Archive for the 'AR-15s' Category

C. J. Chivers writing for The New York Times has an extensive piece entitled Tools of Modern Terror: How the AK-47 and AR-15 Evolved into Rifles of Choice for Mass Killers.  I recommend that you read it.

Chivers has the usual (for him) admiration for the AK-47 as a weapon that never fails.  “The Kalashnikov line was shorter and lighter than traditional rifles. It was inexpensive to manufacture, built for durability and reliable to an extraordinary degree. With few moving parts, and a design that made its disassembly and reassembly almost intuitive, its basics could be mastered by all manner of combatants — from traditionally instructed conscripts to almost wholly untrained guerrillas — in very little time.”

But fail it does.  I blogged on OIF and OEF long enough and had enough friends and acquaintances who had done combat tours in Iraq or Afghanistan that I heard some horror stories about AK-47s that wouldn’t fire more than a round or two and have a FTF / FTE, and that a shooter couldn’t hit the “broad side of a barn” with it.  I’ve shot one, as have you, and those complaints may be exaggerated, but they are about as exaggerated as the complaints against the AR-15.

Chivers focuses some of his time on the initial failure of the Stoner weapon system in Vietnam, while not spending much time on the Molly-Chrome or Stainless Steel barrels found today in AR-15s.  With upgraded buffer springs, enhanced extractor springs, etc., that make the M4/AR-15 weapons so reliable today, we really do have the professional soldier’s weapon that can be used by the masses, or in other words, the tight tolerances, accuracy and recoil-along-the-axis design (as opposed to coupling around the shooter’s hand with the angled buttstock) that makes it such an admirable carbine for shooters of any skill. We’ve had virtually every imaginable torture test, and the high end AR-15s outperform not only AKs but the Garand and Garand variants (M-14).  My Rock River Arms AR-15 could be beaten with a sledge hammer, soaked in paint, and dropped in sand and it would still eat and shoot everything I fed it.

But it’s true that the AK-47 found ready acceptance among terror-producing nations and peoples, and Chivers makes no attempt to diagnose why that is.  Take a long look at his maps of AK usage versus AR-15 usage.  Neither does Chivers make any attempt to diagnose any other element of weapons and terror, such as the possibility that use of the AK or AR for such things marks a shift to CQB versus standoff sniping as with Charles Whitman (with a bolt action rifle).  In other words, what if the problem isn’t the AK or the AR, but the heart of sinful mankind that causes these things, with the weapon of choice being a function of tactical choices the shooter makes?

Chivers disappoints me with this paragraph.

Governments have done little to stop the spread of this class of weapons. Often, as in the case of the United States, they have contributed to it. Acts of crime, terror and oppression with Kalashnikovs and AR-15 descendants, endured by civilians under withering fire, have been hard-wired into our times. There is no end in sight.

“Stop the spread of this class of weapons.”  As if stopping the spread of any class of weapons among peaceable people who need means of self defense is a bad thing.  Chivers is a legitimate military journalist who did a wonderful job on coverage of the campaign in Afghanistan and is a voice for the men in uniform.

But with this one paragraph it appears to me that he has placed his politics squarely on the side of gun controllers who believe that laws, regulations, governmental actions and policies effect behavior and catalyze moral righteousness.  Matthew 15:15-20 teach us that weapons don’t defile the man, any more than alcohol makes a drunkard.

But from the end of the gun comes self defense, and Chivers would do well to consider the millions of men, women and children who have been slaughtered as a result of not having means of self defense.

The Boston Globe:

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said Wednesday she was cracking down on the sale of guns that, she said, were designed to skirt a state law banning assault weapons.

Healey said she had put gunmakers and sellers on notice that they were not allowed to sell the guns, which she said were intentionally designed to circumvent the ban by incorporating “small tweaks that do nothing to limit the deadliness of the weapon.”

The attorney general said at a morning news conference that the law remained the same, but her office would change the way it enforced it.

While manufacturers have deemed certain weapons in compliance with state law, she said, her office had looked at the issue and concluded that they weren’t.

“The gun industry does not get to decide what’s compliant,” she said during the event, where she was flanked by law enforcement officials, community leaders and anti-violence activists. “We do.”

[ … ]

Healey spoke after penning an opinion piece in Wednesday’s Boston Globe, in which she said the gun industry was taking advantage of a legal “loophole of potentially horrific proportions.”

She said her office had begun looking at the law in the wake of the deadly Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, where a gunman killed 49 people.

