If you are used to and have experience with rifles of traditional layout, then it should be quite awkward for you to do simple weapon manipulations with a bullpup rifle. And arguably the most difficult is to do a magazine change with a decent speed. People who do a mag change in a split of a second on their AR, may not necessarily be as fast with the bullpup because of the rearward location of its magazine which screws up all your muscle memory and training.

However, is it a bullpup issue or is it because you just don’t have enough experience with such a weapon layout? The latter is probably the case. And as a proof of this statement, I suggest you watch a video where officers of Chinese People’s Armed Police Force do speed reloads on their QBZ-95 bullpup rifles.

Pretty impressive, isn’t it? I suppose this is training or maybe a demonstration. At any rate, it is a good example of what one can achieve by practicing and knowing his weapons and equipment. OK, not everything is perfect there – I can’t help but nitpick and point out the trigger discipline of these guys, but that is a different subject.

Note also that they are executing the drill blindfolded. That should help you to develop a muscle memory which will allow you doing reloads even in complete darkness or in scenarios where you can’t afford to look at the magazine/magwell risking to lose the situational awareness.

If in your case it is exactly the opposite of what I described in the first paragraph and you have more experience with a bullpup weapon system (say you have a military service experience in the armies of one of the “bullpup countries” – UK, Australia, Ireland etc.), let us know in the comments section what do you think about speed reloads of bullpup rifles? How easy it is to master?