Taking notes, or pretending to take notes, during your leader’s truck side mission brief… punching info into your tactical cell phone either for actual job related duties or updating your Insta in between firing relays at your favorite instructor’s class… walking across the parking lot to talk to someone, post incident… helping move casualties… transitioning to pistol… digging around in your pouches for that fresh battery, weapons tool, licky, chewy, or can of dip (for those man enough to actually pinch real tobacco and not those unholy nicotine packets), or conducting the ritual of actually putting said dip in your mouth… all of these things can and happen with regularity, whilst having a hot rifle attached to your person. Hot, Red Status, Condition One, Loaded, Locked and Loaded; whatever term your tribe employs to mean a rifle that can be fired literally with the flick of a switch and the movement of the trigger is the status we’re talking about. 

Contrary to some people’s belief, the rules of firearm safety are still present, valid, and must be paid their due when we have loaded rifles attached to our fronts or backs. That flick of the switch and movement of a trigger I mentioned above? Yeah, those actions can, and have many times, happened while no human hands were on the rifle. And where was the barrel pointing at that time?  

One of the four performance points of a “duty sling” (that phraseology will be covered in a future article) is that it, and I am NOT paraphrasing here: provide a reliable and repeatable front sling position in accordance with the rules of firearms safety when my hands are off the gun. So how do we solve for this particular “X” of a variable ? I submit it’s a 50/50 split between equipment and use technique. The first half of the equation would be your rifle’s sling.  

So that’s the equipment part. The usage technique is what can be done with a loaded rifle once we decide to take both our hands off it. One option is to just let it do what it does and let go of it. This technique used to serve us well. “Us” being those old enough to have used naked ARs by modern standards that had no lights, lasers, fore grips, or hot suppressors. Once those things moved from the category of “only the cool guys with specific needs have those things” to “every AR needs those things” that technique started to present some problems. The fix? Flip the rifle over and voila! No more catching a hot suppressor to your leg, or a foregrip to the family jewels. Notice how the sling will run over the top of the magazine and sorta trap it to your body ? It also has the side benefit of having the ability to walk without the rifle constantly bouncing with every step you take, which makes the outcomes better when shooting a pistol. So again, all sorts of benefits across a spectrum of potential use cases.  

Watch Chris Sizelove Talk: Setup and Size Guide for the M4 Sling Kit