Archive for the 'AR-15s' Category

The advice is to get both.  But I found this bit interesting.

Armalite continued to develop and improve upon the AR-10 concept. Under the direction of Stoner, replacing the composite aluminum and steel barrel that may have ultimately been responsible for the military’s decision to go with a different weapon. Stoner had never liked this barrel. It proved a spectacular failure during torture tests demanded by the customer. The composite barrel had been suggested by Sullivan. This marked the moment when major Armalite design decisions started moving in Stoner’s direction.

That’s information I didn’t know.  It seems like there’s something I learn about the Sullivan/Stoner relationship every time I read an educated piece on this part of history.

Recoil.

This is a very well written and informative article.  For those who are wondering, the M18 is the M-4/AR-15 variant with a typically shorter barrel, usually sporting a quad rail.

I see the need for this sort of weapon, given the focus on CQB in recent years combined with the fact that suppressors are now ubiquitous in the U.S. military, so a 10.5″ barrel isn’t really 10.5″.

But it does cause problems, including lug breakage, high pressures, etc.  This article discusses some of the ways to mitigate those issues, including coated BCGs, adjustable gas blocks, and so on.

But just be sure to remember that when you go altering the design the engineer gave it, you introduce all sorts of unintended consequences.  The machine will usually perform its best when unaltered from the original design, assuming the engineer is good.

And Eugene Stoner was good.

In this video West Virginia attorney John Bryan details the decision of the Fourth Circuit concerning his client.  It’s a long video, but if you want to read the decision it can be found here.

This case should have been easy and quick.  In U.S. Versus Black, the Fourth Circuit had this to say.

Being a felon in possession of a firearm is not the default status. More importantly, where a state permits individuals to openly carry firearms, the exercise of this right, without more, cannot justify an investigatory detention. Permitting such a justification would eviscerate Fourth Amendment protections for lawfully armed individuals in those states. United States v. King, 990 F.2d 1552, 1559 (10th Cir. 1993).

In this West Virginia case, Walker wasn’t a felon, and West Virginia permits open carry of firearms.  But you see, Black was carrying a handgun, and Walker was carrying one of those evil ARs, so the Fourth Circuit had to do something.

Contrary to Walker’s interpretation, the Black decision does not dictate that, in a state like West Virginia where it is legal to openly carry a firearm, the act of openly carrying a firearm can never engender reasonable suspicion.

Keep your eye on the card – now you see it, now you don’t.  Because we say so.

They go on to differentiate between handguns carried in a hip holster and the awful, wicked AR-15, which is certainly the weapon of choice by mass shooters – so says the media.  That eighty people per weekend get shot in Chicago with handguns isn’t really germane.

Nor is it germane that gangs result from the evisceration of the inner city due to fatherless families and financial encouragement to have children out of wedlock, or that Coyote hunting in West Virginia and elsewhere is commonplace and a man walking in the middle of nowhere preparing to hunt Coyotes should be fairly routine stuff to the tyrants in the police force of Putnam County.

[Note: One reason guys hunt Coyotes is because they sit in wait for deer to deliver fawns, and then eat the young, disturbing the deer herd size.  Coyotes are predators.  In groups they will also threaten people.]

What matters is that the Fourth Circuit is out of Richmond and probably reads every major rag published daily by the legacy media.  Having said all of that, the real root of the problem lies somewhere else.

It lies with the folks in Putnam County, and especially with Sheriff Bobby Eggleton.  A group of people will always take on the personality of its leader.  The offending officer in this case was vulgar, obscene, rude and tyrannical, and couldn’t go three words without cursing at Mr. Walker.  I suspect that’s what the Sheriff is like too.

So the Sheriff is to blame, but probably also the County Commissioners, who should be run out of town on a rail for allowing this sort of thing to happen.

Sheriff Bobby Eggleton: beggleton@putnamwv.org

County Commissioner Brian Ellis: bellis@putnamwv.org

County Commissioner Ron Foster: rfoster@putnamwv.org

County Commissioner Andy Skidmore: askidmore@putnamwv.org

Prosecuting Attorney Mark Sorsaia: prosecutingattorney@putnamwv.org

Matt Bracken writing at American Partisan citing a 1969 American Rifleman article.

I was told by the so-called experts that the M16 rifle is not accurate beyond 350 meters.  But with my rifle fitted with bipod mount and scope sight and firing tracer ammunition, I can reach out and drop a walking enemy soldier at better than 700 meters range …

Our 5.56mm bullet will severely batter a man wherever it hits him.  I would rather stop a half dozen bullets from an AK-47 than one from an M16.

It’s America’s rifle.  If it was a “good” rifle then, I’d say it’s variants are great rifles today.

Another case shot through the gun.

Fox News.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked a federal district court ruling that would have repealed California’s assault weapons ban.

In a Monday panel decision in Miller v. Bonta, the appellate court put the June 4 order from District Court Judge Roger Benitez old hold as the court awaits the outcome of another case. Benitez had ruled that the ban violated the Second Amendment.

“The district court’s June 4, 2021 order and judgment are stayed pending resolution of Rupp v. Bonta,” the court said. “The stay shall remain in effect until further order of this court.”

The Rupp case, which also deals with the assault weapons ban and has already been briefed before the Ninth Circuit, had also been put on hold as the court handles other Second Amendment cases that could effect it.

You knew that would happen, right?  And you know how the Rupp case will end, right?

The Ninth Circus strikes again.

I say more in the post title because there’s already been a lot of that testing.  Watch Andrew’s testing and listen to his points all the way to the end, and then I have some remarks.

