It’s a mistake, like the SWAT cop with the EOTech on backwards.
My favorite was the cop maintaining perimeter at an incident with her AR mag in *backwards*.
Figured it was. Takes a bit more to put on a muzzle brake than an optical site. I wonder if they ran out of flash hiders?
Probably, but I personally haven’t seen that much difference in climb unless you’re in full spray and pray auto on an AR or M-4 platform to warrant putting on a brake vs. a flash hider myself. In this instance where he’s got it on upside down, yes. It will make the muzzle rise.
But you also have to consider the overall weapon design. The built in brake on an AK is mostly pointing up but cocked off to the right about 1 or 2 O’clock....likely because of the bolt and gas assembly design (gas piston above) plus the ergonomics of the shooter’s grasp and stance.
One of the design features for the AR design Stoner started with is that the overall action - retraction (gas), bolt cycling and buffering all needed to be in line with the barrel, i.e., only straight back recoil with no mechanical vectoring affects that pushed up or down. I suspect that even in full auto on an AR, the rise is probably mainly due to the big moment arm its barrel-aligned reverse thrust puts on the shooter as the 5 foot+ arm of that moment (thrust). ARs weren’t first issued with brakes (or breaks as some call); they were three pronged flash hiders that later graduated to the bird cage design. Honestly, I’ve never even thought my two would need a brake at all.