Gun Nuts Media

It’s not exactly easy for me to come up with a humorous way to segue into this post as is my normal routine for dealing with serious topics.  So I guess I’ll just go with the old “damn the torpedos, full speed ahead approach”.

The short version of the story is that on Saturday leaving my office, I was the subject of an attempted mugging by a member of the Indianapolis Choir Boy School of Good Men Who are Only Down on Their Luck.  As I was leaving my office, said altar boy came around the corner of my building to the left into the side parking lot, and as I turned to face him noticed the knife in his right hand.  The Chaplain’s Assistant demanded that we engage in an abbreviated barter process, wherein I would provide my wallet and car keys in exchange for not getting shanktified, which to him probably seemed like a reasonable exchange.

I politely demurred by hurling a cup of hot Starbucks at him while fishing my Beretta Jetfire out of the stupid pocket holster it was riding in.  After taking a face full of Columbia’s most popular legal export and confronted with a counter offer of bullets to his previous barter exchange concept, the young gentlemen decided that discretion was the better part of valor and made all due haste in a westerly direction.

Now, while I did write out the AAR slightly tongue-in-cheek, what happened to me is a deadly serious thing.  I was mugged in broad daylight, not 20 yards from the parking lot of a semi-popular video store.  Two days later, I can look back on this after talking it over with some cop friends and other self-defense types and gather two important take-away lessons that I’ll be remembering for quite some time:

1. Awareness is king.  Because I heard/saw the guy as he came around the corner, I was not caught completely flat-footed when my world went abruptly pear-shaped.
2. Action > reaction > passivity.  I was asked later “why did you throw your coffee at him?”  My only reply, and which remains my reply is “seemed like the thing to do at the time” – but from a 10,000 foot view, tossing my coffee had major impact on the encounter which was to switch the initiative from my would be attacker to me.  By throwing my coffee, I was forcing him to react to my actions instead the other way around, which gave me the opportunity to retrieve a better weapon than a cup of coffee.

The moral of the story for me anyway is twofold: keep your head up.  While you can’t be in condition orange or yellow or whatever all the time, there are certain times when it behooves you to keep your head on a swivel.  Secondly, as pdb is fond of saying, “carry your f***ing guns, people!”  It’s impossible for me to know what would have happened had any number of variables gone differently, but one that I’m glad I didn’t have to worry about was “what if I only had that cup of coffee and didn’t have my Beretta with me?”  On Saturday, a .25 in my pocket beat hell out of the 9mm I left sitting on my desk at home.

Today’s tactical thought is how to set up a double feed in your AR-15 platform rifle. The purpose in setting up the dreaded double feed is so that you can train yourself to rapidly (relatively) clear the double feed. This drill works best with a training partner, as it keeps the element of surprise. First, here’s how to create a the double feed jam in your AR.

1. Remove the magazine and lock the bolt to the rear.
2. Insure that the chamber is empty.
3. Insert a loaded magazine in to the magwell, but DO NOT close the bolt.
4. Lay a round on top of the loaded magazine in the chamber.
5. With your hand, gently lower the bolt until it has picked up the round from the top of the mag and the round laying on the mag and created a double feed malfunction.

Now that you know how to create a double feed, here’s a drill you can do with a friend to train on clearing a double feed. Set up two targets downrange, and tell your friend that you’re going to hand him or her either a live weapon, or a jammed weapon. They will be “on the clock” to clear the malf and engage the two downrange targets with 2 rounds each, or if the weapon is hot, just engage the targets. Make sure you close the dust cover when you’re setting up the gun so that your training partner can’t “see” the malf.

Of course, if you’re on the receiving end of a busted gun, what do you do? How do you go about clearing the malf and making the weapon ready to fire?

1. When you get a “click” instead of a “bang”, the worst thing you can do is stare at the gun. Even though we “know” it’s a double feed, we want to train right – so first we’re going to smack the base of the mag to make sure it’s seated, then try to run the charging handle.

2. “click” – Okay, that didn’t work. Now we clear the double feed. Lock the bolt to the rear, and then remove the mag from the magwell.

3. Now with your left hand (for right handed shooters) reach inside the magwell and dislodge the rounds, or if they already have fallen clear, feel the magwell chamber area to make sure it’s not obstructed. Train like this so that you can clear a double feed just as well at 2am just as well as you can at 2am.

4. Put a fresh mag in, close the bolt, and you’re off to the races!

Once you do this several times, you won’t fear the double feed. It will be just another routine weapons manipulation drill, just one that takes a little longer to clear.