There are two inferior techniques/errors are almost sacred cows in the firearms training industry.
Almost 100% of the top competitive shooters use them.
You see super-high-speed tactical ninjas with Tier I credentials use them.
They’re the techniques shown in all the magazines and YouTube Videos.
Now it would be awesome if this were a black and white issue…it’s not.
Both of these inferior techniques work. Both work in competition and in combat. They’re just not the most effective techniques available for combat and self-defense.
To be clear, the instructors teaching these techniques don’t mean any harm. They’re teaching the techniques simply because they don’t know what I’m about to share with you.
Let’s start with the c-clamp. And a picture of yours truly using it…
Running and Gunning With A modified c-clamp grip on an AR
I have used the c-clamp technique off-and-on for a few years. At first I didn’t like it at all, but I kept seeing the “cool kids” using it and figured I must just be missing something. After all, if all of the muscled up tactical dudes with operator beards on YouTube used it, it must be the best technique, right?
So, I committed to using the c-clamp grip for 12 months. I went cold turkey. I removed the vertical fore-grip from all-but-one of my carbines and committed to the technique.
I used it with .223, .22, .300 BLK, and .308, for hunting, “just shooting,” training, and 3-gun, as well as for all of my carbine dry fire practice.
After just over 1 year with the technique, I said “good riddance” to the c-clamp and put my vertical foregrips back on my carbines.
Here’s why:
- When your left arm is fully extended with the c-clamp technique, it doesn’t help much if someone grabs the end of your gun and tries to take it from you. Since your arm is fully extended, if they pull, your surprise reaction will be to clinch and you’ll go with the gun.If you’ve got a bent elbow, you’ve got more leverage AND your elbows can flex if someone tries to take the gun.
- One of the biggest advantages of the carbine over a pistol in close combat is the ability to muzzle punch a suspected threat OR muzzle punch in the event of a malfunction. If your left arm is fully extended because of using the c-clamp grip, you lose most of this ability. If your left arm has a bend in it, you can use this technique.On suspected threats, the muzzle punch allows you to turn your carbine into a (possibly) less than lethal tool. This technique has been used with great success in Iraq & Afghanistan. When a situation is unfolding at the speed of life in high-stress, low-light conditions, and you round a corner and end up face to face with a stranger, a muzzle punch to the chest might give you enough time to determine that someone doesn’t need a bullet or stop the fight without any shots being fired.
There are hundreds of Iraqis who have 2, 4, 5, or more muzzle punch scars to the chest because of being in the same house as a high value target during a takedown.
They’re still alive today because our guys muzzle punched them instead of giving them 2 to the chest. For you, it might be a friend of one of your kids sneaking in to sleep off a hangover, a confused neighbor, or some other situation where a muzzle punch is a MUCH better instinctive reaction to a bump in the night than shooting first.
In a malfunction situation, the ability to immediately transition from using your AR as a gun to using it as a very effective pugil stick can be a game changer in a life or death situation.
- Like a lot of guys, I LOVE SBRs (short barreled rifles) and AR-pistols. If you train yourself to always reach your support hand out to full extension and use the c-clamp grip, sooner or later, you’re either going to grab a handful of hurt (in the form of a burn or a hole) or you’re going to run the gun slower out of respect for the potential of grabbing a handful of hurt. In many cases, this is what’s known as a “self-correcting error”. If you get a finger in the way of the muzzle and shoot your finger off, you won’t have the ability to shoot that finger off again in the future.
These reasons don’t really matter at all for competition. Or for qualifying. Or for clearing a shoot-house full of paper targets. But they absolutely DO matter if you own a gun as a tool for life & death situations. Especially for bump-in-the-night situations.
The second inferior technique is pulling the gun into your shoulder with BOTH your right and left hands. (The pull+pull technique)
EVERYONE teaches this. This technique is SO proven that if Moses had a 3rd stone, it would have been engraved on it.
The pull+pull technique WAS the absolute best technique available…until it was improved upon. Sometimes an inferior, but effective technique that you’ve done a thousand times will work better for you than a superior technique that you’re trying for the first time. When an instructor is standing in front of a line of shooters, they’ve got to pick their battles on which aspects of technique to change and which are good enough as-is.
In short, if you PUSH with your left hand and PULL with your right hand, you will have better retention, better recoil management, and you’ll be able to put multiple accurate shots on target faster than with the pull+pull technique. I don’t know about you, but for me, that’s a pretty powerful trifecta.
The first time I heard this, I was with a friend who had several high-tempo direct action combat deployments under his belt as a SEAL. I was trying to be respectful, but I still visibly smirked and audibly snorted at him.