Healey said the recent killing of police in Baton Rouge and Dallas, along with the fatal shootings of black men at the hands of police, have only added to the urgency.

She described her action as “a step” toward reducing gun violence.

“It is not a total panacea, I recognize that, but it is a step,” Healey said.

She said her office had notified dealers in the state that they cannot sell guns whose “operating system is essentially the same as a banned weapon.”

Operating system.  Got that?  That means semi-automatic weapons of all kinds.  She doesn’t mean DI systems as designed by Eugene Stoner for the AR-15.  All semi-automatic weapons can discharge one round for every pull of the trigger.

Ms. Healey has declared herself the only sovereign potentate who gets to adjudicate on everything and anything she wishes.  She’s queen.  And gun owners should willingly bypass, smuggle, and disobey this edict however and whenever they can.

Or otherwise called, “thumb over bore” grip.  As I’ve pointed out, it started in the gaming community, and it was taken up by SpecOps, and so you see folks like Chris Costa and Travis Haley using it.

I ran across this report today of a 3-gun competitor who is also using the C-clamp grip.

The folks at Magpul explain why they like the grip.

Salon:

But while the ostensible pitch is self-defense, it’s also hard to escape the sense that they (sic) marketing pitch is building on the fact that the nation just got a full eyeball of what the AR-15 is capable of doing: Mowing down dozens of people in the space of minutes.

After all, they know full well that their customer base is people like Stokes, who doesn’t even really bother to hide that he includes “mass shooting capabilities” in  his assessment of what makes this gun so cool.

“The rifle’s popularity is almost certainly the main reason why mass shooters increasingly reach for it when they go on a rampage,” Stokes writes. “Think about it: if you’re planning to shoot up a room full of people, are you going to reach for a rare, exotic weapon that you have little experience with, or will you select the familiar option that’s easy to train with and that you have plenty of practice time behind? The answer, for anybody who shoots, is the latter.”

It speaks volumes about how all sense of reason has escaped the pro-gun lobby that they think that “capable of destroying a room full of people in minutes” is a defense of a gun, instead of an obvious reason why the damn thing should be banned immediately.

Well, Amanda, let’s talk about this for a moment.  First of all, you don’t really believe what you’re saying, and you know it and we know it.  If you really believed your own propaganda, you’d advocate disarming the police.  But you don’t, and you won’t.  Because you believe in a monopoly of force, despite your undertones of pacifism.  You want the state to be armed as it sees fit, so you want some people to have access to the weapons of their choice, just not all people.  Because all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than other animals.

Second, your propaganda drips with hatred and sarcasm, as if you know all about when and why someone would need a certain kind of weapon.  But I’ll bet that you’ve never shot the weapon you criticize, have you?  If so, please tell us all about it.  Otherwise, get an education.  Start by searching on the words “home invasion” every day for a month on Google news or some other aggregator, and see how may home invasions are perpetrated with two, three, or four or more men at a time, and you’ll see why Mr. Stephen Bayezes needed his AR-15.

Finally, you focus on self defense, but we all know what the real issue is, don’t we Amanda?  You know the second amendment wasn’t written about hunting, or the shooting sports, or even individual self defense (although that would be included under the rubric of what it does include).  We all know, however uncomfortable it might be for you to admit, that the second amendment is all about amelioration of tyranny.

That’s right Amanda.  Are you shocked?  Are you stunned that I said it?  Weapons are the surest means of maintenance of our liberties.  But you don’t want people to have liberties, do you?  Like all good collectivists, you want the state to decide right from wrong, issue the necessary orders for social stability, and ensure cradle to grave sustenance and security.

Don’t you, Amanda?  That’s why only the state can have guns, isn’t it Amanda?

The reaction is virtually ubiquitous across the progressive world, and it pays to know what’s going on.  I won’t have a long analysis of any one commentary, but I have brief comments on multiple commentaries.

First up is Bill Clinton, who is lying when he says that his AWB did anything to drive down any sort violence whatsoever, using any metric at all.  The trend on crime has been decreasing from since before his AWB and continues to decrease today.

On another front, Jeh Johnson says that gun violence is a matter of homeland security.  What he (and the administration) wants to do here is promulgate rules, directives and regulations separate from and unreviewed by Congress, accountable only to a FISA court (which is just a rubber stamp on the executive).

According to NBC, the shooter was racist, belligerent and toxic.  Not Muslim, mind you, but something else.  Because this certainly couldn’t come down to Islam.

