Say have a 11 lb M1 Garand and bad guy has a stock 7.5 lb M4 carbine. You both come around opposing corners of a building with your barrel down and 90 degrees off target. You are only 10 yards from each other. You each see each other at the same moment. Assuming both shooters are equally skilled who wins?
The answer would likely be the bad guy with the M4. Mass at rest tends to stay at rest and it’s going to take longer to put the 11 lb M1 Garand on target than the lighter M4 carbine.
Now, take the same scenero except instead of a M1 Garand, you’ve got a M4 Carbine with a 12" full length 18 oz rail, a front sight mounted on it that weighs another couple oz, and a rail mount QD socket that weighs another oz. Your rifle weighs 20+oz more than the bad guys. That’s 1.2 lbs. Who will win when a fraction of a second will determine the winner? It would seem pretty clear that it will be the bad guy with the lighter stock M4.
Where you grip in relation to the center of mass/how much leverage you have on the gun will also effect presentation speed, as will where the center of mass is with the gun.
Lots of factors will effect presentation speed, but a few pounds really doesn’t do a whole lot.
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Second order effect. Allertness, reaction time, shoot/no shoot decision, how the gun is slung or held, and most of all training have way more effect than gun weight.
Btw watch some youtube clips of international skeet; 2 targets flying opposite directions at 60mph, with random delay for release and gunstock must remain on hip until bird is visible. I only dabbled in college but everyone is shooting 8.5-10# guns and have are VERY quick. Even a 3lb carbine with a 12" barrel wont make up for skill level even if the oppenent has a 10-12lb gun
I agree that experience and proficiency are definitely factors as well as physical conditioning. Simply watching some type of informal shooting competition or observing a firing line of shooters; the more experienced are easy to spot in their ease of firearm manipulations, smootheness, and efficiency.
The guy with the Garand. At ten yards, Bad Guy is still within buttstroking distance of the M1 Garand and won’t be able to shoot before he gets his head knocked off. That’s how Grampa did it fighting the Nazis.
If the guy with the Garand decides to shoot instead, he still comes out ahead. The Bad Guy will come up too quickly and in his haste to get his shot off will miss. The Guy with the Garand knows this and will make his shot count. One hit to the Boiler Room with a 30-06 will end the fight with authority.
If the guy with the Garand is a greenie and panics, the worst that happens is a tie. He takes two, maybe three hits from the Bad Guy with his poodle shooter, gets mad, butt strokes the Bad Guy and beats his ass and after his squad mates pull him off the Bad Guy, takes him prisoner and both go to the infirmary. Bad Guy is admitted for a cracked skull, broken jaw and stove in ribs. Guy with the Garand is released after getting a tetanus shot.
So as you can see, if you’re a Bad Guy and come around the corner to find a guy with a Garand, your best course of action is to throw down your weapon and surrender, or if you have great intestinal fortitude, run away. That’s how the Nazis did it with Grampa
I tend to think that this is a moot point. If the Garand was truly better than the M-4 as a fighting weapon then educated students of the gun would be using them. The weight issue would come into play if you had to hump it and all of the other combat gear many miles. Fatigue would enter into it and after a time adrenaline would not overcome the fatigue, then who wins? With that said I would not want to come up against a trained antagonist armed with a Garand at close range. The scanario makes me think of Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino.
I do know that in the old west, Gunfighters quickly figured out that the gunfighters with long barreled revolvers seemed to die a lot faster than gunfighters with shorter barrels and as a result the 4-3/4barrel became the barrel length of choice.
Someone needs to do a study on this. Get a slow motion camera to detect the first movement of the rifle barrel to eliminate the reaction time factor and see how long it takes to get the rifle up and fire. I’ll bet there’s a significant difference in how long it takes to get the rifle up with an extra 1-1/3 lb of weight on the barrel.
Just enough to make me want to keep my 7" rail on my M4 carbine:)
seb5
Well I guess the millions of GI’s in WWII were real wimps walking all over Europe and the Pacific with those heavy M1’s ! Funny I think they got the job at hand done quite well carring all that heavy gear!:rolleyes: As been said it’s the guy who has the fight mentality in your senerio who is going to win. In your senerio the shot is most like going to be from the hip and who hits the other guy first wins. Doesn’t matter what weapon they are carring.
Id say it would come down to luck of the draw if everything else is equal. Its the Indian not the arrow kinda thing. Although the dude rocking the M1 gets + 100000 "MERICA points tho.
In your senerio the shot is most like going to be from the hip and who hits the other guy first wins. Doesn’t matter what weapon they are carring.