This is Part 2 of the full transcript of an interview with Craig Ouzen, a National Champion, Multigun Competitor. You can watch the video at HERE

So then I saw the Quattro-15 receiver and saw the QMAG-53. Well, but the other thing you notice about the receiver is, is it’s an AR receiver. It’s very mil-spec in its layout. Receiver pins are in the same place, trigger hammer pins are in the same place.

Control surfaces are all the same. And it really dawned on me just how brilliant this solution was to simply make the mag well build bigger. And then feed from the same geometries. I’ve told a lot of people in kind of describing this is it is the double stack the same way that’s the 2011 is the double stack of 1911 pistols.

And so if you’re having a kind of a hard time, wrap your head around what’s going on as the mag just two stacks wider. Now there’s been mags in the past that have tried this Schmeisser makes one, Sure Fire makes one. I think there’s been a couple others out there.

But they had all been a design that started out quad stack and then through an internal mechanism would bring the rounds into a double stack so they would fit into a traditional sized AR-15 lower. So obviously the difference here is we leave the magazine quad stacked and made the mag well in the receiver bigger to accept that. What that allowed to happen is is much better round control and less friction whereas the earlier designs had multiple followers and a multiple springs.

They were very complicated from a widget standpoint and that honestly compromised reliability and compromised feeding.  You know, sometimes those mags would run, sometimes they wouldn’t, but they were far away, not 100% reliable.

Craig: The very nature of competition is that we’re we’re kind of pushing boundaries. We’re pushing limits a good portion of advancements or designs that you see in the AR-15 world right now, things that are considered standard now came from the competition arena. We have we have forearms that are longer and free floating and and we pick ones that increase stiffness and all that, that came from competition.

Nobody else was asking for that. But we wanted to be able to rest that gun on a barricade and not not affect the point of impact of the gun. Those types of things started there. The development of mini red dots, mini red dots were horribly unreliable in the beginning, but they were they were useful. So competitors use those quite a bit.

And that drove a lot of the the development to what we have now. And I think, you know, if you don’t have a long history in this sort of thing, you look now and you see multiple companies that build pretty good red dots. When I started there was two versions of a mini red dot that you could have.

There was a doctor and a J point, and the doctor needed a lot of work to be reliable. The J point was pretty reliable, but it was very small, small window up, things like that. So a lot of these developments come out of that competition side. So during that development, absolutely, we see a ton of failures. We’re kind of the first or one of the first sections of people that get new stuff and we’ll go try it out and it breaks and we go back to that manufacturer, that designer and say like, hey, here’s here’s what it did, here’s what it didn’t do.

Here’s where I might think that you can make an improvement and that development cycle happens.

Craig: Shooting has has always been driven by capacity. There’s there was always a need, an underlying need in competition shooting that the more ammo you could have in the gun, the fewer times you’re manipulating the gun and the more time you spent shooting. Almost all competitive shooting is scored by that efficiency. How many points can you score per second is is kind of the basic calculation.

So every platform of gun has gone through these iterations of trying to add capacity at the time when we only had metal magazines for 8 hours, there was a company called Virgil Trips Place. He made some incredibly heavy magazine extensions and they were great. We thought they were wonderful at the time. They took a regular steel or aluminum G.I. mag and increased it.

He had a 42-round version and a 52-round version. They were very ungainly. Like I said, they’re very heavy. They got very long. They reflect the gun around barricades or on rooftop props, things like that. But people were willing to try those and compromise. And and initially every one of those attempts was met with, you know, greater and lesser degrees of success as far as nobody knew how much spring rate you had to give that magazine to make it feed 52 rounds.

So maybe it was under sprung for a little while and that manufactured to come and build up a new spring. And all of those iterations happened. So I’ve seen a lot of those trial and errors or trials and and iterations to get effective. So ultimately where we ended up just a few years ago was Magpul built a drum bag and they did a very good job.

It was very reliable and a lot of people were using it. And especially in the three gun world, because on the rifle, a lot of times you’ll be put in a in a very compromised position to take long range shots. You don’t want to a go dry in that position and B, you don’t want to reload in that position because you’re breaking up position.

So having that extra capacity was always a big advantage. One of the problems with the D 50 though, is as a drum mag, it’s a very different form factor on the gun. While its function was really good, it was almost impossible to load that D 50 into the gun on a closed bolt. So there was no reloading to a large capacity drum mag.

And then the other part of that was carrying that mag. If you, you couldn’t carry that spare mag, if you were going to reload to it, or any other type of situation where you were going to load that mag to put it in a carrier, to put it in in a mag pouch, it just didn’t happen, There wasn’t anything that was useful for that.

We’d already kind of previously discussed the Surefire style mags with the wide body but the thin neck to go into a regular standard mag. Well, and those again kind of form factor was similar, but they were very long. And when you put them in a mag pouch, the weight of the ammo was far away from where the mag patch mag pouch would grasp on to that magazine and you would have a very hard time retaining that magazine.

So there was the rise issues like that as far as chasing those capacity. And now we have the QMAG-53. So as we can see, same length as a 30 round mag, slightly thicker, it’s very easy to find mag pouches that are actually out there and available in your soft mag pouches will carry it. It stays the same form factor on the gun.

It’s the same form factor. When I go to reload it, I can still grasp the magazine, whether you’re a beer canter or however you want to do your reloads, but I can still have the same grip positioning on my body and my gear whether I’m on a pouch on the front of my C, a vest or a carrier, or whether I’m using a belt pouch, everything’s still the same as a standard AR mag.

And we’ve got that capacity advantage as well.

Craig: So the reason capacity is such an advantage in competitive shooting is this might sound a little pedantic. It’s competitive shooting. It’s hard. It’s designed to be hard. It’s designed with difficult targets. It’s designed with difficult presentations. Different, difficult positions. And that means, you know, you’re not always going to get those first round hits or you’re not always going to be able to to shoot that partially exposed target and get the hits that you want in the scope.

So you’re going to take some extra hits to ensure those hits are on that target. Therefore, capacity becomes important. That’s not to say everybody’s just willy-nilly throwing rounds out there, but you will eventually be in a position to to shoot more rounds than what your original magazine held. And that’s partly stage design. Match director stage designers might make a stage difficult enough to put a difficult set of targets right at the end of a magazine.

So you’re going to be pushing that capacity. So increasing capacity was always very important. The other advantage to having some increased capacity is, is you don’t have to reload. So if I have a a stage that requires 40 rifle rounds, that will necessitate a shooter shooting a standard 30 round mag to do a reload, I don’t have to do a reload.

That’s time. So that time is always a period of of seconds where no shooting is happening and therefore you’re not scoring points. So from a competitive standpoint, capacity becomes a very, very important factor in in the performance of your guns and therefore how you’re going to perform at a match.