Long employed in bullseye pistol shooting, frame mounted optics (FMOs) are making an appearance in the tacticool market.



FMOs appear to be ill-suited for John Moses Browning’s designs, starting with the “breech-piece” (a.k.a. the slide) introduced in the US Patent 621747 granted on March 21st, 1899. It is hard to think of a modern autopistol that doesn’t feature a slide assembly; yet in operation, slide-mounted optics suffer from far greater stress than their frame-mounted counterparts. Given the emergence of military procurement of RDS-equipped handguns, I expect the industry to explore alternative autopistol configurations. My money is on modernized derivatives of the classic Roth-Steyr M1907 cavalry pistol.