So... what? Not like you're a trigger puller anyways right? What's it matter if it's redcoats or SHTFantasy for whatever shooting roleplay you're getting into? Why not try to be the best you can in the system you're learning,  keep what you need and ditch what doesn't when you move to the next?

Sounds like you're really trying too hard to find fault where there is none. Why are you trying so hard?

I still use slings no one uses anymore. Just bought a new Turner last year for my newest rifle.

those who refuse to even consider that they can learn from a class that focuses on fundamentals, wont.
i saw a paratroooper and a ranger not make the score required to receive the rifleman  patch.

shooting with a sling is a skill every shooter should have.

Yup. The only guy who didn't return for day 2 at my first Appleseed was the guy who showed up in full battle rattle, and was out shot by a bunch of 10 yr old kids with shitty .22s and Mosin Nagants.

Great program but it has to be run and taught correctly.

I think that hitting your target past 100yrds. is never antiquated.

Keep in mind that as a civilian you won't be able to call in artillery or air strikes.

Boy, this thread sure got heated.  

I spent the last several days trying a multitude of seated positions in dryfire and cannot for the life of me find anything that works.

Legs splay.  Rifle tips way downward. Elbows slip. Muscle tension everywhere.  No relaxation.
For a minute I thought I found something- by putting big boots on and pulling them wayyyy under my thighs/butt. Had a moment of relaxation- but couldn't reproduce it.

Tried belting my legs together again and it is rock steady. No tension .

Attached File


That's the most comfortable sitting position for me. It was kinda rushed because my phone only has a 10 second timer. I could sit like that for 20minutes.

https://youtu.be/SPVVeKY_puY

I think this video will help.
I think I was in "no man's land" as described in the first part.

Wrasslin shoes!

Day off from work

As an outside observer, I think the program looks awesome. I've read this entire thread, and many others about Appleseed.

Really the only thing I could find to criticize is the high chicken-wing.  It's an outdated technique that was useful for hard-recoiling weapons of the past.
You might find it useful if you're forced to shoot offhand with a .30-06, but I don't think anyone anywhere outside of Appleseed is using that technique anymore. Certainly not anyone competing today. You'll have much better offhand scores if you relax that shoulder and drop that elbow down low and pull it in close. Less fatigue, more stable.

It seems that some of the methods being taught were the best methods of the WWII era and the program might benefit from adopting techniques more optimized around the modern sporting rifle. For example, modern infantry and sporting rifles have pistol grip stocks and fire low-recoil ammunition. That's why you can relax your shoulder and drop your elbow. Doesn't work with a Garand, but works great with an AR-15.

So, my criticisms are minor and superficial.
Slings? Heck yes, slings. Since I took up position shooting (HP) all of my shooting has improved. All of it. I think it's a great idea to teach this stuff to as many people as will accept.

I can't get comfortable in a cross-legged position either.

It's my son pictured below,  but that is the position that I find the most comfortable.
Attached File

Very true. I get terrible pulse bounce in sitting unless I loosen my belt and unzip a bit.

Appleseed teaches the standing position with the use of a traditional sling in a "hasty" configuration and the body in line with the target line. At the course I attended, no one cared how high your elbow was or even addressed elbow position of your trigger arm.

I shoot mid-range prone, which is slung up traditional at 600, some DMR-type matches that involve multiple positions and bipods, and occasionally F-class with my AR, so I know what my rifle does slung up versus a bipod. If your bipod shooting isn't far better than a hasty sling, you might have something wrong with your bipod or its mount.

I said ALL of the below
"I'M an excellent shot, the wind is pretty strong though..(.22 at 25 yards)"; "it is these glasses they keep fogging up"; "the ammo isn't very high quality"(federal auto match); "rifles scope is loose"(AR with la rue QD  optic mount, it was tight);; "The barrel must be loose in the upper " ( factory spec tactical solutions .22 upper); (in case you were wondering I was a whiny little bitch )

Instructor " When was last time you went to eye doctor you are squinting a lot... "
I came back in 6 months with glasses, shot a 243 first time.... lol.  then, got a winter seed, then a second, then went for bolt action .22(pulled it off but HARD) and decide on getting an orange hat.  

(shooternotrifle)

Re: Slings.

Does any one get benefits from any of the 2 point style slings commonly in use today?

More than the hasty sling provides?

... I'm totally going to try shooting my 20" A2 in that position next time I'm at an unregulated range.

Now, I'm just a civilian with no tactical training or combat experience or anything.  Hell, I've never even really been in a fistfight.  So this opinion is worth what you're paying for it.


