Where Are Burris Scopes Made? The Greeley, Colorado Story

By YOUR NAME · July 16, 2026

Type “Burris” into a search box and one of the first questions people ask is where the scopes actually come from. The honest answer has two parts — a Colorado story and a global one — and most pages that answer it skip the interesting half. As a Front Range outfit ourselves, this one is local history for us.

The Short Answer, By Product Line

Manufacturing arrangements shift over time — this reflects mid-2026. The country of origin is printed on every box if you need certainty on a specific model.

The Redfield Engineer Who Bet on Himself

Burris exists because a scope engineer thought his employer’s products weren’t good enough. Don Burris spent 12 years as a design engineer at Redfield, the Denver optics company, where his designs included the first constantly centered non-magnifying reticle in variable-power scopes — the architecture that, by Burris’s own accounting, roughly 99% of variable scopes still use today — along with the first 4-12x and 6-18x riflescopes and Redfield’s Accu-Range reticle.

In 1971 he left, drove an hour north up the Front Range, and started the Burris Company in Greeley. For the first four years the company survived on rings, bases, and open sights. In 1975 came the scope he’d left Redfield to build: the Fullfield, aimed squarely at outperforming Redfield’s own Wideview. Fifty years later, the Fullfield name is still in the Burris catalog.

Don Burris died in 1987, but the company kept shipping engineering firsts from Greeley (the full timeline is on Burris’s site):

• 1980 — first American-made scopes with multi-coated lenses
• 1983 — the industry’s first variable-power handgun scope
• 1988 — the industry’s first scout scope
• 1993 — the patented Posi-Lock adjustment-locking system
• 2000 — the Ballistic Plex reticle and the world’s first titanium riflescope
• 2006 — the first LaserScope with built-in rangefinding
• 2010 — the Eliminator, which folded a laser rangefinder and automatic ballistic compensation into one scope and still has no direct equal at its price

The Beretta Era

In 2002, Burris was acquired by Beretta Holding — the Italian group behind the world’s oldest gunmaker. That put Burris in the same corporate family as Steiner, Sako, Tikka, and Benelli, and the family ties show up in the products: when Burris built its AR-FFL red dot/laser combo in 2013, the laser came from Laser Devices Inc. — the company that became sibling brand Steiner eOptics.

Ownership changed; the address didn’t. Burris headquarters, engineering, and service have stayed in Greeley throughout.

What “Made In” Actually Means Here

Like nearly every optics brand at its price points — Vortex, Leupold’s value lines, Primary Arms — Burris builds its volume products overseas. Industry reporting and the company’s own statements consistently describe the same split: glass and components sourced in Asia (Japan among them), assembly of hunting and red-dot lines primarily in the Philippines, and the premium XTR tactical scopes machined and assembled in Colorado.

Two things stay in Greeley regardless of where a scope was assembled: the engineering that designed it, and the people who fix it. The Burris Forever Warranty — no receipt, no registration, transferable to later owners — is serviced from Colorado.

Our take as buyers: country of assembly matters less than whether the specific model holds zero and tracks true, which is a per-model question, not a per-country one. That’s exactly what our testing protocol exists to answer, model by model.