The U.S. Army Has Finally Found The Solution To The M4 Glitch
Gungho Cowboy
03 Oct 2018
The U.S. Army is finally fixing the problem with the M4 rifle firing unintentionally. This glitch is in the fire selector switch in which the rifle would not fire when the selector is between “semi” and “auto”. But once the selector is place on the “semi” or “auto”, the rifle will fire even without the trigger being pulled.
This glitch poses danger to soldiers and when the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command sent out a safety message on March 26 regarding the problem weapons safety check being conducted already found 3,000 M4 and M4A1 rifles to have failed inspections as of June 2018. The fix has been found after 50,000 rifles have been inspected.
In a story on Military.com, TACOM spokesman R. Slade Walters announced in an email that:
"After receiving a significant number of reports from the field and an average failure rate of about 6 percent of the weapons inspected, we ended the inspections and have determined that the cause of the problem is a tolerance stack of the internal firing components. The problem is fixed by modifying the selector to remove the tolerance issue and the fault. TACOM is working on an Army-wide directive to repair weapons with the issue that will be released when it is approved at the appropriate levels."
Photo: US Army Sniper School (U.S. Army photo by Master Sgt. Michel Sauret)
More M4A1s suffered from the problem with those converted from the M4 to M4A1 having a fail rate of 9% of the 23,000 rifles inspected. Original M4A1s have a fail rate of 6% with 14,000 M4A1s inspected. Less than 1% of the M4s and M16s inspected suffer from the glitch.
The U.S. Marines have also been informed of the problem and they are also conducting their safety checks. So far, they have not disclosed numbers regarding the number of rifles that have failed the inspection and the total number already inspected.
Even the M4A1s that are just being issued in the U.S. Army will also undergo inspection and fixed if the glitch is found.
Top photo: Jackal Stone 2016 (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Marcus Fichtl)