Heather Digby Parton at Salon, with whom we’ve interacted before, thinks we don’t need an AR-15.  No one needs an AR-15. Because she says so.

Would a ban on semi-automatic rifles end Islamic extremism? No. But it won’t make it worse, the way that religious bans and calls for torture and killing of suspects family members will. And it would sure make it a lot harder for any of these twisted souls, Muslim or otherwise,  to spray bullets at a room full of first graders or movie goers or gay guys dancing the night away. You can’t fix what’s in these people’s hearts. That is beyond anyone’s ken. But you can make it harder for them to act on their hate. Nobody needs an AR-15.

So bans won’t end the problem, but it won’t make it any worse.  That’s a pretty low threshold for passing laws.  But wait.  She modifies the assessment.  It sure would make it a lot harder, she says.  But how does she know?  How does she know that someone couldn’t bring multiple handguns to the shooting and perpetrate the same carnage?  She doesn’t.  She just made that up.

Amanda Marcotte, writing at Salon, tells us that we are a bunch of puckered old farts except when it comes to guns.

Conservatives might be opposed to “politically correct” ideas like same-sex marriage, religious tolerance, due process for all, efforts to end race and gender discrimination, and even a freedom so basic as the right to choose when you give birth, but hey, you get to spend a cool grand on an AR-15 and all its trimmings, and isn’t that the only thing that really matters?

Amanda doesn’t hang with enough of us to know.  Hey, we support low or almost no taxes, minimal government regulation, oppose the war on drugs, and believe in small government.  I’m not sure who Amanda is referring to, but she needs to expand her horizons a little.  I think we’re more gun – um, excuse me, fun – to be with than she does.  Care to hang out, Amanda?

Mark Follman at Motherless Jones doesn’t remember his history.  As I read his histrionics I couldn’t help but think of Charles Whitman and scoped bolt action rifles wielded by someone in a sniper’s hide.  For hours and hours and hours.

Josh Earnest doesn’t know what an assault weapon is.  It’s okay, Josh.  It doesn’t matter to me what you call it.  It’s just a machine, like any other machine.  It can be used for good or not, just like a car, or a hammer.  It’s a shame when they send a ventriloquist dummy out to perform without the ventriloquist, huh?

Justin Peters with Slate has issues with what we call the black gun.

The term modern sporting rifle, evoking outdoorsy competition and good, clean fun, sounds incongruous when applied to weapons like these …

Well, it can be used for hunting, or 3-gun competition, or target shooting, or self defense, but since Justin is having difficulty with this, let’s just be clear.  To dispel the myth surrounding the gun, some folks don’t like it at all and prefer an AR-10 or some other weapon (M1A, etc.).  Tall tales about how this gun can inflict carnage on a scale like no other weapon in history are usually written by ignorant boobs who are just pushing an agenda.  It’s just a rifle firing an intermediate cartridge.

But I like it and always will because of a number of reasons I’ve rehearsed before (e.g., the modularity, the fact that the recoil is on-axis rather than being coupled about a point, etc.).  And one reason not mentioned is that we have guns as a remedy for tyranny.  That’s right, Justin.  Got it?  That’s the close quarters battle thing you mentioned and didn’t really flesh out.  As for a field rifle, it may not be the best option if you’re talking over 500 yards.  One may decide not to use the “black gun” for that.  Is this too much detail, Justin?  All the talk about remedies for tyranny?

David S. Cohen, professor at Drexel University, thinks it’s time to repeal the second amendment.  He spends a lot of time talking about how deeply flawed the constitution is.  In fact, I think Cohen is deeply flawed and the constitution pretty good.  But his prose is cute.

The Second Amendment needs to be repealed because it is outdated, a threat to liberty and a suicide pact. When the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, there were no weapons remotely like the AR-15 assault rifle and many of the advances of modern weaponry were long from being invented or popularized.

Oh horse shit.  The founders wrote the second amendment specifically as a remedy for tyranny.  If they had been able to craft the AR-15, they would have used it and ended the war of independence much more quickly.  Guns, rather than a threat to liberty, are the practical surety of liberty.  But the disconnected professor should give it a go if he thinks he can repeal the second amendment.  Any time he feels froggy.

Finally, writer Charles Pierce at Esquire writes about Stanley McChrystal on guns.

If an Army general says this is a weapon that should not be in civilian hands, like a grenade launcher or an F-16, then we should be able to agree as a nation that this is a weapon than should not be in civilian hands. I wonder why “both parties” can’t “talk about it in a rational fashion to dial it down.”

