 Hey guys Dylan Schumacher sitting on the fence and before we get rolling with this video I just want to real quick cover the four firearms safety rules beforehand. I just feel compelled to do that because this is an intro video and in an intro video it's for people who are of course new to guns and so you may or may not know the four firearms safety rules. This deserves its own video which I will do at some point but for right now just so we're on the same page I want to give the four firearms safety rules. The first firearm safety rule is treat all guns as if they are loaded or all guns are always loaded which means we're never going to do anything with a unloaded gun that we wouldn't do with a loaded gun so the word should never never come out of your mouth it's okay Dylan it's not loaded you shouldn't say that okay that means we're not going to point the gun at ourselves we're going to point at someone else we're just going to treat that gun like it's loaded all the time if we all just did that no firearms accidents would ever happen the next three rules are derivations or an explanation of I guess the first firearms safety rule so first firearms safety rule treat all guns as if they're loaded or all guns are always loaded the second firearms safety rule is never point your gun at anything you're not willing to destroy which means I'm not going to point the gun at you I'm not going to point it myself I'm not going to point the gun at anything that I am not willing to destroy I always picture that there is a laser coming out at the end of that muzzle and I don't want to laser anything that I'm not willing to destroy so I want to be very careful where I point this muzzle that's particularly important on hand guns because it's such a short muzzle and the slightest turn of your wrist can sweep large swaths of area with that pistol I want to be very careful where we point that the third rule is keep your finger straight and off the trigger this is where your finger goes on all guns pistol rifle shotgun doesn't matter this is where it goes it does not go here all right we don't rest our finger there we rest our finger here outside of the trigger guard we want to keep our fingers straight and off the trigger until we ready to fire the fourth rule is be sure of your target it's foreground and its background so if you pull your gun out to save your life you want to know what's between you and the bad guy and what's beyond the bad guy so it's important to know where else could your bullet go in the event that it doesn't go where you want it to so those are the four firearms safety rules that's very quick like I said that deserves its own video which we will do at some point however that is your intro so as you watch these videos about firearms and handling firearms I want you to keep those four rules in mind all the time and we're never going to break those thanks a lot enjoy the video hey guys Dylan Schumacher with Citadel Defense and today we're going to go over just the basics of the AR-15 and its mechanical components how do you how do the actual mechanical components of this gun work and what are all these buttons and switches I'm making this video because there's a lot of people right now and several of which are my friends who are buying guns for the first time and maybe they're buying a rifle and they just don't know what the buttons and the switches on this gun do and what they are and so this is just a mechanics video this is not a how to shoot it video this is not a how you operate the gun video this is a how the gun operates video so this is a video about the gun itself so if you've been shooting AR-15s for a while and you already know this this isn't a video for you but if you have someone in your life who's just never seen one or never shot one or just got one and wants to know how the actual mechanics of the gun itself work that's what this video is about so we will start by making sure that the gun is of course unloaded because if you're gonna be working with a gun and you don't want it to be loaded then you better be sure that it's unloaded so the way you do that is this part here this is called the magazine mine just has a fancy design on it magazine holds bullets it's what feeds the bullets into the gun and that part is removable this button right here we call the mag release when we press when we press that button it's going to release the magazine and the magazine is going to come out and as you can see of course there are bullets in a magazine because an unloaded magazine is worthless so now that we have the magazine out of the gun we're going to want to make sure that the chamber itself is empty and the way we do that is we're going to retract the charging handle so this handle right here this is called the charging handle what we're going to do is we're going to pull that sharply to the rear okay now we can cycle it a couple times that works but as you see when I cycle that charging handle what it does here is it cycles the bolt out of the way right everybody can see that moving now if there was a round in here it would be located in here in the nope it's hard to do on camera in the chamber that's where the round would be located and the cycling a couple times of course would remove the round what we're going to do is we're going to lock the bolt to the rear we'll talk about how to do that later and then we are going to inspect the chamber I can see in here you probably can see right about there there is nothing in the chamber let's just use a little bit of light and hopefully you can see that there's no bullet in there okay so the gun is unloaded we want to always make sure the guns are loaded when we want it to be when we want it loaded we of course want it loaded okay so we're just going to start at one end of the gun work to the other all guns of course are going to come with a stock obviously and maybe now obvious but they should most of the stocks on air 15s these days are adjustable so you can push this little button right here that I'm depressing and then you can adjust the stock to a length what you're going to want to do is you don't want to measure the distance between the end of your hand all the way to your elbow right here you want to put that stock in your elbow and you want to hold the pistol grip like this and that's how you're going to adjust that stock is what's the difference here so that right there would be a