5 Most Produced Military Rifles Ever
BY Herschel Smith
1 year, 11 months ago
The writer has it at (5) Lee-Enfield, (4) AR-15/M-16, (3) Mauser Gewehr 98 / Karabiner 98k, (2) Mosin-Nagant, and (1) AK-47 and derivatives.
They don’t do much in the way of producing evidence for their assertions and I have my doubts. For example, who is to know how they counted AR-15s/M-16s? If you sum the total deployed to SE Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan, other armies across the globe, and AR-15 and variants, including upper and lower receivers sold separately, would you have come up with their number of 20 million? I seriously doubt it. I think there have been more than 20 million full ARs sold in America just in the civilian market alone.
However, it’s worth nothing that the gun that was built for conscripts (AK) who didn’t know how to shoot and didn’t want to mechanically understand the gun has been quite successful.
That’s one observation that should be made, of course, that genius Eugene Stoner designed his rifle for the professional soldier who needed MOA or sub-MOA performance, and wanted to understand how to work on his rifle. As it is said, the AR is an MOA gun, while the AK is a minute-of-man gun.
Furthermore, America was built, at least up until the 1980s or so, with garage, backyard and farm mechanics working on cars, gun, and machines of all sorts, repairing them, cleaning them, and making them better. Eugene Stoner knew this, I suspect, and didn’t worry too much that it was “too professional” of a rifle for the professional soldier.
From my point of view, Stoner understood the AK about as well as Kalashnikov did. Watch and tell me I’m wrong.
Here are the preceding two videos of Stoner and Kalashnikov at the range (Link 1 and Link 2). One day I’ll embed the entire Eugene Stoner tape library for viewing.
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