Scopes on Air Guns

Choosing a scope for your air guns

Simply put, an airgun scope enables the shooter to align the air gun more precisely with the target. The right airgun scope on your air rifle improves the sight alignment and sight picture for all shooters. This improvement becomes even more of an advantage for older airgunners as their eyes begin to lose their focusing range. Air gun accuracy with open sights requires that your eyes focus on the rear sight, the front sight and your intended target all at the same time. That range of focus for your eyes is a stretch even for younger airgunners.

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Scopes designed for use on spring-piston airguns must be specifically manufactured to withstand the bi-directional recoil inherent in that type of airgun. And magnum spring-piston air guns are the ultimate torture test for a scope - much more so than a 458 Magnum Rifle. In a spring-piston air gun, the air gun recoils to the rear as the piston travels forward - just like a normal rifle. But with the piston comes to an abrupt stop at the end of its travel, the airgun recoils forward. It is this forward recoil component that regular scopes are not built to withstand. Newcomers to air guns are always amazed to find that their favorite deer rifle scope will not hold up on their spring-piston air gun.

Better airgun scopes will usually have a focusing objective, so that parallax errors can be adjusted out, and to provide a clear, sharp image of the crosshairs and the target at closer airgun ranges. Again, many newcomers to air guns have the mistaken belief that yardage ranges on the focusing objective dial compensate for the drop of the pellet as the range increases. Nothing could be further from the truth. A focusing objective is important to place the focusing of the crosshairs and and the target image in the same plane, but it in no way compensates for the pellet rise and fall from the line of sight due to gravity effects. Most regular rifle scopes simply will not give a clear image of the target and crosshairs at close airgun ranges - they are optimized for shooting at ranges of 100 yards or more.

Magnification and field-of-view can both be important factors in choosing an airgun scope, depending on its intended use. Increasing the magnification will increase the apparent size of your target, allowing you to see more detail and aim more accurately. However, the laws of physics dictate that increasing the magnification of an airgun scope will necessarily reduce your field-of-view. A smaller field-of-view will usually increase the time it takes for you to acquire the target, i.e. find your target looking through the airgun scope. This is not a problem as long as your target is stationary. However, if your target is moving, e.g. a squirrel, acquiring the target quickly is a decided advantage. That is why variable power airgun scopes are so popular. These days the 4-12x variable is the most popular variable in airgun scopes. At long range using the 12x setting, targets can be more easily seen. Remember airgun targets are frequently much smaller other targets. Airgunners often practice at close ranges using targets as small as aspirin tablets. When hunting or shooting at closer ranges, the 4x setting provides a much larger field-of-view, along with increased brightness to see that black squirrel hiding in the shadows.