Well, we’ve already talked about what a complete ass clown and worm Stanley McChrystal is, or really to be more honest, a murderer with his ROE (see many engagements in Afghanistan, and I used Ganjgal as one stark example).  But beyond having to use an adulterer (Petraeus) and a murderer (McChrystal) as your touchstone for gun control, what kind of analyst asserts that being a general has anything whatsoever to do with public policy?

Seriously.  Staff and flag officers spend time in TRADOC, strategy, logistics, and so on.  Why would anyone conclude that a general had to have any knowledge of operation of weapons or any special insight into public policy at all?  What kind of juvenile did Esquire hire with Pierce?  Here’s a bet.  The gunsmiths down at Hyatt Gun Shop can out-gunsmith McChrystal or anyone he knows every time, and I’d lay good money on that.  And a random selection of people in the phone directory (and testing those people) would yield better policy results more focused on the maintenance of liberty than Stanley McChrystal at his very best and most studied.

Concerning this post, I exchanged comments as follows

Herschel Smith • 11 hours ago He’s not the AR-15 inventor. He took a Eugene Stoner design and adapted it for 0.223.

Sigivald Herschel Smith • 9 hours ago

There is a difference between being an engineer and designer.  The AR-15 belongs to Eugene Stoner.

Army Times:

What if you never had to clean and lubricate your rifle again?

Army engineers at Picatinny Arsenal believe they’ve cracked the code to make it happen with a new surface applicant, which they said could go into production in 2018.

When rifles and machine guns are fired, byproducts accumulate, leading to what’s known as “fouling.” Buildup of powder residue and moisture can eventually cause the weapon to jam, or lose accuracy, reliability and cyclic rate (rounds per minute). That’s why soldiers have to clean their rifles, generally with a wet lubricant known as CLP (cleaner, lubricant and preservative).

The new material, known as durable solid lubricant, would be applied during manufacturing and coats the weapon’s moving parts. DSL simply prevents material from sticking to the weapon’s surface. Since the fouling buildup only loosely adheres to a DSL surface, any force from the other moving parts or vibrations from firing is enough to knock it loose and keep the rifle clean.

“We see this as a major breakthrough in a technology that hasn’t been able to demonstrate performance like this in the past,” said Adam Foltz, an experimental engineer at Picatinny working on the project.

Christopher Mulligan, a research engineer who has a doctorate in materials science and has worked for Army Research, Development and Engineering Command for 13 years, said the material is a hard coating that drastically reduces friction and corrosion, improving the rifle’s reliability. Explosive byproducts don’t stick to the material, he said. The Army has a patent pending on DSL; he and Foltz didn’t want to go into detail on the technology until the patent is approved.

Testing so far has been limited but encouraging, the two said. A 10,000-round test of an M4A1, for example, produced zero stoppages despite testers never cleaning the gun, Foltz said. “The only time we weren’t shooting was to let the barrel cool.” There have been other tests that, while lab-based, incorporated sand, mud and extreme temperatures.

Not only does DSL make a rifle easier to maintain, but it greatly reduces wear thanks to removal of CPL. The oil mixes with phosphate and hot propellant gas produced by firing, which increases the volume of a buildup that can erode a weapon’s moving parts, Mulligan said. The engineers provided an image depicting test results which they say show parts of a bolt and bolt carrier 50 percent to 90 percent worn after firing 15,000 rounds while treated with CLP. The DSL-coated parts showed wear ranging from 10 percent to less than 5 percent on the same parts over the same use.

In order to keep Dr. Christopher Mulligan employed, it takes a lot of money.  Ph.D. engineers don’t come cheap, and their research time doesn’t either.  Paying an engineer for five or six years to do one thing in hopes that the entire project doesn’t fail for lack of viability is a pricey endeavor, tailor made for endurance rather than sprint.

This is just the kind of thing they would use tax money for, and that brings to mind the following question.  Why is the Army seeking a patent on this?  A patent is an odd thing to attach to this project, and is normally reserved for use when money is at stake.

For something like a secret project involving DARPA, or perhaps some project involving the nuclear assets of the nation I can see the need for secrecy, FOUO and other types of classifications.  But what’s the intent here?  Does the Army intend to sell it, or perhaps prevent some company inside of the states from reverse engineering this and marketing it?

When the national laboratories conduct work and research, normally the results of their work are in the public domain unless it involves secrecy (such as with the nuclear program).  The idea is that if tax money has been used to create the intellectual property, then taxpayers own it.

