fot those that can stomach another conversation about crosshairs... this from a designer's point of view
"Like the arrow or the circle, the crosshair focuses our attention and prepares us for a message. Unlike the arrow or the circle, both of which focus our attention but without yet suggesting why, the crosshair tells us exactly why: what’s in the crosshair is in mortal danger. Even those of us who have never looked through a gun scope know from movies and magazines exactly what the crosshair is and what it means. It means someone’s got a gun. Someone’s aiming that gun. And someone else is gonna get shot....As propaganda, the crosshair is a symbol of presumption, not persuasion. The crosshair narrows the world into a single viewpoint, into the x/y axes of lethal intent, and I refuse that Cartesian carnage. The crosshair can devolve into a tool of fanatic ideology, promoting a worldview so narrow that it contains nothing else but the object of derision. Someone who layers a crosshair over something or someone is basically shoving a scope in the viewer’s eye and trying to say, “There is no outside world. There is only an object on the other side of the crosshair. See it. Shoot it....Using the crosshair this way marks the end of thinking, not the beginning. The crosshair is the sentence, not the consideration. It’s death, not deliberation, and so there’s nothing to talk about. In this way, the crosshair backfires."
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/crosshair-in-the-crosshair