and consistently.
The reason this prism scope won out over so many of our other formidable home defense red dots, like the Mediator and the new Granite line of competition optics, is how it handles the target’s image. The 20mm objective lens of the Advocate takes in the light that comprises your image of the target, passes it through a series of prisms, and focuses it down to the exit pupil of your eye-piece. Standard reflex optics just pass the image through. This results in a sharper image, even in low-light settings.
Order Your Advocate Prism Scope Today
When you need a home defense red dot you can count on, we have the practical optics that balance cost and performance. Sign up for our newsletter to get deals delivered to your inbox. Order your Advocate 1X Micro Prism from Gideon Optics today.