He had the advantage of having proven the technique in combat, over several years, and with hundreds of students, so he humbly let me live—and proceeded to drop the mag on his carbine, lock back the bolt, hand it to me and told me to try my way and his way.
If you ever laugh (or snort) at a SEAL who tells you they have a better way and they look down, smile, and calmly ask you to try their way instead of getting mad, you pretty much know that you’re screwed.
He had me hold it with a pull+pull grip. And he grabbed the end of the muzzle and jerked it around. (it went where he wanted it to go)
He had me hold it with a c-clamp grip. (He grabbed the muzzle again and it went where he wanted it to go…only faster and further)
And he had me hold it with a push+pull grip. (it still moved, but about 70% less than with the pull+pull grip)
Again, weapon retention doesn’t matter in competition, on the range, in a carbine class, or in a shoot house, but it DOES potentially matter in a real-life fight for your life.
Then he had me put a mag in and try the 3 techniques with live fire.
This was almost 3 years ago so I don’t remember the exact distance, but the target was 15-21 feet away.
The first 2 techniques—the ones I was familiar with (c-clamp and pull+pull)—gave me good results, but the push+pull technique gave me a 50% smaller group ON MY FIRST TRY! Within a few tries, I was putting 5 rounds per second into groups that ranged in size between a tennis ball and a softball.
The more I’ve thought about this, the more amazing it is. I tried his technique for the first time and was IMMEDIATELY better than I was with 2 techniques that I’d practiced thousands of times.
So, the push+pull technique is better for weapon retention and recoil management, but how does it get more rounds on target faster?
The secret is dynamic tension.
When you use the pull+pull technique or the c-clamp, you need to have the butt of the rifle pushed against your shoulder/collarbone/chest.
When you push with your left hand and pull with your right, you don’t need to have the butt of the rifle against your shoulder to shoot—your left arm is pushing and absorbs the recoil and the gun goes back into alignment VERY quickly, even if the butt of the gun is hanging in mid-air.
You can prove this out at home with a broom handle…the dynamic tension provided by the push+pull technique is superior in almost every way to the pull+pull technique.
That means that as you’re mounting your rifle, you can start putting multiple accurate rounds on target AS you’re pulling the butt of the rifle into your shoulder/collarbone/chest.
As an added bonus, this technique carries over to SBRs, AR-Pistols, and even AKs MUCH better than the pull+pull or c-clamp technique.
“I think AR’s are bad for home defense because of over penetration. I don’t want to shoot my neighbors or kids in another part of the house.”
Good. I don’t want you to shoot anyone who’s innocent either.
But let’s dig into this a little…
First off, penetration is good. It gets you to vital organs and stops threats fast. In the FBI Miami Shootout, there was a famous bullet that stopped just short of hitting the heart of one of the bad guys…it was called “the bullet that failed.” You don’t want to use bullets designed to fail.
You’ve got to have penetration to maximize effectiveness…you just don’t want to miss your targets and have ammo go through walls into bedrooms or into your neighbor’s house.
There’s 2 components to this…
The first and most important rule to minimize innocent people getting hit in a gunfight is to hit your target with every shot. Don’t stop training when you can hit your target…keep training until you CAN’T MISS.
That is the standard that you should set for yourself. 100% hits and no misses. It’s not reality and there’s a really good chance that Murphy will step in and mess things up, but you want to train so that any misses you have are beyond your control…not because of a lack of training or practice.
Second, you should realistically expect ANY ammunition that’s going to have effective penetration on a person to go through drywall, sheetrock, and other wall materials.
Ordinary defensive 9mm hollow points can go through 6 layers of sheetrock or 3-4 layers of steel in a car. There’s a good chance that ANY caliber of defensive pistol or rifle ammo has the ability to go through walls and hurt innocent people. Hollow points that may expand when they hit soft tissue oftentimes get plugged when they go through sheetrock, don’t expand, and act like a full metal jacket round.
There are bullet designs that claim to reduce over penetration on sheetrock, and some do better than others, but regardless of how realistic it is, the best way to minimize the chances of hurting innocent people is to have 100% hits.
One thing that’s surprisingly consistent in penetration/overpenetration testing is that typical defensive handgun rounds penetrate MORE layers of building materials than .223 from a carbine.
