What’s with teh cool kids suddenly using C clamp foregrips? Is this a JSOCism that’s made it’s way across?
That's always bemused me a bit, ever since I saw it being touted as The Next Really Cool Thing in one of those comedy "magazines for elite tactical operators who are operating tactically" I picked up at a DSEi about fifteen years ago, in an article touting some training camp or other for "close protection specialists" trying to get hired in Iraq. (In between puff pieces for "I've been lent this rifle and given lots of ammunition as long as I write about how amazing it is" and "here's a company who will take a perfectly good Glock automatic and turn it into an expensive ornament by milling great lumps out of the slide and digging holes in the frame with a soldering iron, 'cos it's more tactical innit?"
Some of the stuff on the course made a vague sort of sense (issues like wearing what you'd be working in to train in, or applying fire by firing under a vehicle rather than standing behind bodywork and glass) and it did look like a fun way to turn live rounds into empty cases (doubtless expensively), but the trainers were photographed in that weird kung-fu yoga pose of left arm stretched out, twisted over the fore-end, and grabbing it just behind the front sight; which looks... uncomfortable and non-instinctive, and even the author was trying to contain scepticism with "apparently after enough practice..."
Is it just a follow-on from "we used to have vertical foregrips to show we were special, now everyone's using them, we have to be
more special"?
In the very minimal CQB training I had, it was all about full front to target, as narrow a profile as possible (i.e elbows tucked in), etc; what’s changed?
Fashion?
My equally minimal CQB (it was early 1990s, to be fair) was about "two of you go in fast right after the grenade detonates, one goes high and the other goes low, fire into anything that might hide an enemy, don't forget you've got bayonets" - probably not
really ROE-compliant these days.
But then, shooting pistol as a civilian for a few years in the 1990s saw at least three different "this is absolutely the best way to get rounds on target" stances and styles come through, each attracting their share of followers.
Hence why a fair few pistols in the late 1980 sported this sort of hooked trigger guard :-
Then when the fashionable stance changed, they switched to this instead:-