Four Years Behind Gold

The Eyewear I Trust Every Time I Hear “Make Ready”

By Marc Schulte

Competitive shooters are obsessive about equipment. We test ammunition, change springs, argue about triggers, chase the perfect dot, the perfect zero, the perfect recoil impulse, and the perfect setup. I’ve certainly done my share of all of it. Over the last four years, guns have changed, optics have changed, ammunition has changed, and plenty of other pieces of gear have come and gone. One thing hasn’t: my shooting glasses.

For the last four years, I have used Hunters HD Gold exclusively for competition. Club matches, major matches, practice days, good weather, terrible weather, bright sun, dark bays—you name it. When I put on my belt and get ready to walk a stage, Hunters HD Gold are on my face. At this point, I don’t really think about them anymore, and after four years, I think that may be one of the greatest compliments I can give a piece of competition equipment.

USPSA is, at its core, a visual sport. When we talk about becoming better practical shooters, so much of the conversation eventually comes back to vision. Where is the next target? How early can I pick it up? Where exactly is the available scoring area on that partial? Did I see the dot lift? Did I call the shot? Can my eyes get to the next target before the gun arrives? The gun can only react to the information we’re feeding it, and everything starts with our eyes.

That realization changed the way I started looking at shooting glasses. They aren’t just something I wear because eye protection is required. They are part of my shooting system. We’ll spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on an optic because we want a clearer window and a better view of the target, so it makes sense to care just as much about the lens sitting directly in front of our eyes. That’s what originally attracted me to Hunters HD Gold, but it isn’t the only reason I’ve stayed with them for four years.

One of my favorite things about the Gold lenses is also one of the simplest: I don’t spend my match day swapping lenses. The Gold lens is photochromic, so it reacts to changing light conditions rather than forcing me to decide before every stage whether I should be wearing clear, amber, smoke, or something darker. If you shoot USPSA, you immediately understand why that matters. A major match rarely gives you ten or twelve stages with identical lighting. You can start the morning under cloud cover, shoot directly into the sun two stages later, find yourself under a covered bay after lunch, and finish the day with targets disappearing into deep shadows. Sometimes all of that happens on one stage.

I don’t want to manage my eyewear through all of that. I don’t want another decision. I don’t want to be standing at my range bag wondering whether the sun is coming back out or whether the next bay is shaded. I put the Golds on and go shoot. The glasses don’t eliminate difficult lighting and they don’t magically make hard targets easy, but they give me consistency. After thousands and thousands of rounds, my eyes know what the world looks like through those lenses. I know what cardboard looks like through them, I know what steel looks like through them, and I know what my dot looks like. That consistency matters.

Competitive shooting also changed the way I think about sunglasses in general. Before I became serious about shooting, I mostly thought about lenses in terms of brightness. Sunny day meant dark glasses; cloudy day meant clear lenses. Now I care much more about contrast, definition, and how quickly my eyes can process visual information. USPSA targets exist in messy visual environments. Brown cardboard can disappear against dirt berms. White steel can sit against washed-out backgrounds. Black hardcover can blend into shadows. Walls, barrels, fault lines, ports, vegetation, and everything else on a range can compete for your attention. I want separation. I want the target to look like a target and the edge to look like an edge. That is one of the biggest reasons I’ve stayed with the Gold lens for so long. I simply like what I see through it, and after four years, I trust what I see through it.

Of course, none of that matters if the glasses don’t provide real protection. We spend an incredible amount of time around bullets, steel targets, fragments, splatter, brass, gravel, and debris. The stakes are a little higher than whether our glasses look good in match photos. Hunters HD Gold’s protective eyewear is built around impact-resistant Trivex lenses and tested to high-impact safety standards. For me, that is the correct order of priorities. They need to protect my eyes first, and then I can worry about optical clarity, contrast, comfort, and everything else. My eyesight isn’t replaceable, and that is not an area where I want to compromise.

As much as I believe in the glasses themselves, there is another reason I’ve become so loyal to Hunters HD Gold: their customer service is exceptional. And I’m not grading on the curve of the firearms industry. I’m not saying they have great customer service for a shooting company. I mean Hunters HD Gold’s customer service legitimately rivals the best customer service I have received from any company, in any industry. That is a big statement, but after dealing with them for years, I stand behind it.

If you have a question, you can talk to somebody who actually understands the product. If there is a problem, they work to solve it. If your situation doesn’t fit neatly into a drop-down menu on a website, they don’t seem interested in telling you why they can’t help. They try to figure out what you actually need. My favorite example doesn’t even involve my own glasses. It involves my dad.