But what about shotguns? If we look at both ends of the spectrum, slugs have a serious over-penetration problem and bird shot has a serious UNDER-penetration problem. In the middle, Buckshot shares a problem that’s common to all shotgun loads—the recoil is harder for smaller shooters to control, slows down followup shots. In addition, the recoil and weight of a shotgun make it less enjoyable to shoot for smaller shooters and less practice translate directly to less comfort with the gun and lower performance under stress. Finally, there are fewer ranges that allow you to practice with a shotgun than there are that allow you to practice with a pistol or AR.
So, if all bullets are capable of penetrating through multiple walls, it stands to reason that you might want to use a weapon platform that will give you the highest probability of hitting your threat. For most people, the increased barrel length and controllability of an AR makes it easier to hit man-sized targets at in-house distances in low light conditions under stress.
The proof is in the pudding…while nationwide hit ratios for law enforcement are in the 12%-25% range, hit ratios with rifles for many departments are over 80%.
In addition, it’s generally easier to put a light/laser on an AR than on a pistol. There are great laser/light options for pistols, but most shooters find them easier to operate on an AR than on a pistol.
Finally, you can use both a pistol and an AR as an impact weapon, but the AR is much easier to control and keep control of if you decide to strike someone with it.
Next is another “rule” that I thought Moses delivered himself: Always move with the muzzle of your gun pointed down.”
There’s a joke that this is an Army vs. Navy thing…more specifically, Special Forces vs. SEALs. It’s said that SF points their guns down so that they don’t shoot their helicopter blades and SEALs don’t point their guns down so they don’t poke holes in their boats.
The reality is a little more complicated…
When you think about indoor ranges, VERY few have fully bullet resistant ceilings. They may have a few sheets of AR-500 hanging from the ceiling a few yards downrange, but very few ranges have AR-500 right above the shooting bays. If there’s a potential of having ANY students on the range who don’t have fully established trigger discipline, it makes more sense to have a rule that all muzzles remain pointed at the ground so that you don’t have an errant round escape the building.
When you move to outdoor ranges, you’ve normally got berms that define the shooting bays. Shoot over the berm and there’s the possibility that your bullet will hit something that you don’t want it to hit…again, if there’s any chance of a shooter being on the range who doesn’t have fully established trigger discipline, it makes sense to always keep the muzzles pointed below the top of the berms so that no rounds escape.
There’s another factor at play. And it has to do with live fire shoot houses. In many cases, there are catwalks above the shoot house so instructors can watch students shooting and moving through the structure. If you’re an instructor, and students are going through a shoot house below you, would you want them to point their muzzles down, or up…at you?
Muzzle down makes perfect sense in these situations…in fact, it makes perfect sense in almost all square range situations, but in a real-life, dynamic, close-quarters, fight, muzzle-down isn’t always the best solution.
If you go around a corner and someone starts striking you in the face, would you be able to defend and counter attack faster if your muzzle was up in front of your face or down by your knees?
If you go around a corner and someone grabs for your gun, do you want gravity working for you or against you?
Try this with a broom handle…hold it pointed down and have someone grab it and try to keep you from pointing it them. Now hold it pointed up and have them try to keep you from pointing it at them.
It only takes a few seconds to see that muzzle-up gives you a significant advantage. Add in a little friendly slapping to the face and the advantages of muzzle-up shoot through the roof.
If you go around a corner and are surprised, will muzzle-up or muzzle-down let you muzzle punch faster? Muzzle-down is kind of like a kettlebell swing. Muzzle-up is like a jab…with additional leverage and speed.
Muzzle down is not even always the safest solution. What if you’ve got young “ankle biters”, family/innocent people curled up on the ground, pets, or you’re upstairs while the rest of your family is downstairs?
What if you’re in a multi-story apartment building, condo, or hotel?
This is something you’re going to have to struggle through on your own…It’s not a black and white choice. Personally, I’ve chosen to practice muzzle-up because of the retention and striking advantages, but I have to switch to muzzle-down at many training and competition events because of range rules.
Where did this information come from? It’s from the comprehensive Home Defense Rifle course from SEALed Mindset. Learn more now by going to HomeDefenseRifle.com
So, what are your thoughts on ARs for home defense and muzzle-up vs. muzzle-down? Please sound off by commenting below!
by Mike Ox
Mike Ox is an avid defensive and competitive shooter who has co-created several firearms training products, including Dry Fire Training Cards, Dry Fire Fit, 21 Day Alpha Shooter, and See Faster, Shoot Faster. His brain based training focuses on accelerated learning techniques for shooting as well as controlling brain state and brain chemistry for optimal performance in extreme stress situations. Learn more about dynamic dry fire training for defense and competition at www.DryFireTrainingCards.com/blog
