What you need to know when you need Ballistic Eyewear
There are plenty of brands out there to choose from, WileyX, ESS Eyewear, and Revision Eyewear, Smith Optics jumped into the fold with the Smith Elite Military and Law Enforcement products but just like clothing, shirts, vests, pants and footwear, everyone is different and it’s so hard to know to get unless you can walk into a store and try them on. If you are not on a SWAT Team and do not have to wear full coverage googles, the Smith Elite Sunglasses are worth checking out. If you notice in many of the Iraq and Afghanistan photos of our soldiers, many of them are wearing eyewear and the smart ones are wearing ballistic sunglasses. The standard you want to check on any eyewear for ballistic protection is Ansi Z87 ratings, according to Smith Optics their sunglasses exceed that rating. There are plenty of horror stories of IED’s going off and people losing an eye 100yds away due to fragmentation. If you have ever been to a firing range and had to sight in a rifle and hit below a target, you would see fragments of dirt and rock and possible a bullet key-holing, so you can see how much material that can cause damage just from one bullet.
Goggles are somewhat of an annoying thing to me and I’d avoid using them in most situations because the protection they give is higher than sunglasses but they tend to fog up under stressful situations and trying to keep that much of the glass scratch free and smudge free so that your vision is not inhibited is a hard thing to do. One major selling point I’d made with the Smith Elite ballistic eyewear is that it it is hands down the easiest to clean compared to other eyewear. I’ve had some of the Edge Eyewear in my rotation and although they have some cool flexibility and anti-fog abilities, whenever I got a smudge on them they were not easy to wipe off at the firing range when all of my Smith Optics Elite eyewear wiped perfectly clean with the Smudge Buster rag that Smith Elite sells.
heck out spotting scopes for years and to this day, haven’t felt the need for a separate optic just for spotting, but I know plenty of people that got their money’s worth. “The Mission Drives the gear” they say and you don’t need to spend money on things that add weight to your payload that you might not need. In the military, optics are on most rifles these days and having 3x-4x can help you get plenty of range, but that’s not going to help you see pinpoint accuracy like whether or not you got a hit at 500yds or if you missed the paper. Some of these issues can easily be over come by using Shoot N C targets but depending on the caliber you are using, it can still be difficult. Another thing to be careful about is in hot weather, the mirage you get from grass and dirt will wreck your ability to see at any range and magnification will just exacerbate the problem. Two man sniper teams usually have a spotter that picks the targets and gives ranges but you can do much of that a good mil-dot rifle scope.
