Your adapter plate sucks
The pistol optic market has absolutely exploded over the last few years. Almost every major manufacturer is releasing "optics ready" handguns right from the factory. To accommodate all the different red dot footprints on the market, these factory guns use a universal cut paired with a stack of interchangeable modular adapter plates. It seems like an awesome, flexible system right up until you take a high-level training class and watch a guy's expensive red dot shear its screws, fly off the slide, and hit him squarely in the forehead.
To understand why universal adapter plates fail so often, you have to look at the violent physics of a reciprocating slide. When you fire a 9mm pistol, the slide rockets backward at incredible speed. It slams violently into the rear of the frame rails, abruptly stopping its rearward travel. The heavy recoil spring then yanks the slide forward, stripping a round out of the magazine, and slamming the breech face hard into the barrel extension.
Your red dot sight is a heavy chunk of aluminum and glass sitting on top of that slide. Basic physics dictates that objects at rest want to stay at rest, and objects in motion want to stay in motion. When the slide violently starts and stops, the heavy optic naturally wants to rip itself right off the top of the gun. This creates a massive amount of shear force.
If you look at the tiny screws used to mount an optic—usually 6-32 or 4-40 threads—they are incredibly fragile. Screws are designed to provide clamping force, also known as tension. They are exceptionally good at pulling two pieces of metal tightly together on a vertical Z-axis. But small screws have absolutely terrible shear strength. If they are subjected to hard horizontal impacts, the metal fatigues rapidly and the screw simply snaps in half.
If your optic is only being held in place by the shear strength of two tiny screws, the gun will inevitably break them. A proper, dedicated optic mill job completely eliminates this problem. When a machinist cuts a slide specifically for an RMR, they leave two massive steel recoil bosses—or lugs—protruding from the floor of the cut. They also machine the front and rear walls of the pocket so tight that you almost have to tap the optic into place with a rubber mallet.
When the slide cycles, the massive horizontal shear force is absorbed entirely by those steel recoil lugs and the tight metal-to-metal contact against the walls of the pocket. The slide pushes the optic, not the screws. The screws are only there to provide downward tension. Factory adapter plates almost always introduce sloppy tolerances. The plate wiggles in the slide, and the optic wiggles on the plate. Because the recoil lugs on the plates are often undersized or non-existent, the entire violent shock of the recoil is transferred directly into those tiny mounting screws, snapping them like dry twigs. When I need to properly secure an optic, I pull my heavy-duty Torx hardware and threadlockers from https://www.brownells.com/optics/red-dot-sights/handgun-red-dots/ and throw the factory adapter plates in the trash. Get your slide direct-milled for your specific footprint, utilize the mechanical recoil lugs, and stop trusting tiny screws to do the heavy lifting.