Ever seen that episode of The Office where Jim gradually fills Dwight's phone handle with nickels, and then removes them all? Then Dwight hits himself in the face when he picks up the phone?
These people would be shooting over the top of anyone's heads. They're not hitting anything.
Well that's kinda my point. Even before you fire, if you weight the barrel like that then when you take it off you will naturally want to aim higher than necessary. By the time you add recoil, you aren't even close anymore.
As long as this is treated as physical training and not actual marksman training I can see this being very useful. I remember going to the arcade once with those laser guns you hold up, all you can play for however many bucks, fuck my arms were sore.
The Pole Cat Tall Bipod shooting system is a great shooting platform for kneeling or standing situations.
I imagine that arms getting tired might be part of the cost computation for all-you-can-shoot deals, though, so I dunno how well people tromping in the door with those would go over with arcade management.
While the weights here are impractical, wouldn't a weighted barrel work really well? If you're forced to engage your muscles against the weight of the barrel you'll most likely be extremely stable.
Maybe, but not weights like these ones. It would probably make recoil more controllable at the cost of making aiming much more difficult. Usually you want to have lightweight parts to make aiming easier, and using your muscles and body to absorb and counteract the recoil.
Sort of, I'm thinking this is extreme dry fire training to "untrain" the natural reaction to push down on the weapon to counteract recoil.
A common way of doing this with automatic pistols is to place a coin on the end of the slide close to the front sight. With the pistol unloaded, squeeze the trigger till click without dropping the coin.
What it looks like they're doing here would be more punishing than dropping a coin when they instinctively push down.
Hold on, you're right, we should consult someone with actual military experience who handles fully automatic long guns professionally. Preferably someone like a front line soldier with excellent marksmanship credentials.
One sec...
Yeah, my wife said this is dumb and you shouldn't do it. You'll just fuck up your barrel. If you want to get good at holding a gun while shooting, hit the range.
It's been a while since I handled an automatic, but depending on the rifle, they do creep up quite a bit when you mag dump. The smaller NATO rounds aren't bad, but something like 7.62x39 from an AK is pretty uncontrollable.
I don't really see the point of loading down your barrel for training, you really don't want to mess with your muscle memory for marksmanship. Even if this was for exercise, it still doesn't make sense, it's not like it's the 1800s and everyone is standing in line formation waiting for a firing order.
Also, you don't need personal experience with automatic weapons to understand the well known phenomenon of barrel creep. Semiautomatic rifles creep upward, hell even musket training from the 1800's advised to aim low at the waist because of it.
There's actually a muzzle brake that users report is so effective that it does push the muzzle down. (More likely is that it's so neutral in terms of muzzle climb that users are pushing the gun down unintentionally.)