by David E. Petzal
Back when everyone knew who Arthur Godfrey was, you couldn’t sell a big-game rifle without iron sights. Scopes would betray you, and shooters insisted on iron as backup.
Optical sights are infinitely improved, but they’re still comprised of layers of glass and many minuscule parts. Scopes can malfunction, or be broken, or get bashed so far out of adjustment that they’re useless. Iron sights—good ones—can also break or be knocked out of whack, but it takes damage of a world-ending nature to do it. Therefore, when you fall and your scope is bent in the shape of the letter C, your iron sights will remain undisturbed—assuming you have iron sights. If you don’t, you then get to find another scope, or grovel to borrow a rifle, or go home.
What follows is some anecdotal evidence of the usefulness of iron sights.
A Finn, Simo Hayha, is the most effective sniper of all time. He performed his heroics during the Russo-Finnish war of 1939-1940, and used a Finnish-made copy of the Russian Mosin-Nagant military rifle and a Suomi submachine gun. His longest shot was at 400 yards; he had a few at 300; the bulk of his handiwork with the Mosin was performed at 100 to 200; and with the Suomi, at 50 or less.
He never used a scope. Hayha felt that scopes reflected light; that their high mounts made his profile more visible, and that Finland’s bitter cold would fog the lenses. His principal tools were extraordinary patience and attention to concealment. He went so far as to keep his mouth filled with snow so his breath could not be spotted. Hayha was a first-rate shot, but more important, he was a master of Fun in the Forest. Iron sights, even the crude ones on a Mosin-Nagant, were all he needed.
Now we travel from Finland to Africa, and the rifles used by professional hunters to keep clients from being stomped, chewed, clawed, or impaled. I’ve met a whole bunch of PHs, and looked at their rifles. They were all bolt-actions; they ranged from .375 H&H to .460 Weatherby; and every one of them had iron sights. There was nary a scope or a red dot or a holo sight in the lot.
This is because African stopping rifles are treated very badly for the most part. They get thrown around, bounced, dragged through the sand, and bashed on a daily basis. And they must function despite all the maltreatment. The sights are invariably a big gold or ivory bead up front and a shallow V in the rear, sometimes with an inlaid gold line at the center of the V. The sight bases are screwed and sweated to the barrel. If you give a PH a scope as a gift, he’ll take it home and use it as a paperweight.
Now we come to three rifles that have seen a near-inconceivable amount of use, and which I’ve been lucky enough to handle. First is a David Miller-built .338 owned by Jim Carmichel. It’s based on a much-reworked Model 1909 Argentine Mauser, and incorporates Miller’s extraordinary scope mount, which is the strongest I know of. Jim had a plain Leupold 4X scope mounted when I saw it, and the rifle had iron backup sights. It was his go-to rifle for years, and he took all manner of game with it.
Warren Page was the most experienced hunter I’ve known personally, and he did most of his shooting with a Mashburn 7mm Magnum, built by Mashburn. The rifle wore a Kollmorgen 4X scope with a medium crosshair. He called the rifle Old Betsy, and it accounted for 475 head of big game, all sizes, several continents, all conceivable conditions, and it had backup iron sights. His other go-to gun was a .375 Weatherby, built by the Weatherby Custom Shop for its own blown-out version of the .375 H&H. Warren picked a very early Remington Model 721 for the action, and mounted a Lyman 2.5X scope in a Pachmayr Lo-Swing side mount. Did it have iron sights? You bet your life. Warren bet his.
What I have to offer is this: I’m very fond of the scopes made by a very high-priced manufacturer whose specialty is tactical and target scopes. I’ve been using one of this company’s target scopes in competition for seven years now, and have used it on two different rifles for a total of 4,500 rounds. In case you don’t shoot in target competition, you should know that your scope doesn’t sit placidly above the barrel; it’s constantly being adjusted, and the adjustments must be accurate to 1/8-inch. Despite all this wear and tear, it continues to work flawlessly.
However, an identical scope by the same maker stripped an adjustment gear very early in its competitive life. It instantly became null and void. I sent it back and they fixed it. A hunting scope by the same folks had its objective-lens element separate. Back it went, fixed it was, and fine it works.
My point being that even the best scopes can break.
And then there were the friends of mine whose safari rifle—a pre-’64 Model 70—was run over by an airplane tug when they boarded in Kansas City, Kansas. The stock was cracked through the pistol grip and the scope was squashed, despite the fact that the rifle was in a very strong aluminum case. (Baggage handlers abuse gun cases for sport. In the 40 years that I traveled constantly with guns, I’ve had one case come through undamaged. It’s a Pelican-Hardigg iM 3300.) The ruptured Model 70 had iron sights, but they were the horrible junk that was standard on those rifles. I had a spare scope; my friends dug up some epoxy and glued the stock together; and the rifle functioned once more.
In my present situation, I use only one gun for just about everything. It’s a Ruger Scout Rifle in .308, and it comes with a rear ghost-ring peep and a military front blade sight. I replaced the factory rail and rear sight with the version made by X-S Sights in Fort Worth, Texas. They make a longer rail than Ruger, and their ghost ring peep is incorporated neatly into the rail. Its adjustments are very simple and very rugged. The X-S rail is held to the barrel and receiver by five screws, and mine has never worked loose, despite the belief that Scout rails always work loose. Not this one. It’s the cat’s meow and the bee’s knees.
You may remember the line from The Graduate: “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics.”
My one word to you is “Iron.”
Dave Petzal, in conversation, usually limits himself to one word or fewer. He agrees with Jeremiah Johnson, who said, “Nothin’ wrong with quiet.”
