Shooting AR15s

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. Before we actually look at the firing and the manipulation of some long guns here on the range, I wanna talk a little bit about the importance of pairing a long gun with a handgun in a serious situation. If you find yourself, for instance, in a home defense situation where you need to move through your home, either to escape or to get to your family to move them to someplace safe, when you're moving through that home, we've looked at how the rifle can be pretty awkward to move around with and very long. Much easier to move with a pistol in those exact same areas. One of the things that can make that an even better option for you is if you find a pistol caliber rifle along with the pistol that share magazines. There's a few different options. This is one of them. This exact same magazine will fit in this pistol and in this carbine. So I could actually insert the magazine, chamber around, and now I am ready to go with this rifle if I need to let it hang on the sling, if I need to put it on a carrying strap, or even if I were to clear it and put it down, it works if it's exactly the same ammunition, exactly the same magazines as my pistol for close-quarter situations and things like that. Now in a true home defense situation or an emergency response from a vehicle, you're probably not gonna have time to try to put on all of your gear, and put on a vest, and put on a hat that says, "I'm here to defend myself." The reality is, what you wanna do is have these things conveniently placed. If you always carry this pistol, but the rifle is sometimes more convenient in the home and it's right there or in your vehicle, if you don't always carry a pistol, but you have a rifle stored appropriately in the back of your vehicle or somewhere in the passenger compartment, it'd be great if those two things can work together. If that works for you in your home defense, or self-defense, or family defense plan, that's perfect. Now I've looked at the AR family of rifles and exactly how to manipulate and go through different procedures while firing. What we're gonna do now is go ahead and fire and actually look at how that will look in a realistic situation. Of course, we're on a range, I've got my ear protection on, put my eye protection on. When we're getting into a shooting position, we wanna be sure that as we're moving through in a ready position, whether we're dealing with a threat that we aren't sure if we have to use lethal force, or moving through a home to get out or to get to our family, we're gonna bring the rifle up against our cheek. We don't wanna bring the rifle up arbitrarily, and then bring our cheek down. We want them to meet so that as we lower our center of gravity, as we focus on the threat, we bring that rifle up and they meet. This causes a nice block of movement. So the upward movement of the rifle and the downward movement of our face are stopped by each other. We don't have to consciously stop the rifle and then move our face down to it. So we're gonna come together. As we do that, we're hitting that selector switch. We're turning it into the fire position, which is straight down on this firearm. Again, we go down to the ready position, and it goes back into a safe mode. We come up, touch press, fire around. Maybe we fire multiple rounds. Again, we're back down to a safe position. We recognize the need to respond, we come up, every time hitting that safety selector lever, making sure that we go back and forth between safe and fire every time we come up or down. When it comes time for a reload, the rifle has locked back, we're immediately gonna drop that magazine. If we need to use a hand to strip that out, that's fine. We're gonna find our spare magazine, insert it into the magazine well, keeping that rifle up against our shoulder. Once it's inserted, we then use the same hand to hit the paddle, which allows us to chamber around. We are still off safe as we were when we locked back. The rifle's back up, we continue to fire back down into the ready position. If we had a malfunction or we had any other problems in the middle, we of course couldn't respond. Now, one of the things that you find by pairing a rifle with a pistol is it could be easier and faster to actually transition to this secondary firearm if you were in the middle of a critical incident and needed to. Of course, that's gonna look like this. At this point, I release this firearm, it drops down, it's hanging on the sling or carrying strap if I had it on this arm. If I was using your traditional carrying strap, it would simply be over here. And what I would do as I was firing is come up at this point, fire, fire, fire, the gun locks back. I simply drop it, it hangs here. I go to my pistol, and engage with the pistol. All right, now you can see that's much easier with the three-point sling system, which keeps the rifle right in front where you want it. So it's unloaded, I drop it, immediately transition to the pistol. Engage the threat, come back into my ready position. At this point, I would continue this critical incident with the pistol. Unless I needed the rifle, distance, time, penetration, anything that required me to use a rifle round, I would then have to go back to the holster and reload. One thing you may have seen at different times is the idea of taking a knee. The problem of taking a knee is that it's a very specific designed technique for a very specific situation. I'm gonna have Brad join me on the range. This firearm is cold. He's gonna come out, and he's gonna pick up another long gun from the selection that we have here. For instance, a semi-automatic shotgun. The taking a knee technique is not recommended when you're alone. It's designed so that if you have two people working together to address a problem and I'm in front of Brad, he's behind me in a linear stack. As I get to this point, what he's gonna do as I'm unloaded, I am then gonna take a knee to get out of his way as I go through a reload procedure. He can address the threat, and I'm not gonna stand up in front of him. Now, Brad's just gonna step back administratively. Again, it's important to realize where the tactics you choose to use come from. That tactic is very specific for military and law enforcement teams. If you get the impression that taking a knee is a good idea because other people do it, you could be completely wrong. And in fact, in most cases, for a single person, working with a pistol or a long gun, you are wrong. You wanna keep your mobility, you wanna keep your ability to move on the range, and you wanna be able to do that reload while you're standing and mobile, and addressing the threat, not taking that knee. It's important to realize, tactics that are appropriate for military and law enforcement aren't always appropriate for your self-defense, regardless of which type of firearm you're using. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.