Quote Originally Posted by Ed L. View Post
While the marksmanship aspect may be good, a lot of their manipulation aspects is not in keeping with modern practices of running a carbine. They teach using a tight sling that ties up the support arm and doing all loading of magazines into the gun with the strong arm--thus removing the firing grip. To their credit, I don't believe that they hail themselves as teaching modern use of modern style weapons for the battlefield. Their emphasis is on long range marksmanship training and getting America back in touch with their heritage as rifleman.

It's a fun time nonetheless, and a lot of the shooting is done at reduced size targets at 25 yards, where a .22 rifle will suffice. This is great from convenience and cost saving.

I did one of these this past weekend. I only did the first day where they do all of the actual instruction. Its purpose is to teach basic rifle marksmanship, not manipulation and running a carbine. Sometimes people here get stuck in too small of a bubble and think that if it isn't high speed, running a carbine type training, then it's bad. This is a good step back to basics of good marksmanship that will carry over into whatever else you shoot, however you shoot it. You can throw out the sling and whatever else doesn't fit in with your normal techniques. I learned a few little things about body position that improved my prone shooting even without a sling.

It was a good refresher on CMP-type shooting and it was good to refocus on basics of a good shot. I used a 10/22 with tech sights that performed flawlessly. The 25 meter range works fine and you're shooting at some pretty small targets - it's not as easy as it looks. We did the reduded size AQT three times. I shot a rifleman (expert) score on the first two, then blew the last stage on the third one after shooting great on the other three stages. Just fatigued I guess, but it shows that it's not a "gimme" even at "only" 25 meters.