And it’s not such a bad idea.  So why is the Army seeking a patent on this technology?

Hot Air:

While it’s not a done deal yet, there’s a good chance that we may finally be receiving a final decision from the Supreme Court on the question of so called “assault weapons” bans. Back in December, gun rights activists were largely disappointed when SCOTUS decided they would not hear an appeal to Illinois’ assault weapons ban, allowing a lower court ruling in favor of the law to stand. At the time, I speculated that they were waiting for more lower courts to weigh in on similar challenges around the country to see if there was some sort of consensus or if the states were divided and in need of clarification from above.

This week that question may have been answered. The 4th Circuit, hearing a Maryland case, went the other way, overturning a ban on AR-15 style rifles and expanded capacity magazines. (Baltimore Sun)

In a 2-1 decision applauded by gun rights advocates, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit concluded that the semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines banned by Maryland’s Firearm Safety Act “are in common use by law-abiding citizens.” As a result, they don’t fall under the exception to the right to bear arms that applies to “unusual” weapons such as machine guns and hand grenades, the court said.

This apparent contradiction between the 7th Circuit Court’s ruling in Friedman v. City of Highland Park and the 4th’s ruling in Maryland has likely provided enough contrast for the Supremes to take up the question.

If they take it up, I predict they will sustain the constitutionality of such a ban.  First of all, look at the makeup of the court.  It has five outright communists (including Kennedy), a collectivist in conservative dress (Roberts), two more fairly unreliable “conservatives” (Scalia and Alito), and only one true conservative (Clarence Thomas).

Second, they won’t even have to turn to their own proclivities to find their decision.  It’s embedded in Heller itself.

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts rou­tinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. See, e.g., Sheldon , in 5 Blume 346; Rawle 123; Pomeroy 152–153; Abbott 333. For exam­ ple, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues. See, e.g., State v. Chandler, 5 La. Ann., at 489–490; Nunn v. State, 1 Ga., at 251; see generally 2 Kent *340, n. 2; The American Students’ Blackstone 84, n. 11 (G. Chase ed. 1884). Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws impos­ing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. 26 We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.” 307 U. S., at 179. We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradi­tion of prohibiting the carrying of “dangerous and unusual weapons.” See 4 Blackstone 148–149 (1769); 3 B. Wilson, Works of the Honourable James Wilson 79 (1804); J. Dunlap, The New-York Justice 8 (1815); C. Humphreys, A Compendium of the Common Law in Force in Kentucky 482 (1822); 1 W. Russell, A Treatise on Crimes and Indict­ able Misdemeanors 271–272 (1831); H. Stephen, Summary of the Criminal Law 48 (1840); E. Lewis, An Abridgment of the Criminal Law of the United States 64 (1847); F. Wharton, A Treatise on the Criminal Law of the United States 726 (1852). See also State v. Langford , 10 N. C. 381, 383–384 (1824); O’Neill v. State, 16 Ala. 65, 67 (1849); English v. State, 35 Tex. 473, 476 (1871); State v. Lanier, 71 N. C. 288, 289 (1874). It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like—may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause …

You can read the rest for yourself.  Scalia isn’t here arguing for the constitutionality of owning M-16s.  He is attempting to answer an objection before it is cast.  He is implicitly accepting the legitimacy of banning M-16s.

I’ve said it before.  While many in the gun community celebrated Heller, I say it was perhaps in the top two sinful abominations leaving the pens of the supreme court, second only to Roe v. Wade.

The seeds of acceptance of an “assault weapons” ban are right there in Heller.  They will support the legitimacy of said bans.  And of course, we won’t listen to them because they jettisoned their own legitimacy long ago.

Readers know how I feel about the gun Eugene Stoner built.  Furthermore, readers know that we speak the name Eugene Stoner only in hushed reverence.  But that’s not my article title – it belongs to John Snow at Outdoor Life.

What we’ve seen over that time is the rise of the AR, which has become America’s most popular rifle, as well as the greatest battle rifle of all time.

How did this happen?

Think of the AR as a seed planted in the 1960s, when the military adopted the rifle, known both as the M16 and the XM16E1 initially.

The rifle got off to an inauspicious start in Vietnam. Shoddy construction in the form of barrels and chambers that hadn’t been chrome-lined, poorly made ammo that used the wrong type of powder, and the lack of cleaning equipment and training for the troops who were issued the rifles led to disaster on the battlefield. Rifles malfunctioned, and soldiers and marines died. The grunts and GIs lost faith in the M16, and Colt, which had purchased the manufacturing rights to the rifle from Armalite in 1959, had a public-relations disaster on its hands.

