The Nightstick SFL: Laser & Light Up the Night

When it comes to responsible home defense, you have to see it before you shoot it. Which means your home defense gun should have a light on it, or you should be able to hold a light while you shoot it. If you’re using the classic pump gun, however… well, this whole ‘put a light on it’ is most often just no fun.

There aren’t many good places to put them, the recoil gives little leeway to poor quality and bad design, and the ergonomics are usually awful. It’s for this reason that the best solutions here are always dedicated solutions.

Hell, this is how SureFire first became well known. Back then they were called “Laser Products” and their premier product was a shotgun forend light LAPD procured in advance of the 1984 Summer Olympic games.

In the more than forty years since, while SureFire has upgraded their own offerings considerably, there are really only two other brands to even consider within this realm: Streamlight and their TL-Racker and the Nightstick you’re seeing right here.

NIGHTSTICK

Nightstick, a subsidiary of Bayco Products, was founded in 2010 with a focus on portable industrial lights. They make a lot of “intrinsically safe” equipment, which is especially important for the oil and gas industry (intrinsically safe equipment won’t cause ignition of flammable gasses even in failure conditions). They also make a lot of equipment for fire, EMS, and law enforcement.

Nightstick offers several variations of the SFL, each with their own SKU. You can get it in black or orange (with less-lethal guns in mind here), with or without the green laser, compatible with a Mossberg 500/590 or Remington 870 forend.

WHAT’S IN THE BOX

This is a straightforward system. In addition to the forend there’s a wrench that works for both a Remington and Mossberg shotgun, batteries, battery adapter, and hex key for laser adjustment. The Nightstick SFL also comes packaged with an optional strap you can attach. The strap helps keep your hand in place, which is especially important if we’re talking about shotguns with shorter barrels—the last thing you want are your fingers to accidentally end up in front of the muzzle.

CONTROLS & OPERATION

You can run the SFL as light only, laser only, or light + laser. To swap modes, simply hold down one of the switches while tapping the other and it will cycle through.

For activation, each side of the forend has a rubberized, nicely recessed switch allowing for easy ambi use. The placement and pressure required means that you aren’t likely to inadvertently activate it from a mere bump, but not so much it’s too hard to get going.

If you just give one of the switches a quick press and release, it’ll be constant-on; the forend will stay on until you press the switch again or it runs out of juice. If you press and hold it for more than a pregnant pause, then it’s in momentary mode and will shut off as soon as you let go.

OUTPUT & ANATOMY

You can feed the SFL with either two CR123 batteries or a single 18650 cell, and Nightstick went out of their way to list performance specifications for each battery type, even though they don’t actually change that much aside from runtime (one of the benefits of a well-regulated head). With the two included CR123 batteries the SFL spits out 1,200 ANSI-rated lumens and 10,315 candela with a 90-minute runtime. Switch to a rechargeable 18650 battery (Nightstick sells kits if you aren’t already a lumen nerd yourself) and you get a drop in performance practically imperceptible to humans (1,100 lumens and 9,955 candela) but now with a 2-hour runtime. Win some, lose some.

Nightstick advertises the SFL as has having a deep parabolic reflector with a beam distance that reaches more than two hundred meters, but even if that’s academically true it’s essentially a non sequitur when it comes to the effective range of 12ga shells themselves. Functionally, we found the beam to be rather wide with a lot of spill, which is good for use indoors and suburban backyard distances—about what you’d expect from a light designed for law enforcement use that could play double-duty on a home defense gun.

That spilling light means you can get a lot of room and environmental information, but you’re not going to be using it like a sight. The light you’ll be using as a sight is the green laser inside the bezel itself. It’s a class IIIa/3R, which means it’s low-powered enough to considered safe for accidental/inadvertent exposure but thankfully it’s strong enough that it can still be seen in the middle of the beam pattern and even for more than a dozen yards in the bright sunshine.

LEOs may especially like the laser for use with less-lethal systems, because the presence of the laser itself has been found to be a useful tool for de-escalation purposes.

LOOSE ROUNDS

In the realm of industrial lights, what Nightstick sells is safe design. Lights that won’t spark if crushed or rolled over by heavy equipment – those working inside a coalmine or inspecting a pipeline definitely appreciate that. In the world of law enforcement, Nightstick is selling a value proposition: they’re making lights that follow established form factors with higher specs but at a lower price point. They aren’t gunning for the premium SureFire, but Streamlight is right in their sights. And so it goes here.

Though the MSRP is a touch under $400, we’re seeing them in stock and selling for a little over half that price. If you don’t want the laser? You’re going well below two hundred here.

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