Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm out here today at the Institute for Military Technology,
where we are going to do a little bit of shooting with an original Vietnam pattern M60.
This is kind of one of the early benchmarks of American general purpose machine guns, and
I have basically not had much chance to ever shoot one.
So I thought this would be a cool opportunity to get some trigger time in,
and kind of get a baseline understanding for one of the guns that really all modern machine guns,
certainly in US service, need to be compared to. So, let's dive right in.
It's actually really quite nice to shoot.
I suspect the weight of the gun has something to do with it, but the design is overall pretty decent.
One of the things that we talked about this a bit before with the M60 is that the design had some issues to it.
But in large part, what created the sort of the dual reputation of the M60 with the US military
is they were pretty good at first, but over a couple of decades of use,
... many of the guns wore out and that led to a lot of the problems
that would be seen later in their service, especially with, like, National Guard type units, so.
This is a cool example of one, basically as it was originally fielded in Vietnam.
And I can see why this would have been popular, this has quite a lot of firepower to it.
Alright, so firing from the bipod is the practical and effective way to do it,
but of course, it is iconicly fired from the hip or shoulder.
I'm gonna go ahead and try it from the shoulder, and see just how difficult that is to actually do.
That's a heavy gun. Can be done but, like, not all that well.
The recoil is not particularly bad, but it does throw the aim off.
Definitely best done from the shoulder.
Recoil from the hip is ... not as bad as from the shoulder, but again always difficult to aim from the hip.
So, let's do a little bit more practice here.
Yeah, that's hard to do. ... At least for me, not particularly effective from the shoulder.
Alright, so hopefully you guys enjoyed that. Just a short little look at the M60 in its original Vietnam guise
doing some shooting. So hopefully this will set the stage for us to come back with a couple other
.308 or 7.62 NATO machine guns later on, as well as to take a look at some of the E series
upgraded and improved M60s later on. So a big thanks to IMT, the Institue of Military Technology,
for giving me the opportunity to do some shooting with this one.
Thanks for watching.