Field Notes

Sighting in a muzzleloader is the same arithmetic as any other rifle and a completely different afternoon. Every shot is a full reload, the bore condition changes between shots, and the barrel needs to cool, so you get very few shots per session and each one has to count. Pick one load, pick one swabbing

Sighting in an air rifle follows the same logic as any other scoped gun, but the pellet’s flight path is far more curved over short distance. That means your line of sight and your pellet path cross twice within the space of a back garden, and the hold changes noticeably between those two points. Zero

A three-pin sight is set in order, not all at once. Zero the top pin at your closest working distance and get it truly centered, then walk back and set the middle and bottom pins using only their own vertical adjustment. Move the whole housing when every pin is off in the same direction, and

The 100 yard zero is the default for hunting rifles because it is simple, honest and confirmed. Most shots taken at game fall inside it, the trajectory inside that distance is flat enough to hold dead on, and it requires no mental arithmetic at the moment you least want to be doing arithmetic. The important

The 25 yard zero exists because of one fact about how bullets fly: the bullet path crosses the line of sight twice, not once. Set the near crossing at a short distance and the far crossing lands somewhere useful a long way downrange, which is why people say a close zero gets you on at

The short answer: a pistol red dot zeros with the same adjustments as any other optic, but on a handgun the optic is rarely what is wrong. Confirm the pistol is unloaded, make sure the optic, the mounting plate and every screw in that stack are correctly fitted and torqued, then shoot deliberate groups from