New Grip To Make Fighters Shoot Faster

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Everyone who has been a soldier, and more specifically a fighter, knows that carrying an assault rifle or a machine gun on a long mission can be a very difficult, finger-numbing task.

The Ryker Grip, designed and marketed by a team of Navy and Marine Corps veterans with close ties to the special operations community, uses ergonomics to ease strain on the body, allowing for a more natural head position, squared shoulders, and better body alignment.

The fist-sized piece of military-grade polymer fixes to the rail, allowing shooters to hold and control the gun from the side, rather than from underneath as with a conventional vertical grip.

According to military.com, the design was created by Ron Holmes, a veteran of Force Reconnaissance and Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, who found that conventional rifle handling became more taxing as he got older.

“The [service in the] Marines put a lot of abuse on his body,” said Ryker CEO Josh Robertson, a veteran Navy officer. “He was trying to clamp down on a rifle, and his fingers start going numb. So we set out to solve this problem.”

They arrived at the concept for a side “fist grip” by trial and error, cutting up existing grips and experimenting with various positions.

“It’s honestly that classic garage story. We were just making stuff, whatever we could find, and went through a lot of iterations trying to figure out something that worked,” Robertson said. “Eventually, we came to something that worked really well and started playing with it. And we were like, we’re actually doing a lot more here than what we thought we were.”

They learned, among other things, that the ergonomic position not only made shooters more comfortable; it also made them faster.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrE4xfWzqwY]

The team found that its test subjects maintained accuracy and increased speed by an average of about 12 percent. Among experienced shooters, it was closer to 20 percent, Robertson said.

“We know in a gunfight, seconds count,” he said. “You can get a tactical advantage on someone, obviously that’s going to increase your survivability … we can show that yes, this is, in fact, faster. You are more efficient; you do fatigue at a slower rate; you’re increasing your odds of surviving a gunfight.”

The fist grip also leaves the first and second fingers of a shooter’s supporting hand free near the top of the weapon, opening up the potential for new ways to multitask. The company’s founders theorize switches could be added to integrate comms or a light, allowing a user to keep both hands securely on the weapon.

“A [Joint Terminal Attack Controller] who’s painting a target has to push two switches to do their job while taking it off the rifle,” said Jake Joubert, the chief operating officer for Ryker and a veteran Navy officer who worked with special operations. “If we can save a life because somebody’s a little bit faster or they maintain a positive control of their weapon, that’s really a thing that you can’t measure.”