Monthly Archives: December 2012

SPORTS fan?

Okay, I understand some are reluctant to talk about ARs in the aftermath of Newtown, but since apparently there’s like a billion new AR owners out there thanks to all the talk of a new assault weapons ban, we should probably start talking about them again. Today, we’re talking about SPORTS.

Look, nobody talks about what you should do if your AK47 malfunctions because, let’s face it, if your AK47 has a malfunction you can just bang it against a rock to get it working again. AR15s are much more finicky. They malfunction. It’s a fact of life. They’ll malfunction when they’re brand new out of the box, so it’s not like the rifle is punishing you for doing something wrong, it just hates you on general principle.

If you have a malfunction at the bench, you can just stop, put the safety on, unload the weapon, take it apart and fiddle with it until you reverse the gypsy curse they put on your rifle at the factory. The real question is “What if it malfunctions when I really need it?”

I don’t want to sound like I’m parroting the gun-grabber line here, but the M16 and M4 weapons systems were developed for battlefield applications. That means when it breaks, it’s not a moment of quiet reflection where the shooter puts it down and takes a few minutes to ponder what the root cause is. It’s more a BANG! BANG! CLICK! “SHIT! SHIT! SHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT!!!” kind of moment. When that moment comes… and it will… because it’s an AR15… there’s a series of actions taught on military firing lines designed to fix most of the common malfunctions and get your weapon back in the fight in the least amount of time possible. This series of movements is called “SPORTS,” and it works… most of the time.

Because it’s from the military, you’ve probably guessed by now that “SPORTS” is an acronym. It stands for “Slap, Pull, Observe, Release, Tap and Shoot.”

Slap

Slap is the first movement in this series because a lot of the time the problem isn’t the rifle but the magazine. With your supporting hand and your finger off the trigger, reach down and give the bottom of your magazine a hard upward slap. If you hear the bolt slam forward, it’s a good bet you’ve solved the problem and you’re good to go. If so, stop here and re-engage. If not, go to step 2.

Pull

So you slapped your mag and didn’t hear the bolt go forward. Time for step two. Again with your support hand, reach up and pull the charging handle back all the way. This is the lead-in for step three.

Observe

With the bolt back, you can now look into the chamber and see what the F the problem is. It could be a stovepipe or failure to extract. So with the handle pulled back, rotate the rifle counter-clockwise so you can see inside. If you see a bunch of rounds jammed up in there or some other obstruction, stop here and start working on the problem. Lock the bolt back to the rear and remove the magazine. Sometimes that causes the stovepiped rounds to just fall out and sometimes you have to actually get in there and dig them out. Hope the folks shooting at you don’t mind a time-out. If there’s no sign of anything abnormal, on the other hand, you’re going to go to step four.

Release

You should still be holding that charging handle back while you observe the chamber. You don’t see anything weird going on in there, so release the charging handle. The bolt should slam forward. Sometimes the problem is that the bolt didn’t seat right after the last shot. Releasing it now should solve the problem. Time for step five.

Tap

This is the only time I’ve ever used the Forward Assist. It’s like the appendix of the AR15. It’s used so infrequently that I would actually feel remiss if I didn’t now tell you where to find it. On the right side of your upper receiver, directly above your grip, there’s a little button protruding from the receiver at a 45 degree angle. See it? Go ahead, you can push on it. It won’t hurt nothing. It should spring back and forth. Got it? Okay, good. What that button is doing is pushing a piece of metal into little grooves cut into the side of the bolt carrier, pushing your bolt a fraction of an inch forward and making sure it seats right. It’s basically there just in case your bolt doesn’t slam forward all the way. It goes back to when the original M16A1s were having so many malfunctions in Vietnam. The Forward Assist was a “fix” included in the A2 model. Nowadays the platform has evolved to the point where the FA isn’t as necessary and you can find a lot of ARs that don’t even have them anymore. But odds are yours does.

So, with your shooting hand, hit the FA with the palm of your hand. You don’t have to do it a lot, once or twice will do.

Shoot

Okay, once you’ve hit the FA, it’s time to try this again. Raise your rifle and shoot. If it goes off, congratulations you’ve solved the malfunction. If it doesn’t fire, you’re going to have to do some digging to find out what the problem is.

Keep in mind this isn’t a gunsmith’s answer to a malfunction. This is a “This rifle has to fire RIGHT NOW,” ATTEMPT at an answer and it might not even work. But a lot of the common headaches that come with an AR15 can be temporarily resolved with SPORTS. I’ve never used an M16 in actual combat, but in training, using dirty blanks, decrepit magazines, and a weapon used by more men than Cartman’s mom, I’ve never been put permanently out of the fight by a malfunction thanks to this technique.

TJ