Dusted off and updated last year’s Christmas message. The outside dangers have not changed much and if it helps one of our friends then its worth it.

Happy Holidays to all of our friends, colleagues and cohorts! We at AggDefSol would like to express our joy over this wonderful season and offer you some reminders as “gifts” to help ensure a safe and enjoyable season.

 As I’m sure everyone knows the shopping is in full swing and as Christmas draws nearer we will all become a little more harried, stressed and complacent. Don’t let this happen to you! Just as the predators in the animal kingdom recognize the many opportunities to make a kill that occur during the great migrations and calving seasons, so do the two-legged predators in our society look forward to this time of year. Each Holiday shopping season brings new chances for the lesser predators; shoplifters, purse snatchers, scam artists and petty thieves, to do what they do best; perform crimes of opportunity. At this same time the upper tier hunters; burglars, rapists and robbers; also gear up for what are comparatively easy picking versus the rest of the year. So how do we navigate the malls, shopping centers, parking lots and ATMs with any degree of safety you may ask? Pretty easily actually, if you just do a few simple things.

Be aware! As anyone who has taken one of our classes will tell, “Look like a Predator and the other predators will leave you alone.” Keep your eyes open, your head up and your mind on your immediate environment. Scan the parking lot before you walk out into the dark. Notice who and what is around you. Criminals do not want to be recognized, remembered or confronted. Be conspicuous about looking around and at people.

 Have a plan. Have your keys ready before you get to the car. Don’t juggle your bags, set them down and get the car open. Know what you intend to do if you are confronted. If you were being aware you would have seen it coming and been ready. That should take care of the top-tier critters and some of the smaller hyenas as well.

 To deal with most of criminal activity during this time of year follow these easy rules:

1. Lock your car/ house doors/windows.
2. Do not leave anything valuable in plain sight in your car. Lock it in the trunk!
3. Put your wallet in your pocket/ purse/ European shoulder bag before you walk away from the cash register.
4. Do not walk to your car while talking/ texting on your phone/smartphone/laptop/iWhatever. Now there is merit to having your phone ready to call for help or talking to loved one as you walk to your car, but remember use your phone as a tool for your protection, keep your head on a swivel while walking in parking lots. Let potential perpetrators know you are watching them and they will more likely slink back in the shadows.

 Obviously, we at AggDefSol are proponents of first person protective devices from quality manufacturers in the right caliber. Just remember that your safety and the consequences of your actions are your responsibility.

Feel free to comment with your own safety tips.

 Merry Christmas! Happy Chanukah! Joyous Yuletide! And Happy New Year!

Be Safe, Ric.

First things First!

Remember the Cardinal Rules of Firearms Safety:

1. Treat every weapon as if it is loaded.
2. Keep you finger off the trigger until you are ready to fire.
3. Never allow your muzzle to cover anything you are not willing to accept the responsibility for destroying.
4. Be aware of your target and what is around it.

Now that we have the basic safety rules in place we can get to the actual clearing of the weapon.

Be mindful of the workspace.  Loading and unloading procedures occur in the workspace where we have better tactical and visual control of the weapon.

You will also notice that at no point do we clear by “firing”, that is Rule 2 -  Keep your finger off the trigger until you make are ready to fire. There is never the need to press the trigger during a clearing procedure.

Carbine clearing steps

1. With the weapon in the workspace rotate it clockwise 90 degrees to visually inspect the safety and make sure it is in the SAFE position. If the weapon is on released hammer, the weapon fired and not cycled, then on an AR style rifle the safety will not move to the SAFE position. If this is the case go ahead to the next step and continue to be mindful the weapon condition.
2. Depress the magazine release and allow the magazine to fall free of the weapon. If you have a full or partial magazine you want to maintain control of the magazine as you would during a tactical reload.
3. Maintaining the workspace rotate the weapon counterclockwise until you can clearly see the ejection port. Do not over rotate the weapon so you are staring directly at the ejection port or any brass, live or spent, may eject into your face.
4. While observing the ejection port, use your support hand pull the charging handle fully to the rear and hold.
5. At this point you should look at three spots for a live round or spent brass while looking through the ejection port:
   • observe the magazine well and make sure there is no brass or live ammunition;
   • observe the bolt and make sure there is no brass or live ammunition attached;
   • observe the chamber and make sure there is no brass or live ammunition.
6. If you are training, have your training partner verify step 5 and verbally agree by saying “clear.”
7. Release the charging handle.
8. Finally,  rotate your weapon to visually inspect the safety and make sure it is in SAFE position

If you followed these steps your weapon is now safe, but remember we ALWAYS follow the Cardinal Rules of Firearm Safety, so even after clearing your weapon continue to follow all Cardinal Rules of Firearms Safety. The life you save may be someone you care about.

