Thursday, December 03, 2009

I Don't Get Vertical Foregrips

My understanding of rifle technique is pretty weak, but it largely breaks down to "whenever possible use your muscles as little as possible." This is because your skeleton doesn't expand or contract, but your muscles are always moving whether you like it or not. Therefore you want to support and aim the gun using rigid skeletal members, not by shoving it about using your muscles which are far more variable. This yields better accuracy.

Enter the vertical foregrip which appears to be designed almost solely to allow you to muscle the gun around. I've tried it and except for being a convenient place to hide a bipod, I find that I'll never get proper skeletal support using one. My accuracy drops into the toilet accordingly.

Now I can understand why some people like it. If I had a select fire weapon, the gun is going to be bouncing around anyway. I'm going to have to apply muscle to it to hold it on target so I might as well affix a convenient lever arm to help me out. But like almost all civilians, I don't have a select-fire weapon. That guy isn't me. Accordingly the vertical foregrip looks to me like something civilian shooters adopted from the military without thinking it through.

Now I'm more than willing to admit my shortcomings in this area. Can someone that shoots a rifle/carbine much more than I do help me out?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Jon the Presbyter said...

I've only ever seen them on full-auto weapons like tommy guns and AK-47s.

Jeff the Baptist said...

There's a real trend towards putting them on AR-15s right now and I don't get it.

I did do some further research and found out that the real reason for the vertical foregrip was not for recoil control at all. It was because after you mount a weapon light on a carbine length picatinny rail, you don't have enough room to put your hand on it.

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

What words... super, a brilliant idea

Anonymous said...
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