# Long Gun Carry Positions



## Tgace (Dec 18, 2004)

http://www.warriortalk.com/showthread.php?t=2418&highlight=tactical+carbine

Low Ready: Rifle mounted in the shoulder, muzzle depresed to 45 degrees below horizontal. This is a good general purpose ready, but it is not perfect.

Sul Ready: Identical to Pistol Sul. Rifle pivoted downward at shoulder until support hand touches the support side leg. Buttstock need not remain in contact with the shoulder. This is identical to pistol SUL concept, and was called Indoor Low Ready at one time. The Sul allows you to move in a 360 environment w/o covering innocents or partners unnecessarily.

Relaxed Close Contact: Using the Rifle SUL as a starting point, the buttstock is brought out of contact with the shoulder and rests under the shooting side arm. The RCC allows a relatively high degree of preparedness along with an unfatiguing hold for long term deployments. This can be "tightened up" as needed. See below.

Each of these three positions is usefull for moving from point to point when no contact is immediately expected. The weapon can be "mounted" back into the shoulder, or brought into body index in the case of an exteremly close confrontation problem in the blink of an eye. Moreover, none of these positions, except perhaps low ready is physically draining for the open ended time frame.

When contact is made, but and immediate shot is not necessarily needed, the muzzle must be moved into position covering the adversary. The idea that you will be issuing commands out in the open with your gun muzzle pointing at the deck is foolish. Point in! The Contact Ready Positions are:

Contact Ready: From Low Ready, simply ove your muzzle up until it is covering the waistband area of the adversary. Those who say that you won't be able to see your adversary this way have never pointed a loaded rifle at another man with the possible intent to kill him. You can certainly see what you need to see.

Close Contact: The Relaxed Close Contact tightened up with the muzzle pointed right at them ready to shoot. And you can truly shoot from here if necessary. The only difference between Contact Ready and Close Contact is that with the latter you hold the rifle closer due to a close proximity threat.

Now any combative rifle problem can be dealt with using these ready positions. Simplicity demands we use what we need and nothing more. We can certainly complicate matters, but we must ask why?

The High Ready is a popular ready position for rifle or shotgun. Let's analze it and see what it gives us, if anything, that the other readies do not. 

The High Ready can be traced back to sport shotgunning. When Jeff Cooper was developing the Gunsite Shotgun Program, he consulted with John Satterwhite, a shotgun magician who could toss seven claybirds into the air and blast them all before they hit the ground using a pump action shotgun! His ready position of choice? The Satterwhite Ready.

This involved having the muzzle pointed toward the targets, and the butt held at the hip. On "go" the shotgunner popped the buttstock into the shoulder and fired almost on contact.

This was very useful for bird hunters and clay bird shooters as they could see their bird and move the muzzle toward it, firing a pattern in the direction as the mount was made. Cooper eventually added the concept to the rifle and had his rifle students hit clay birds on the fly with their rifles in the old 270. When the era of the poodle shooter came about (Cooper's words), they used the mold from the General Rifle class and the High Ready was dragged into the carbine program as well. That is the tale of the travels of the High Ready. When FS designed the rifle program, we were all Gunsite products and used the existing template. No innovation was allowed.

So what does the HR give us? When you look at it in the sense of combat against other human beings who are trying to kill you, it gives you nothing at all that the Low Ready, Rifle SUL, or Relaxed Close Contact don't. Moreover, it places your weapon in a position where you can't immediately fire (not aimed in, not in the shoulder, not under the arm). If weapon retention is a concern, and alternative force is anticipated, the Relaxed Close Contact and Close Contact are far better choices than High Ready.

So where is High ready useful? When moving through an urban environment and you anticipate second or third story threats, you move with the muzzle elevated and pointed at those thraets in a ready similar in appearance to the High Ready....conceptually however, it is following the line of thinking as Contact Ready with the muzzle in contact with the anticipated threat.

So there you have it my friends.


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## MA-Caver (Dec 18, 2004)

I believe these are examples of some typical carry positions. Screen captures to be sure of popular hollywood but best can do.


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