Happy (and safe) shooting!

Troubleshooting

 I spoke to him on the phone asked a bunch of questions and ran through the typical troubleshooting steps.

1. Brute strength. (that didn’t work)
2. Break-Free and more brute strength. (that didn’t work either)
3. Sharply striking the butt against the ground while holding the charging handle. (Caution: this is not normally recommended unless all else fails. You could break your stock or worse bend your buffer tube. Also, it is important to strike the stock in line with the buffer assembly to prevent putting excessive torque on the buffer tube.)

Our friend is quite adept and was relieved that he had already done all the quick tricks I could have him try over the phone so, I had him bring the carbine over and I quickly ascertained:

While the bolt carrier would not come out of the upper receiver, the bolt carrier did not appear to be binding or stuck. You can determine this by wiggling the back of the bolt carrier and checking for movement due to the “slop” in the AR systems’ tolerance.

We could get the bolt carrier out of the upper about 1/8 of an inch using brute force. This happens to be the length of travel of the bolt in the bolt carrier before the carrier key forces the bolt to rotate. So, I assumed the bolt and bolt carrier were not seized together.

Using the bolt-over clearing drill (see number 3 above) I was able to get the bolt carrier out 1/4 of an inch and could see the bolt beginning to rotate by observing the chamber. At this point I was worried that if I was wrong and the issue was not just the bolt binding in the chamber then I would get the bolt carrier stuck inside the buffer tube thus creating a whole different problem.

Finally, he put on a lot of break free on the bolt and bolt carrier. The whole thing looked like a muddy mess. This was not nice clean lubrication , but thick, black carbon soaked muck. What a joy to work on.

 The rubber mallet is your friend

 I have an armorer buddy who is fond of telling people, “You may want to leave the room before I hit your gun with this hammer.” I find a rubber mallet makes people a little less squeamish

 Finally, we blocked the upper receiver and used a large slotted screwdriver against the bolt carrier; with just two taps from my rubber mallet the bolt carrier came sliding out of the upper receiver. Note: take care to have the tip firmly against the carrier to prevent chipping or slipping.

Why did it happen?

 It is important to explain the condition of the carbine to ascertain why the bolt was stuck. As I said, the break free was a mucky mess. He was disassembling the carbine to clean it, but it was last fired two weeks earlier. (OK, I will address that in a bit.) He fired approximately 1000 rounds during the training day; in addition, the training was tactical in nature, the kind that gets dirt in the gun. When he was done on the range he put the carbine, bolt locked forward, into his gear box, cleaned up the range and stowed gear. Two weeks later he went to clean the carbine. The AggDefSol staff discussed this incident and we believe the cause of this seizure was the excess of carbon, sand and brass flakes which built up over the course of the thousand round day. This amount of ammunition caused the metal in the chamber to expand, yes, our guns do that and continue to run. The carbon baked on basically turning into black concrete; I confirmed this while examining the bolt and firing pin. After the training day was over the carbine cooled and the metal contracted causing the sand, carbon and brass flakes to be compressed between the bolt and the chamber, making normal manual extraction impossible.

How to prevent

1. Fully clean your carbine immediately after training; especially, if it’s a duty weapon, your life depends on it.
2. Quick field clean. Often we will do a quick internal inspection after class. This requires a quick wipe down of the bolt face to check for damage and a swipe of the chamber to look for damage or metal wear. This check and “cleaning” can keep your carbine running a few hundred more rounds.
3. Don’t store a hot gun on a closed bolt. We can also think safety here. When clearing and cleaning the range leave you carbine with the bolt locked to the rear. It is a visual safety check and it allows the gun to cool without the binding effect.

Any thoughts on how to do it better? Leave a comment and let us know.

First things first, always review the Cardinal Rules of Firearm Safety before loading your weapon, now move on to other range safety controls, proper loading and unloading procedures and finally do a review basic marksmanship skills. Determine how fast you should perform these drills. A good rule of thumb is to base your speed on your accuracy. If you are missing the black you probably need to slow down to work on your accuracy and your fundamentals, but if you are driving every round in the center of target, then you need to speed it up. 

