Born Ballistic
From its origin with the iconic Fullfield riflescope to the revolutionary Eliminator laser rangefinding scope, Burris products have married precision and performance for the past 52 years.
By Andrew McKean
For much of his professional life, Don Burris unintentionally occupied a place at the hub of American sports optics. Not only did he establish a riflescope company under his own name, but he connected the nation’s foundational optics brands with the rise of modern hunting and precision shooting.
An Oklahoma native, Burris was a successful aeronautics engineer before joining Redfield Gunsight Co. just as that Denver, Colorado, based company was bringing magnified riflescopes to the hunting market. Up until that time, in the late 1950s, Redfield was mostly known for making precision iron sights for competition shooters, but it had just acquired the riflescope business from Kollmorgen Optical Corp., which manufactured scopes under the Stith line. The purchase was especially timely, as centerfire cartridges like the .308 Winchester, .223 Remington, and .280 Remington were all introduced within a few years of the Kollmorgen purchase. American shooters were scrambling to buy magnified rifle sights to maximize the effectiveness of those flat-shooting rounds, and Redfield was primed to provide them.
“Those early Kollmorgen scopes were all fixed-power scopes built on 26mm tubes, in the German tradition,” recalls John McCarty, who joined Don Burris at Redfield in 1961. “Don didn’t mince words. He said, ‘This is America. We don’t need millimeters here. We need inches.’”
Burris oversaw Redfield’s production of scopes built on one-inch tubes and soon brought one of the first variable-power scopes to the market. Meanwhile, Redfield developed a rotating dovetail ring-and-base design that became the standard scope-mounting system for a generation of riflemen. Burris was a lifelong hunter, and he saw the need to incorporate precision aiming capabilities in Redfield’s scopes. Under his watch, Redfield came out with the Accu-Range system, which used two reticles that could bracket a target and give shooters a close approximation of distance.
Don Burris’s enduring contribution to the optics industry was the development of the Wide Field riflescope while at Redfield.
“It was an ultra-wide-angle scope,” says McCarty. “But the Redfield marketing department said that customers weren’t going to know that it’s a wide-angle because externally it looked like every other scope on the market. So, Don went back and lopped off the top and the bottom of the objective so that it looked wider than it was tall.
The scope now looked like a rectangular television screen. Consumers flocked to it, making it the best-selling scope in America for nearly a decade.
“It was a mess to manufacture,” says McCarty. “Production would have been much easier if it had stayed round, in order to thread washers into it, screw it all together, and seal it. Instead, we had to cast a rectangular objective bell, and all the lenses had to be held in with a screw at the top and the bottom and then sealed with an O-ring. We scrapped more of those scopes than we sold.”
Burris was restless, and he left Redfield to start a company that made mountaineering equipment. It turned out that the pull of the optics industry was too strong to resist. Within a decade Burris had started his own optics company, under his own name, in the farm country around Greeley, a good hour north and a little east of Redfield’s Denver facility.
He was attracted to Greeley because Don loved to golf, and the Greeley Country Club was one of his favorites,” says McCarty. “But Don recognized that in a rural community where the men worked the fields all day, their wives would be a good and reliable labor force. As an added bonus, most people in Greeley hunted antelope, deer, and elk on their days off. They were shooters and hunters, and they knew the value of reliable, durable gear.
Burris Optics Company remains in Greeley, its 47,000-square-foot plant busting at the seams on a crowded industrial lot near the Poudre River. Because there’s no more room to build on the site, the company opened a second location across town to accommodate overflow. The company that bears its founder’s name still produces sports optics that are designed to make shooters and hunters more capable on the range and in the field, incorporating precision aiming attributes in nearly every gun-mounted optic.
Products have included an improved version of the old Redfield wide-angle riflescope, which Burris called the Fullfield, introduced in 1975. Iterations of the scope are still being made by Burris, under the Fullfield E1 and Fullfield IV banners. The company pioneered the use of double springs, patented as the “Posi-Lock” system, to make windage and elevation adjustments repeatedly precise. Burris was an early leader in development of bullet-drop-compensating reticles. And in 2010, Burris introduced the revolutionary Eliminator electronic scope that combines a laser rangefinder with a ballistic calculator to guide distant shots to the 10-ring of a target or the vitals of a big-game trophy.
“The consistent thread of the company through the decades has been the development of products that were designed and perfected by people who actually use them,” says Jordan Egli, Burris’s director of marketing. “That is a legacy of Don Burris. He was a hunter who wanted to make products that he would enjoy using. We’re still a company of hunters and shooters.”
The company’s location, which Egli describes as “where Colorado’s high plains meet the Front Range,” shapes the personality of Burris Optics. “We have pronghorns, mule deer, and elk close by, and come hunting season, there’s a lot of empty cubicles. But it’s still a relatively small town, and we have multiple generations of Greeley residents who work at Burris.”
