Still not FAST enough

Colt M4 Match Target

Every now and then, I’ll try something just for fun to see what happens.  This weekend, I needed to tune up a bit for a rifle match, so I shot the FAST drill with my Colt M4 Match Target.  To modify the FAST for a rifle, you have to start from low ready instead of the holster, and concealment obviously isn’t going to factor in to the drill.  I was particularly curious about my reloads with the rifle; I figured they’d be slower than my pistol reloads, but I wasn’t sure HOW much slower.  For the test, I used the following gear:

  • Rifle: Colt Match Target M4 with Miculek style muzzle brake
  • Sights: Crimson Trace MVF-515 vertical foregrip
  • Magazines: one Colt 20 round magazine, one Magpul 30 round PMag
  • Magazine holder: Blade-Tech AR15 mag pouch

I also moved the target back to 10 yards, because 7 yards with a rifle just seemed too easy.  After getting loosened up, here is my fastest time on the FAST using the rig as described above.  Total time: 3.93.  Time breakdown: 0.76/0.41/2.28/0.16/0.16/0.16 – I think it’s safe to say that I’m taking waaaaay too long with the second head shot, since that could easily be done with a rifle in 0.25 seconds.  Interestingly enough, even when I use a rifle set up with a laser sight, I’m still slower than Dave Sevigny.

I didn’t really have a purpose to running this other than “I wonder what will happen/this will totally make a great blog post”, but I did gain some valuable insight on my rifle shooting, so it wasn’t in fact a waste of time or ammo.  A big takeaway from this is just how fast you can run a rifle that has a laser on it; the corollary to that is how are you going to sight your laser in?  I have my laser sighted in so it’s set up for CQB work inside of 25 yards.  Not that I’ll ever NEED it for that, but theoretically I’ll use the laser for short range rapid shooting and the sights/optic for stuff outside of 25 yards.

The big “lesson” for this though is how fun shooting rifles can be.  I rarely shoot my rifles, since I’m focusing primarily on pistol games right now, but with Tac Rifle and 3-gun season coming up, I need to get my AR’s out and make sure they’re ready to run.

3 Comments

  1. Caleb,

    You might want to look at those ranger magazine baseplates from magpul. That might speed up your reload a little more.

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