Set Up and Zero Iron Sights – Your New Rifle

One of the first steps when you get a new rifle is to set up and zero the iron sights. Now you have to know what you want to do with your rifle before you get down to zeroing the sights.

It’s pretty obvious that a rifle is a great long distance weapon and since you are reading this blog, you probably want to use it to defend your home and most likely inside your home. That means you are going to have to compromise on zeroing it.  A rifle is not going to have the same point of aim, point of impact at 10 meters, 100 meters, and 300 meters. The trick when you zero iron sights is to make sure you know where to aim for what distance.

The video below gives some good tips on how to get a good zero that will serve you well for home defense. He zeros at 100 yards to get a battle sight zero at 300 yards. Notice that he likes to use this zero because he get a better sight picture at the longer distances.

Now if this sounds a little simplistic, I have another video for you that explains what the different zeros do for you. One thing I want you to notice is that if you go for a very short zero, you are going to have problems at long distance; this really compromises your use of the weapon as a general purpose home defense gun.

Here is a link to the pdfs from the second video.

Take it out to your local range and get it set up, then make sure you practice with it.

At what distance do you zero your home defense rifle? Let us know in the comments.