I went to an Appleseed shoot 10 years ago (!) as a kid fresh out of college.  All I had was a 10/22 and a Marlin 880 and had no formal firearms instruction of any kind, past my dad teaching me the safety rules and basics with a Daisy pump rifle.  I learned a hell of a lot of fundamental stuff that is applicable to shooting in general--how to use irons properly, trigger control, etc.  I found the loop sling to be awkward and unusable, and greatly preferred the hasty sling instead (it seemed more stable and I felt locked-in better).  I think I scored in the 190 range at one point, and that was using the Marlin.  My improvement in just one day was amazing.

The instructors really weren't pushy on equipment, besides "you should have a sling"; they encouraged people to at least give irons a try but didn't press the issue.  They also weren't picky on what type of rifle you had.  They did have a couple of loaner rifles that they called "liberty training rifles", which were 10/22s with peep sights and pistol-grip stocks.  They didn't promote a chicken wing (IIRC, they discouraged it) and nobody gave a hoot if you brought a black rifle.  The eight and two loads were really just there to force you to do a mag change at some point, but also accommodated someone with a Garand (they had one of those there, too, for people to try... honestly I didn't like it and kept worrying it would smash my hand as it cycled).

I can't speak to the applicability of their techniques to modern combat scenarios.  But it seems, at least to this amateur, that their methods are designed to teach basic fundamentals and provide the best results (purely in terms of accuracy) in the shortest amount of time.  I do kind of like that they teach using only the sling and no other aids (bipod, bags, etc) as it's like teaching people to do calculations by hand, fly basic stick-and-rudder airplanes, etc., and it's something I can fall back to if I have minimal equipment at the range, or I'm hunting, or whatever.  To this day I sling up whenever I'm shooting.  Hoping to get out to the range next month and try out shooting prone (I haven't done that in years... last time I did was at a public range where a couple college kids were trying to hit metal spinners at 25 yards with scoped .22s off the bench.  Asked if I could try, and proceeded to get them all going with irons on the Marlin, shooting prone)



Other observations from Appleseed:  

Don't let your fingers get in the way of the ejection port.  I got a .22 case driven mouth first into my left ring finger.  I still have a crescent-shaped scar there.  That kinda hurt

One guy had a suppressed, SBR'ed .22LR AR-15 with an EOtech on it.  As he described it, "purely a 'fuck-around' gun".  It was a hoot for plinking.

Before laying down on your pad to shoot prone, check for snakes.

Since we are on the topic of slings... I'm amazed that folks think they are still magic... I'm a  Service rifle shooter, I know how to sling up in a 1907... but other then Service Rifle... and shooting for 40 years... I've never had the need to sling up...
I have felt my time was better spent mastering the standing position in all it's various forms and if I need to go prone... the magazine makes a wonderful, steady monopod from which to bang away from.

Breathing.. trigger control... NPA... all good stuff...and I don't think Appleseed is a bad program.. just a bit antiquated for what it's origins were... Only reason I never went... $60 and the ammo is a lot for what little I'm going to get out of it... but if one gets close to me, I may just say screw it and do one just to experience it myself. After all.. Shooting is still fun.

That is the correct attitude!  Enjoy it, maybe learn some different technique that works and have a great day at the range.

FWIW, I found my VTAC sling adapted really well to Appleseed's training. The only problem was the instructors had zero idea what a VTAC or VCAS sling were, so I had to improvise those adaptations myself on the fly. Worked out well though. I swapped weapons with the guy on my left who had an AR-15 with a borrowed loop sling on it during one course of fire (I had my Colt 901 .308 with a VTAC on it) and I got noticeably better groups with my improvised VTAC than I did with the officially taught USGI loop. In fact, so did he.

Which brings me to my other big gripe with Appleseed: they may focus on the USGI loop, and I don't expect them to know every sling all the way on down to Bob's Sling Shop's Custom HSLD Sling of which ten were ever made. But at least SOME familiarity among instructors with the more common slings and how to adapt them to Appleseed's instruction would be nice.

Another good point. One of multiple reasons I switched away from .308 PMAGs to Lancer L7s: they make for an amazingly steady monopod, and have zero issues feeding reliably while doing that. Combine that with using one or two fingers under a full-length VFG makes for almost bipod-level stability without the bipod. Case in point, my groups shooting prone like that without even having sling support before instruction began during the initial accuracy assessment were within the accuracy variance of the ammo I was using, and were significantly better than any of the groups I shot with the insistence on "don't let that mag touch the ground." Learning older-style prone shooting was fun just because I always like learning new things and I'd be enthused even to learn 1800s shooting techniques if someone wanted to teach me, but prone felt like a little too much focus was on trying to treat an AR platform like a Garand.

Upside: If someone handed me a Garand and a sling and no way to support the rifle on the environment, I could probably kick my own ass at shooting prone post-Appleseed with a Garand compared to shooting one pre-Appleseed.

Downside: I don't have a Garand, I have ARs and an ARX, and the prone techniques did not teach me much useful for the rifles I actually use beyond reinforcing fundamentals.

