Dave,

I ran the Next Level Armament charging handle for a few weeks then passed it to some of the other assaulters who were doing a training mission in Africa.  We all came to similar conclusions.

The thing that concerned all of us initially was the thought of the rifle coming out of battery when the charging handle got caught on our kit or something else which is a potentially fatal event.  We never had it happen in all of our time using it.  I even attempted to throw the gun to the side (while attached to my sling still) trying to get the ears of the charging handle to catch on the Molle of my kit.  It wouldn’t.  This was mainly a concern, because most of us run single point slings and slide the gun to our non-dominant side when preparing to do a shotgun breach (most guys store their breaching shotgun on their dominant side behind their pistol).  I know that I am not very gentle with my long gun when transitioning to my breaching shotgun, nor is anyone else that I work with, and we never had the bolt come out of battery.  We also tend to stow our long guns to our non-dominant side for building climbing and fast roping and there were no issues with the handle getting caught during any of those events.

We primarily use Eotech 3x magnifiers that flip out of the way in front of aimpoints or Eotechs at work (more and more we are transitioning to 1-6x scopes similar to 3Gun pros though).  Usually the attaching arm for the Magnifier makes it difficult to charge the gun when running malfunction drills.  In the few weeks I ran the charging handle at work I ran hundreds of malfunction drills using a mix of green tip and dummy rounds and I only missed the charging handle once and that’s because I was going too fast and brushed the edge of it.  That is such an improvement that I won’t be going back to any other charging handle.