My dad needed prescription shooting glasses, but his situation wasn’t as simple as putting his everyday prescription into a safety frame. He uses progressive lenses, and that creates a very specific problem for a shooter. He still needs the lower portion of the lens for close-up vision and reading, but he doesn’t want the progressive area interfering with his sight picture when he is actually shooting. A normal pair of progressives is designed around everyday tasks. Shooting is a completely different visual task.

Brian at Hunters HD Gold understood that immediately. Instead of simply taking my dad’s prescription and producing a conventional pair of progressive lenses, he worked with him to make the glasses fit the way he actually uses his eyes. They moved the progressive portion farther down in the lens. That allowed my dad to still drop his eyes and use the magnification when he needed it, but when he brought a gun up and established his normal sight picture, that progressive area was no longer sitting directly where he needed to see the sights.

That sounds simple once somebody explains it, but somebody first has to understand the problem. Brian did. He listened, understood exactly what my dad was trying to accomplish, and then made the prescription work around the shooter instead of forcing the shooter to work around the prescription. The glasses came out perfect. That experience has always stuck with me because it says something about Hunters HD Gold that you won’t find on a specification sheet. They didn’t just make my dad’s prescription. They made him a pair of shooting glasses. There is a difference.

That is also why I’ve come to think of customer service as part of the product itself. Equipment gets used. Prescriptions change. Frames get damaged. Shooters have unusual visual requirements. Knowing that the company behind your equipment is going to answer the phone, listen to the problem, and genuinely care about getting it right has tremendous value. When I recommend Hunters HD Gold to another shooter, I’m not just recommending a tint or a frame. I’m recommending the people standing behind it, because I know how they are going to take care of that person.

Eventually my experience with Hunters HD Gold expanded beyond the range. For shooting, I’m a Gold guy. For practically everything else, I use AktiveBlu. I wear them for driving, traveling, daily activities, and my other hobbies. They’ve simply become the glasses I reach for when I’m not competing. In some ways, that may be an even stronger endorsement than telling somebody what I wear at a match. Hunters HD Gold earned my trust first through competition, and then I wanted their eyewear everywhere else. Gold for competition and AktiveBlu for life has basically become my entire eyewear system.

Another reason the brand has always resonated with me is that Hunters HD Gold doesn’t feel like a company standing outside practical shooting trying to sell products into it. They are part of the sport. You see them at matches, supporting shooters, supporting clubs, and staying involved in the community. That matters to me. The future of USPSA isn’t built solely at Nationals or the Area Championships. It’s built at local matches. It’s the new shooter showing up on a Saturday morning, the people setting stages the night before, and the Range Officers giving up their weekends. Companies that support that level of the sport are supporting the future of practical shooting, and I notice that.

Four years is also a pretty good product review. I’ve had products I was excited about for three weeks and products I really liked for three months. Four years is different. Four years means hundreds of stages. It means early mornings, long match days, heat, cold, rain, dust, direct sun, dark bays, local matches, major championships, practice sessions where everything works, and match days where absolutely nothing seems to. It means thousands and thousands of times bringing the gun up and asking my eyes to tell me what is happening. Through all of it, the glasses stayed.

At some point, truly good equipment starts to disappear. You stop wondering whether your magazines are going to feed. You stop wondering whether your optic is going to hold zero. You stop wondering whether your belt is going to stay where you put it. And I don’t wonder about my glasses. I trust them.

When the Range Officer asks whether I understand the course of fire, I don’t want to be thinking about eyewear. When I hear “Make Ready,” all of those equipment decisions should already be over. I want to be looking at targets. I want my eyes moving. I want to see what I need to see, process it, and execute.

For four years, that is what Hunters HD Gold has allowed me to do. But those four years have also taught me that the reason I value Hunters HD Gold goes beyond the lens. It’s knowing the protection is there. It’s seeing the target the way I want to see it. It’s being able to wear the same glasses through an entire day of changing conditions. It’s having AktiveBlu when I’m away from the range. It’s watching Brian take the time to understand exactly what my dad needed and create a pair of prescription glasses around him instead of around what was easiest to manufacture. And it’s knowing that when I recommend the company to another shooter, the people behind the product are going to take care of them.

That is difficult to quantify, but after four years, it is incredibly easy for me to value.

I put them on. I trust them. And I shoot.

After four years, they’ve become one of the few pieces of gear I never second-guess.