How a Rifle Sling Can Help!

How a Rifle Sling Can Help!
Be a Better Shot with Your .300 Blackout

I know what you’re thinking. Yes, we know that sounds crazy. Bear with me.

So you’ve got your .300 Blackout rifle all built, and you’re starting to accessorize it. Maybe you’ve got your handguards on it, a foregrip, and you’re working on picking a sight. However, what other accessories can help you improve your shot?

As strange as this sounds, a sling can be an extremely useful tool for improving your accuracy. Simply attaching the sling won’t make you shoot more accurately. Attaching the sling and using a specific technique will help stabilize the rifle and improve your accuracy. It’s not like upgrading to a match grade barrel, where you simply install the 300 blackout barrel and watch your shot group tighten.

When you use the sling properly, you can successfully steady your rifle, cut down on recoil, and improve your target acquisition. All of these will help to improve your accuracy, but also help to increase the speed at which you can take a follow up shot.

Don’t believe me? Ask a Marine.

Let’s talk about this technique.

The Basics

Slings are meant to do so much more than just carry your weapon. Sure, they’re very useful for holding your weapon while you’re doing other things, but they serve a much greater purpose.

In order for the sling to be able to help stabilize the weapon, it must be able to take some of the weight off your support hand. For this reason alone, a tactical, one point sling won’t work on a full-length rifle. One point slings can be helpful for pistols, but for a rifle, your sling needs to have at least two points of attachment for it to work.

Realistically, any two point sling will work. Magpul makes a great one, but any of them will work. Once you’ve got the sling and attached it, you should definitely give the following technique a try.

Technique 1

There are actually a couple different ways that you can accomplish this. All of them will result in you stabilizing the rifle using a good sling.

The first way to do this is to loop the sling around your support arm. Essentially, if you’re pulling the trigger with your right hand, you’ll loop the sling around your left arm. It should be around your triceps, and the sling should be tightened down at the rear attachment point so that it is taut from your left arm to the front attachment point. You’ll leave just enough slack in the sling for you to loop it around your arm.

Putting the sling around your triceps gives plenty of room for support, and tightening the sling down means that the weight of the barrel will be supported throughout the sling and your left arm rather than held with your left hand. This noticeably stabilizes the rifle. One caveat though, make sure that you’re not completely cutting off circulation to your arm!

This technique can be used in a variety of different positions. You could do this while standing, kneeling, and even while laying down. However, while you are prone, there are much easier ways to support the rifle.

Technique 2

Another way to accomplish the same thing is to loop the sling around your firing arm. If you’re firing with your right hand, the sling would be wrapped around your right triceps. You will tighten it down in the exact same way.

This technique is much more stable in my opinion, but takes much longer to set up. It also is very difficult to set up while standing. Obviously this wouldn’t apply to the specific rifles we’re talking about, but it’s worth noting that this technique doesn’t work with bolt action rifles.

Technique 3

Both of the aforementioned techniques take a pretty significant amount of time to set up. You have to wrap the sling around your arm and tighten it down at one of the attachment points. This is great for range shooting, but what if you’re in a defense situation or out hunting, and have to take a shot much faster?

This technique is extremely fast. When your two point sling is attached and hanging off your weapon, all you have to do is slip your arm in between the sling and the rifle, and then go back around the sling to the grip. It should make a very quick loop.

When it’s done, the sling should be below your hand on the grip, wrapped around your forearm, and underneath your triceps before going to the rear attachment point. You will create tension by bending your arm at the elbow until the sling is taut.

One Point Slings and Pistols

As we mentioned before, one point slings are useful for pistols, but not so much for rifles. For those of you that have built AR pistols, here’s the way to use your one point sling to help improve your shot.