This is Part 3 of the full transcript of an interview with Craig Ouzen, a National Champion, Multigun Competitor. You can watch the video HERE

Craig: So again, there’s there’s a lot of skill sets that come together in competitive shooting. If you were to, say, train with your friends or maybe occasionally you take a class once a year and go out and train and then you practice and train those drills, you know, once or twice a month or a couple of times throughout the year.

I think a lot of people build skills and they they see improvement from from where they started. But if you’re actively shooting competitively, what you will have is, is more and more of those skills will be tested all at one time. So rather than having a shooting drill of can you draw and hit a target, say the really famous build drill, I’m going to draw and I’m going to shoot a target six times.

That’s a that’s a standard drill. Everybody knows that’s testing your draw and it’s testing your your grip, your gun control and how you’re controlling that gun. That might be the first target on a stage. So we’re going to draw to that target and shoot it. And then there’s there’s 20 more targets, 30 more targets on that stage that can be addressed from different positions, from different ports standing on the ground.

Those targets, especially in three gun with rifle, will be far enough away that you need to take a very solid position to get hits at three, four and 500 yards. Those targets might be obscured or you can only see them partially. Those targets might be very small at great distance. So all of those difficulties ramp up to really test what skill set you’ve built.

And it will constantly put a premium on how you handle that gun. The more, the better you handle the gun, the faster you can do the administrative tasks of loading the gun, reloading the gun, getting into position. The more time you can focus on making that shot or the more effort you have to making that shot. Match directors and stage designers love to do that.

Three gun. We do a gun transition, so we’ll put one gun down, pick up another gun,match directors and stage designers love to do that. What targets present that you can see. So it kind of artificially forces you to go faster than you maybe want to. So all of those tasks have a real prime importance. The easier it is to perform those tasks, the better.

So if I’m using an odd proprietary mag, let’s say it’s an unloaded start with the rifle and I’ve got a bunch of rifle targets and I want to use a drum mag or I want to use a capacitor, have a capacity advantage. That drum mag is going to be very difficult to put in the rifle with the bolt closed.

So I may have to stage, you know, open that bolt up to get that magazine in. No problems in comparison. So just there’s always a premium on that gun handling and anything we can do to keep that gun handling as consistent from platform to platform. Adding adding capacity is always best to have it in the size that we use the most.

The other option is a very long mag for capacity. As I stated before, those are very hard to put in a mag pouch. They’re they’re more unwieldy to to load and unload. So having the extra capacity in the same form factor of a let’s call it a standard [magazine] is better.

Craig: All right, let’s let’s kind of cover a little bit of why a QMAG-53 has such an advantage over other magazines that we might use in our AR-15, even other high capacity magazines that we might use in our AR. So there’s a Gen two [Magpul]. This was the Surefire 60 rounder and we’ve got the quad mag 53.

So obviously nothing wrong with this mag. Over time mag pul mags have become the standard in the AR world and very reliable, very robust. I don’t think anybody’s not familiar with them. They work, they’re easy to handle. There’s a form factor. We’re all used to kind of universal as far as fitting in mag pouches out there, all of those kinds of things as we chase capacity.

One of the things we would see done to magazines like this is we would see these big extensions down on the bottom added to those magazines and a different spring put in to take up more spring pressure. But that gave us the capacity. A lot of things can go wrong there depending on the quality of of that base pad.

We may have some little shifts where alignment into that base pad isn’t a smooth or is as perfect as it should be. And we can have feeding issues whether the the follower gets stuck at that point or rounds get stuck at that point. We can we actually make this mag, which is a highly reliable mag into a somewhat less reliable mag.

So we had reliability problems.

The second part of that length is is now as it sits in the gun, we now have much more length. So if we’re shooting off the ground in a prone position or we’re getting into some sort of a prop, like a rooftop prop or a barricade, sometimes that length of magazine would start since we added length could it’s now in the way or it doesn’t let us get into a position to be as effective.

That’s one of the problems adding capacity to it to a standard mag. Second part of that is is carrying a standard mag in any sort of mag pouch. If I’ve got a if I’ve got a chest rig and I’ve got a 40 round mag with the base pad on it or a 30 round mag on a base pad, now I’ve got a much, much more in the way of, of my mobility and how I carry that if it’s carried on a belt. I now have a lot of length sticking out of that mag with weight that will help that mag work out and it’s not quite as secure. So adding capacity to standard mag was common, but it did have some drawbacks.

We all know Sure Fire makes really good stuff, but this mag was incredibly complicated. When they worked, they worked great. If they didn’t, they’re very difficult to diagnose, very difficult to tune and get right. So there was kind of some hit and miss. We gained the capacity. We maintain the form factor. It fit in the gun and didn’t wasn’t a problem with barricades or shooting positions. However, because the mag was complicated because there’s a lot of of room in there or a lot of surface area in there for rounds to contact and multiple followers. Sometimes there was friction problems and reliability problems kind of reared their head. These mags weren’t quite as reliable as people would have liked them to be. As far as carrying the mag, yeah, we can have a pouch that grasps this portion of the mag, but again, we’ve got somewhat of the weight problem wanting to wiggle it out of there on a security issue.

And the other part of it is if you run on a soft mag that’s held together by elastic tension, these would kind of squeeze out because they’re there from the width to the narrowing they’d want to work out as well. So kind of difficult to carry that way. So what we’ve hit on here with the QMAG-53 and obviously Desert Tech can do a lot of you’ll see a lot of videos as far as reliability and what their testing is.