Can you describe your use of the VTAC? Any lessons learned to improve?

Being a paratrooper or a Ranger is not a shooting qualification.    You can barely qualify at the range, and still be a Ranger.  Being a cop doesn't mean you are good at shooting.  Being a paratrooper doesn't mean you are good at shooting.  Being a Marine doesn't mean you are good at shooting.  Where did you get the dumbass idea that those jobs mean someone is good at shooting?    

I've been shooting competition for many years, and it's been almost 30 years since I first qualified "expert".  Even as a boot, my only concern was being company high shooter.  The possibility of not qualifying expert never even occurred to me.  How the fuck would I learn something from an Appleseed instructor who most likely knows far less about shooting than I do, with far less experience?  I did consider it, and it's fucking ridiculous.  They aren't teaching rocket science at an Appleseed; it's just basic fundamentals that many of us mastered DECADES ago.  They don't have any secrets that are going to make me better.  And we have lots of people like me on this forum (probably quite a few who are even better than I).  Some of you people are so thickheaded, that you won't even consider the possibility that some people have advanced far beyond your skill level, and far beyond what Appleseed teaches.  But I sure called it (about the retards who think Appleseed is magic), didn't I?  They all popped into the thread, just as predicted.

You can't just jump into a cross-legged position and expect to be comfortable.  It takes time and stretching to get your body accustomed to it.  Work on it when watching TV, or doing other stuff around the house.  Trust me, it will be FAR more stable than using the position in that picture.  When done right, it can be nearly as stable as prone.

I suspect you would fail their very simple test.  Most people with your attitude do.

LOL, I've read some retarded shit from you, but that takes the cake.  How is an Appleseed test going to be tougher than qualifying Expert in the Corps, or High Master in Service Rifle?  I passed those marks a long time, and I did it by actually shooting (with irons) at distances from 500M to 600 yards, in the wind.  Here is my rifleman patch, rookie:  Expert   What is it that makes people like you make dumbass comments like that?  Does it insult your manhood that some people have advanced beyond your skill level?  Keep practicing, and don't take it so personal that some people are better than you.  My post is not to brag, but to get the dumbasses to stop pretending that Appleseed is magic, and claiming that it can make anyone and everyone better.  So just stop already.  It's a good program, but don't pretend it's more than it is.

Again, you'd be amazed at how many people come in with those claims and that attitude and can't hit those tiny little targets at 25 yards with a .22.

It's just what it is.

If I had five bucks for every "expert qualified", "NRA rated", "super secret operator" that signed up and didn't make the grade... I'd have a bunch more NFA items in my safe.  Ego is a real monster to overcome.

Maybe a few actually used to be someone back in the day, but skills atrophied and it showed on paper. 

I carry a hundred bucks in my wallet to every event I attend, in case someone says they didn't get any value out of the event.  Years later, that money is still there.

My "attitude" is a result of my experience, and confidence does not equal arrogance.  I know exactly what I am capable of, from extensive competition and my scores.  If you actually think that someone can shoot High Master in Service Rifle, and fail to qualify at an Appleseed, then you are only showing off your ignorance, and you know nothing about shooting sports.  If you think that an Appleseed patch is more difficult than qualifying expert in Marine qual, you know nothing about Marine qual (I'm talking about the old qual with irons, not ACOGs).  If you have gotten your patch at Appleseed, good for you.  Now try shooting Service Rifle at 500 or 600 yards with wind and iron sights, next to experienced shooters.  You will quickly learn how much you still have to learn, and you will be humbled.  You will also finally realize that your Appleseed was just the beginners class.  The experienced guys are usually very helpful to newcomers, but don't start out by bragging about your Appleseed patch, or you will get nothing but laughs.  

And you can save your "tiny targets" logic, LOL.  The .22 targets that I practice on at 50 yards are FAR smaller than your Appleseed targets (yes, I have been to one), and I rarely miss them.  It's also obvious that you have never seen a Service Rifle target from 600 yards.  They appear very tiny, which is what Appleseed was trying to duplicate.

My skills haven't "atrophied" at all at 47.  If anything, I'm at my peak, mainly because I don't get nervous now (like I often did when I was younger).  I guess that's one of the good things about aging.  And don't mistake confidence for arrogance.  

So where do you rank in Service Rifle, hotshot?  If you haven't even attempted it, then LOL at every single thing you wrote.  Posts like yours are actually doing a disservice to Appleseed, not promoting it.  Just accept it for what it is (beginner's rifleman class with a history lesson), and don't pretend it's more than that.

Yes, -but likely only because my left shoulder has been rebuilt twice and and the hasty sling is incredibly painful to the point that I simply can't use that method.  I shot another appleseed this past weekend and spoke with the instructors ahead of time and they were very supportive of using whatever would work with my situation.

Might go to an appleseed in a bit