Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm out here today at the range at the Institute of Military Technology,
where we are gonna do some shooting with an M240 Golf.
This is the FN medium, or general purpose, machine gun that was adopted by the US military to replace the M60.
Now this was originally actually first adopted as a vehicular gun for tanks and Bradley APCs
and that was the Charlie model. It had no butt- stock, it was solenoid fired, it didn't have a bipod,
it was a vehicular gun.
It was then picked up by both the Army and the Marine Corps.
Now the Army adopted the Bravo model, which has this ground mount kit of
a butt-stock, and a pistol grip, and a bipod, and also a handguard both top and bottom.
The Marine Corps decided that they were too cool to use a handguard, and so they got the Golf model here.
Which is presumably just a little bit lighter, although that's not saying much. This is a heavy gun.
The Marine Corps Golf model, which this is an example of, has no handguard top or bottom,
but it does have the bipod, butt-stock, pistol grip to be fired like this.
So this replaced the M60 as the American 7.62mm calibre general purpose machine gun.
It is a quite heavy gun, but it is also an extremely durable gun.
Mechanically, this is basically a Browning BAR flipped upside down and made belt feed.
So we're gonna go ahead and load some up here, to do a little bit of shooting.
Alright, got a push through safety selector there.
There is no semi-auto feature, this is full-auto or nothing.
And a very nice set of aperture sights as well as a Picatinny rail for an optic, which I don't have.
It's got a relatively high rate of fire, it's got a reasonable amount of recoil to it,
you could kind of consider this like the baseline for a 7.62 calibre belt-fed machine gun.
It's heavy, that weight does help absorb some of the recoil,
but it's not exactly, you know, built with recoil reduction in mind.
So we'll go ahead and reload it and do a little bit more.
So what this really brings to the table is durability and reliability.
These are both very durable and very reliable guns.
In kind of typical military tradition they are heavy, but what you buy from that
is you don't have to worry about whether or not they're going to work.
So, overall really quite well regarded guns.
So I've kind of gotten in the habit of trying these sorts of things from the shoulder.
And the 240 here is possibly one of the worst guns ever that you could try to shoot from the shoulder.
It is pretty darn heavy, it's also got a very long length of pull.
It's got a pretty big receiver here and then tack on a long butt-stock,
and most of your weight is in the barrel out at the front.
It's a tricky gun to shoot from the shoulder, but we'll give it a try here, just for you guys.
The nice thing is, because it's so heavy, it doesn't climb, like, at all.
The downside is because it's so heavy, it's really hard to actually hold it out on target.
So I'm sure there are a bunch of Marines who have gotten quite good at firing this thing from the hip.
Probably also with assistance of the carry handle there, but
not recommended in general. This is a gun much better suited to bipod use, so.
Hopefully you enjoyed this brief look at some shooting with a 240 Golf.
Thanks for watching. (I guess I'll just empty the rest of this out.)