We’ve discussed this many times before, and linked various articles on this: Small Caliber Lethality: 5.56mm Performance in Close Quarters Battle (note that links to this paper in previous posts are broken but this one works), 5.56X45mm Versus 7.62X39mm, AR-15 Ammunition and Barrel Twist Rate, and a CFD analysis entitled Prediction of Projectile Performance, Stability, and Free-Flight Motion Using Computational Fluid Dynamics.

I had never even once believed that the reason for a change of barrel twist had to do with yaw inside tissue.  The real reason is found elsewhere.

Accuracy cannot be assessed without addressing the rifle barrels’ twist-rates. In the early 1980s the M855’s 62-grain bullet was developed for the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW). For purposes of interoperability, the same load was adopted as the M16A2 rifle’s standard ball as well. A February 1986 U.S. Army study noted that the M855’s bullet required a “1:9 twist [which] would be more appropriate for the M16A2 rifle, improving accuracy and reliability.” Multiple studies confirmed the 1:9-inch twist requirement.

But then a problem arose. The U.S. military’s standard M856 5.56 mm tracer round was longer, heavier (63.7 grains) and slower than the M855 ball, and simply would not stabilize with a 1:9-inch twist barrel. Thus, despite it doubling M855 group sizes, the M16A2 (and later, the M4) specified a 1:7-inch rate-of-twist barrel to stabilize the tracer round. It remains so to this day. Therefore, M855A1 was test-fired with both 1:7- and 1:9-inch twist barrels, and it was verified that this new cartridge is consistently more accurate in the latter barrels-as was its predecessor.

Note that in these articles I’ve also cited contacts in the industry who claim that this concern is a bit overblown, and that a barrel twist of 1:9 is perfectly sufficient to stabilize bullets up to and including 62 and 65 grains, and even 77 and 80 grains. Some of this has to do with barrel manufacturing procedures and quality.

I think Andrew just confirms what we already knew.

BLUF: The 77 grain bullets did more damage in the meat targets.  But as always, check the ammunition you’re using for zero, accuracy and precision.

We’ve all seen the ruling in California concerning AR-15s, a ruling that was righteous and correct, but which is likely to be overturned by the Ninth Circus.

Anyway, here is a sampling of the reactions from the chattering class.

“Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment,” U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez said in the ruling. Leaving aside the question of why civilians are purchasing “homeland defense equipment” (did we forget to include the Army line in the budget this year?), this makes total sense.

What two items could be more directly and obviously comparable than an AR-15 and a Swiss Army knife? I can’t think of how many times I’ve used an AR-15 to open a bottle of wine. Whenever I need a toothpick but cannot find one, I just whip out my AR-15. Conversely, whenever I am entering a theater of war, I always remember to pack my Swiss Army knife. That way, if anyone comes at me, I can offer to help them open a bottle, which will be so confusing to them that perhaps I can just get up and walk away before anyone notices I have gone. I very much understand how things work in theaters of war.

Sometimes you wish you had a nail file, but you don’t have one, and at times like these it is so good to have such a versatile tool as the AR-15, designed for home defense and homeland defense, which will shoot a very large number of bullets into something to help you express your frustration at not having a nail file.

And the lame attempts at sarcasm go on and on.  Here is another.

“I think it’s incredibly problematic when a federal judge quotes things that are factually incorrect, because it hurts the integrity of the branch,” said Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles who is an MSNBC columnist.

[ … ]

Constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said Benitez’s assertions are “utterly without factual foundation.”

It’s called the genetic fallacy.  This author tries to line up people who disagree with the judge, one of whom is a commentator for none other than his own silly outfit, the other (Tribe) whom you could probably get to agree to sue little green men on Mars in federal court.  He’s a certifiable kook.

What these commentators and their line of “experts” simply cannot understand is why the judge would call this the Swiss army knife of guns.

They cannot understand that there are over twenty million of these rifles in circulation now, and many more to come.  They cannot understand that they can be used equally well by people large and small.

They can be easily maintained and cleaned, used for self defense, used for target shooting, and with a different upper receiver (say a 300 BO or 6.8 SPC upper) used for hunting deer or feral hogs – or used in 5.56mm/.223 to shoot Coyotes who are ensconced on your property and endangering your small children when they go out to play.

These people have never been chased by hogs or coyotes, never had all of their chickens killed by a fox, never hunted deer, and apparently never had to worry about crime, living behind gated communities as they do.

They falsely believe that home invasions are perpetrated by one person, and only one person, and that the police are only seconds away when a 911 call is made.  They even believe it’s the duty of the police to protect them despite court rulings like Castle Rock v. Gonzalez, Warren v. District of Columbia and DeShaney v. Winnebago County

And as for the whole notion of use to ameliorate tyranny, they would have sided with King George, so that argument convinces them of nothing.  They believe in tyranny.

There is no use of a weapon by any individual outside of actors on behalf of the state of which they approve.

These people quite literally live in a different world than you do.  They usually do not get outside the beltway, they only fly over the areas you live, and those nasty animals are something the wildlife game managers should handle.

I’ve talked with them before.  Their most daring event is when they walk their dog and hear something in the brush, hurry back home, and decide not to do that again so near dusk.

They are the effeminate chattering class, and they don’t see why you need or would want guns.  They don’t understand the modularity of AR-15s well enough to know why a judge would refer to its massively varied utility.  They would rather sip Chardonnay than worry about your problems.

They know enough to be sarcastic, and to want to disarm you.  But that horse left the barn years ago.  There’s no getting him back in.  He’s long gone.