stock adjusted for me assuming I'm not wearing plates or armor or anything like that okay that's the stock this thing right here this is called a forward assist no one ever uses that they don't need to be on the gun at all but what that does is if you needed to close your bolt a little bit further you could push the forward assist in order to assist in closing the bolt again go ahead and forget about that thing it's never used you're really not gonna need it this here is a safety okay now in this gun it's an ambidextrous safety which means on both sides of the gun a lot of guns will not have ambidextrous safeties and that's just fine you don't need it what you do need to know though is that when it is parallel to the ground the gun is on safe when it's perpendicular to the ground the gun is on fire what that means then is safe means the trigger cannot be pulled when it's gun is on safe and when it's on fire if I were to pull the trigger the gun could fire assuming it was loaded this guy was not like we talked about earlier so on my particular gun here I have this fancy lever ignore that you don't really need to know anything about that it's not a big deal but what you have here is a bolt catch bolt release so when I depress the bottom of the bolt catch and I pull the charging handle back that is what locks the bolt to the rear as we discussed earlier as you can see the bolt is retracted then if I were to push push the top of that button it will of course release the bolt so if I were to push the top right here in the bolt release it's going to close that bolt on the gun as you can see the bolt is now closed the bolt the bolt is the part of the gun that will take it's going to part a little bit later and demonstrate this to you but the bolt travels all the way down the buffer tube and all the way back up each time the gun is fired so the bolt is what's going to the bolt of the gun and I'll take the gun apart here later and show this to you but the bolt travel all the way down the buffer tube and then all the way forward it picks up rounds off the magazine and seats them in the chamber it also higher houses the firing pin which is going to fire the rounds and the mag release which we already talked about which releases the magazine so we hold this and this will be a second video but when your firing hand rides here on the weapon your thumb rides on the safety you can manage the bolt release from the side with your forefinger and then you'll end up managing the bolt release the bolt catch with your support hand which is your other hand we'll talk about that later now different weapons are going to come with different kind of forearms and that's fine not a really big deal some sometimes you have a little fancy grip up here sometimes you won't sometimes these will be skinnier sometimes it'll be a little fatter what matters is the end of the day it's going to come down to a front sight here of some kind either a big a2 sight that comes with the gun those big like triangle metal ones if you bought a more standard AR or you might have some kind of flip up sight option as is on this particular one and then of course you'll have a rear sight rear sights can fold up and fold down not a big deal these can be adjusted these sights can be adjusted if i manipulate and were to turn this dial right here i could move the sight either right or left to adjust for windage for me on this gun i keep that fold down out of the way because i run a red dot sight not something that's needed on a gun but certainly makes your life a lot easier a front sight you need a front sight tool which you can find on amazon for like eight or nine bucks but what that goes on is that allows me to turn the front side and either decrease its height or increase its height to adjust for elevation in my shooting just a side note two things that you absolutely should have on your rifle is a sling either a two point or a single point i'm usually a single point guy the vast majority of people run a two point sling which means it's connected to a gun on two points go ahead and buy yourself a two point sling if you're new not a big deal the other thing that you should absolutely get on your rifle is a white light okay it's very nice to be able to have a white light this happens to be a surefire light but there are different kinds out there you need to be able to see what you're shooting at particularly at night now this is not a video on how to clean the air 15 which ends up being pretty simple however to field strip this gun so again you understand the mechanics of it there are two pins located right here there's one pin located right here then the other pin is located right here what we can do is we can push this pin into the gun and then we roll the gun around i'm going to finish pulling that pin out at that point the gun will break into two pieces here and it's just hinging on the other pin which i can also remove if i need to do and then this could come away in two separate parts entirely when we do that we can pull out the charging handle and the bolt as we discussed earlier so here's the bolt that can come out of your gun and then here is the charging handle that can also come out of your gun for lubing this gun what you really need to know is soak the bolt carrier group that's this piece in lube everywhere and it'll run just fine air 15s like to run wet there's some debate about that and some people say showing the certain parts of it or whatever i just keep mine filthy wet and let it roll to reassemble it of course you're going to replace the charging handle then you're going to feed your bolt carrier group back inside then you can close the hinge and finally we can push that pin back into place at that point we'll do a functions check weapon cycles fine the weapon is reassembled so that's the basic mechanics of the air 15 the weapon itself is pretty simple it just takes a little bit of time a little bit of familiarity handle but basically the main controls that you're going to be concerned with as we mentioned are that both catch bolt release the safety you need to know how to work that really well and of course the mag release last but not least of course is the trigger although i think most of you can figure that part out for yourself we'll try to do another video on how you're going to hold operate and shoot this weapon but that is the mechanics of the weapon itself do brave deeds and endure