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Originally Posted by Machineguntony
Theo, can the M240 be shot in the standing position? It doesn't seem balanced in a way that it would be very amendable to shooting from the shoulder.
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No, not practically at least. The M240 ejects brass straight down, so putting your support hand below the receiver will block ejection. So that means you need to put your support hand forward more, and the gun is just too long and heavy to make that a practical shooting position.
Also, putting your support hand forward of the receiver puts it on or near the gas piston housing, which gets ridiculously hot pretty quickly. On the M240B, you have picatinny mounting bracket that could also act as a handguard, but it would probably still get hot pretty quickly (I have no personal experience with the M240B, so that's just an educated guess). And either way, you'd need to be really strong to properly support the weapon that way.
I knew a few guys who told me about firing the M240G from the shoulder, but I've never done it or seen it done. We were taught to shoot it from the tripod whenever possible, or the bipod if necessary. Shooting from the hip using a sling was something done only in CQB, or when ambushed and moving out of the kill zone. Shooting from the shoulder was considered to be horsing around, and horsing around on a live-fire range is frowned upon in the Marine Corps to say the least.
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Originally Posted by Machineguntony
Thomas Hoel, author of the Civilian M60 Guide, says that you should never shoot a civilian transferrable M60 off the integral bipod because it eventually causes loosening of the trunion and barrel socket. I would think that the same advice applies to the M240. The military shoots it from the bipod because it can just throw it away and get another gun for $5000. We civvies can't do that.
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I don't know, all I can tell you is that the 240 is built like a tank and so is the bipod. And we shot ours from the tripod 95% of the time anyway.
The M240 is a bipod or tripod weapon only. If you want a shoulder-fired belt-fed machine gun an M249 SAW or M60E4 is a much better choice.