3” DOTS or B3 at 7 YARDS [Get our custom 3 inch dot target] 

• Low ready: one shot 4 times
• High ready: one shot 4 times
• Low ready: two shots, one target 4 times
• High ready: two shots, one target 4 times
• Low ready: two shots, one shot each on two separate targets 4 times
• High ready: two shots, one shot each on two separate targets 4 times

8” DOTS, BODY or B8 at 10 YARDS 

• Pivot left and right 90 degrees and 180 degrees: start at Low ready facing away from the target: turn (each direction), four shots, two shots each on two separate targets 2 times each direction (left and right 90 degrees and 180 degree pivot) 
• Transition drill: start with no magazine in your carbine. Click, transition to pistol, two shots or dry fire once 5 times.

8″ DOTS, BODY or B8 at 25 YARDS 

• Reload drill: from ready, one shot, Emergency reload, one shot. Recover magazine and perform Tactical reload to set up drill 4 times.
• Soft malfunction (fail to fire) drill: start with an empty chamber in your carbine, full magazine, click-tap, rack, engage with two shots 4 times.
• Standing to kneeling to prone: two shots each position 5 times.

8″ DOTS, BODY or B8 at 15 YARDS 

• Shoot on the move (box drill): Two targets, first run with 1 shot each, second with 2 shots each.

Additional tips: 

1. If unable to move at the range, do the static drills both strong and weak side or double up on strong side drills. Practice movement and manipulation at home dry.
2. While doing the 7 yard and turn drills, load multiples of 8 rounds if you wish to do more transitions.
3. Remember to utilize the workspace when performing all reloads and immediate action drills.
4. Remember at less than 25 yards/meters transition to secondary weapon to stay in the fight. At distances greater than 25 yards/meters seek cover and perform immediate action to clear carbine stoppage.

Special thanks to guest author Mark Tiedemann for contributing this series of drills. Feel free to leave Mark a comment here or look for him on m4carbine.net where he is a forum moderator. 

It is important to note not to store you ammunition longer than necessary. Now, what do we mean by this? Rotate your ammunition whenever possible. So, instead of storing 5000 rounds of 5.56 or .223 for 10 years, mark each ammo can with the date you acquired the ammunition and the ammunition type. As you acquire more ammunition, of equivalent type, use the oldest ammunition first. This provides you a method of keeping your ammunition stock as fresh as possible. Of course, there is more to ammunition than caliber. You will need to mark your ammo cans with all the appropriate information. Most shooters are not going to open a case of 62 grain M885 green tip for target practice and store cheap 55 grain Wolf 5.56 ammunition. They both might be 5.56 ammunition, but they are very different in terms of performance.

Next, keep the humidity out! If you are storing ammunition in a less than ideal location, humidity will likely be your biggest enemy. The DoD stores ammunition in non-environmentally controlled warehouses for decades. If you have good ammo cans and pack your ammo well you can easily have your ammunition survive very long term storage. During Desert Storm (that was 1990-1991) Soldiers were issued 5.56 ammunition that was manufactured at Lake City (LC 67) (manufactured in 1967) that performed well showed no signs of degradation. You can easily store your own ammunition by ensuring the humidity inside the ammo can is low. The key to success is to lower the humidity in all the packing material before sealing the your ammunition in an airtight container such as an ammo can. If you are storing loose ammunition this is not really an issue since there is nothing to trap humidity, but air. If you are storing your ammunition in cardboard boxes inside the ammo can you will need to get the humidity out of the cardboard before sealing the can for storage. The easiest way is to use a dehumidifier, you probably have on inside your gun safe to protect your guns. Placing the ammo and container (unsealed and open) inside the safe several days will draw the moisture out of all the packing material to ensure you start with the proper humidity conditions. Next take a few new desiccant packets (1/2 or 1 oz packets) and place them in the ammo can. Finally, a worthy addition to the storage container is a humidity sensor card to provide a quick visual inspection as you spot check your ammo. All you need to do now is seal the ammo can and it should give you years of successful storage.

Now that you have your ammunition sealed and stored you will need to spot check it every 12 to 24 months. The key point to remember is typically winter provides lower ambient humidity and summer is a much higher humidity, at least here on the East Coast, so adjust your checks to correspond with a low a humidity season for your area. This will decrease the impact the your check will have on your interior humidity. If you placed the humidity sensor card in the ammo can, your checks will only take a few second. Simply, inspect the card to ensure the humidity is under about 30%, remove the existing desiccant packets and replace with new desiccant packets. The cost of desiccant packets for a can of ammunition should be less than $1 and the humidity sensor card can be found for less than $.50. This is really a trivial amount to protect the typically hundreds of dollars of ammunition that is stored in one ammo can.