THE THING ABOUT SLINGS

Any question regarding sling use on a home-defense long-gun used to be simple to answer. Conventional wisdom was thoroughly against it. They just tangled up on things, and who needed to sling up for improved accuracy at the sort of ranges you find in the typical suburban dwelling anyway?

Some people even invoked the experiences of various elite units in the brushfire guerrilla wars of the ’60s and ’70s. “The 27th Elite Regiment didn’t allow slings while patrolling for People’s Army terrorists in the jungles of Backwoodistan!” How exactly this factoid related to defending Fort Livingroom from J. Random Crackhead was left as an exercise for the imagination.

By the mid ’90s, opinions on slings began to shift, largely due to the influence of early firearms training schools like Gunsite and Thunder Ranch, that taught slings, the late Gary Sitton touted the Scattergun Technologies (now absorbed into Wilson Combat) upgrades to his Remington 870 for home defense, and those included sling swivels and a simple two-point sling.