Rifle Rest

24 Apr 08

Rifle Quirks:

During our Urban Rifle Courses, I advise students that, as they are shooting, nothing should actually touch their rifles except the shooter's own hands, face, and shoulder. The rifle is zeroed assuming it is touching only the shooter's body. Allowing any part of the rifle to rest directly upon a fixed object will affect the bullet's trajectory, sometimes severely.

Of course, resting or bracing the rifle against a fixed object may be unavoidable in certain circumstances, so we all need to test this theory with our own rifles in order to see for ourselves what effect, if any, we can detect.

This report from a friend on the East Coast:

"Shooting my M1 Carbine at 100m resulted in consistent, three-inch groups, exactly at the point of aim, which is very acceptable for a car-gun like this. I fired from a braced, sitting position, but only my hands, face, and shoulder actually touched the rifle. Repeated iterations of this test produced identical results.

Then, I conducted the same test, this time with the rifle's forend resting directly upon a sandbag. Resultant groups expanded to six inches in diameter and were inconsistently centered eighteen inches above the point of aim! This, of course, represented an insufferable degradation in accuracy.

When I, once more, held the rifle so that only my face, shoulder, and hands touched it, groups tightened back up and returned to the point of aim. I was astonished at the difference resting this rifle directly against a solid object made."

Comment: Some rifles are affected more than others by this phenomenon, and, at ranges we shoot, such an effect is often minimal and of scant concern, but it can be substantial, as illustrated above.

"Don't let anything but your own body make contact with your rifle" is still good, general advice with regard to a genuine, fighting rifle!

/John