At the Barrett display, the company had one of their experimental M240 Light Weight machine guns on display. The action and operating mechanism is the exact same as the FN Herstal 240 used around the world, however they’ve incorporated a number of features to make it shorter and lighter. The first being the receiver body with a number of cuts in it to reduce the overall weight. This consists of mainly cutting out a number of sections of the sides, while leaving various ribs to maintain strength. Then they have designed a new buttstock for the machine gun, similar to the new M240 buttstocks coming out in the military, this one has a hydraulic buffer, and is telescoping. They have a fluted barrel as well. The bipods are the M60 pattern bipods that fold out individually, while telescoping with teeth on the bottom of them. The handguard uses Keymod mounting at the 3, 6, 9 o’clock, while having a ribbed bit on the sides to help with maintaining a solid grip on the machine gun while carrying it.

Currently Barrett is still looking at military contracts for the machine gun, while not releasing it for the commercial side of the house. Something that I was concerned about, is that I was able to put the fire control group on Safe, while the bolt was still forward. If you are familiar with 240s, then you know that this shouldn’t be able to happen because when the bolt is pulled to the rear while a belt is on the feed tray, the safety disengages the sear, and the bolt will slam forward, picking up a round, thus firing it unintentionally. Now, the Barrett control group might be operating differently from the conventional 240 one, and I wasn’t able to fully disassemble it to see the difference.

UPDATE-

Barrett reached out to us and confirmed that the fire control group has dummy parts in it, because of SHOT shot firearms regulations. From Barrett-

the rifle systems we bring to show have been modified with dummy parts that don’t actually function the way a real one would.