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“The best gun error ever in TWD is when Herschel was on a tower with an AR with it’s AIMPOINT... ON BACKWARDS.
He must have been all like, Wow! I wish I could see them but there’s a red dot shining right into my eye.... “

Excellent catch by Lazamataz: whose eye for detail is better than mine. Also memory; I don’t recall this scene.

But if it is a real “red dot” made by Aimpoint, nothing would come out of the “wrong end” into which actor Scott Wilson was peering.

The technical term for sights of this type is “reflex” or reflector sights. They are entirely passive and send nothing out toward the target.

Reflex gun sights were first used on aircraft gun systems during the Second World War. They superimpose a projected image of the sight’s illuminated reticle onto a partial-reflecting mirror; the target image arrives through the front of the optics (that “wrong end” toward Scott Wilson’s eye in the vidcap image) goes through the partial-reflecting mirror, and is combined with the reticle, which is aligned with the gun trajectories according to the operator’s preference and the maintenance technicians’ calibration and adjustments. Easier and quicker to use than two-element “iron sights”; all the operator (typically, the single-seat fighter pilot) does is look through the sight, see the target, see the reticle image, and match them up. No struggling with focus, as everything appears to be at the same distance.

Anyone who has seen gun camera footage from 1941 onwards has likely seen the glowing dot inside one or more circles, often with tick marks around the periphery. One slang term for it is “pipper”.

Red-dot sights (Aimpoint is a leading manufacturer, so much so that the name is now generic) have only been made small enough for small arms for a couple decades. They are sometimes confused with laser designator devices, often called “laser sights”: a laser (nowadays a very tiny one, built into spring guides, grip panels, or a module below the barrel) projects a beam that appears to the shooter as a bright spot on the target. The alignment of the laser can be adjusted to make the spot coincide with gun’s sight picture, or point of impact, as preferred by the shooter.