Please Recommend a good pistol light

[alamo5000]

When you say "cone", what you probably mean is the hot spot? Which is related to throw. Beam-shape for urban home defense is largely a user preference thing, IMO; once you get into duty or rural use, throw becomes much more important, due to much longer ranges.

My use is primarily rural. No street lights etc. My immediate lawn is about 100 yards wide and almost 300 yards deep and there are barns and stuff like that on the property.

By 'cone' I mean how tight or wide the beam is. If I shine the light on a wall 10 feet away and I only get a spot the size of a softball that's too tight. I know that's an exaggerated example but I don't know the technical term to use. Like I said earlier, the Arisaka light is right on. If I go into a dark room and bounce the light around off the ceiling or something it will pretty much light up the whole room enough to see if there is anything or anybody in there. At the same time if I am walking through the yard the distance it reaches is still very good. Just informally speaking you can easily spot a person in the yard from 75 to 100 yards away or better. It casts a wide enough beam if I want to say scan across the yard or something like that as well I can do it. And if for example I go walking around the woods in the dark I have a light on my gun etc etc if for nothing else to scan the area, see where I am going, or whatever. The odds of me just strictly hunting down a bad guy is not very high.

Even if I go on a night time pig hunt for example it would be a priceless thing to have. I really am glad I bought that light. I just need to transfer the same concept to a pistol.

With the Arisaka light I have a much better idea of how I use that one, as for a handgun how I will, like you mention manipulate the controls while still being able to shoot is TBD.

And absolutely thanks for the info about which models are better for which rails. That really does help a lot.

To be honest I am kind of tempted to get one of the little flashlights too but for now I am sticking with a weapons mounted light for this particular purpose.