The fallout of that era created a tide of ill will and misinformation—like the myth of the M16’s tumbling bullets—that kept the AR seed dormant for decades while the military slowly modified the platform to address its shortcomings.

We’ve dealt with the issue of bullet flight before, and while the 5.56 mm round doesn’t tumble in flight (that would cause keyholing targets), it does in fact yaw in flight and rock back and forth, even boat tail ammunition.  This occurs at the beginning and close to the end of its flight.  See Small Caliber Lethality: 5.56 mm Performance In Close Quarters Battle, specifically see Figure 4.  This is not a myth.  It’s real, and reproducible.  The bullet also tends to fragment into multiple pieces, causing multiple wound tracks.  For this, see “Terminal Mechanics” on page 5.

The M16A2 made its official debut in 1982 and featured a heavier barrel, a faster twist rate, and a three-round burst mode in lieu of a full-auto setting. Then, in the mid-’90s, models like the M4 and M16A3 were introduced, with flattop receivers with Picatinny rails and adjustable telescoping stocks and shorter barrel lengths.

These evolutions in the platform augmented the AR-15’s excellent ergonomics, and gave the rifles more flexibility and modularity to adapt to different missions. And finally the seed could grow and bloom. What the AR needed for this to happen was a catalyst, and it came from an unlikely source: the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB), which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

The AWB was authored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and prohibited the sale of semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines that had more than one of the following features: pistol grips, threaded barrels, bayonet lugs, folding or collapsible stocks, flash suppressors, and grenade-launcher mounts. Similar provisions applied to semi-automatic pistols and shotguns. The ban also limited magazines to a 10-round-maximum capacity.

The goal of this was, of course, to kill off these semi-autos in the name of public safety. The “logic” being that these guns—AKs and ARs, in particular—contributed to crime because of their cosmetic and ergonomic features.

At first it did seem that the AWB had taken the legs out from under the AR platform. Major gunmakers backed away from the category and stopped aggressively marketing the rifles to civilians.

“Before the assault weapons ban, ARs were expensive, hard to find, and didn’t work all that well,” says firearms expert Michael Bane. “When it came on, all the big players got scared off, and this opened the market. For that 10-year period [before the AWB expired in 2004], the little guy got the innovative edge because there was no one there to knock them off.”

Into that vacuum stepped entrepreneurs and innovators like Randy Luth, Karl Lewis, and Jack and Teresa Starnes who saw the potential of the AR and started introducing everything from aftermarket parts and accessories to complete rifles.

It was during this period that the AR realized its potential as a modular platform. The adaptation of the Picatinny rail system created new possibilities for accessories.

[ … ]

As a battle rifle, it can engage opposing forces accurately at distances a fighter with an AK couldn’t dream of. Accurized for precision rifle work, it can shoot tight groups at 1,000 yards. For hunters, it can be lightened up and chambered in hard-hitting cartridges for any type of large game.

But most important, the AR has become a bridge for shooters, connecting what used to be disparate communities of firearms owners and uniting them around its modular platform, encouraging people who used to stand toe-to-toe instead to fight side-by-side to protect our rights.

Any rifle that can boast this series of accomplishments deserves to be called the greatest, no question about it.

The author then gives us the personal perspectives of a number of people, including Kyle Lamb.

Kyle Lamb doesn’t have any patience for the haters. After more than two decades in the Army, most of it spent in special operations with Delta Force, he’s seen enough combat and has headed up enough training to know exactly what the modern-day descendants of the original M16 can do.

“People hate this gun. Even people on our side,” Lamb says. “But it is the most modular and accurate battle rifle we’ve ever had on the planet. The AK? It’s great too—unless you’re actually trying to hit somebody.”

Lamb’s military career, which started in 1986, coincided with the evolutionary refinement of the M16. This isn’t surprising, given that Lamb and his fellow soldiers in the special operations community were key players in perfecting the platform.

After Lamb joined Delta Force and started shooting every day, he learned how to get more out of the M16 and saw where it needed improvement.

In combat Lamb and his colleagues discovered one shortcoming was the sights.

“We showed up in Somalia with Aimpoints with big red dots. The dots were bigger than the dudes we were shooting at,” Lamb says. “So we got into better sights. Guys started adding regular hunting scopes to the rifles and making shots out to 400 yards.”

The tactical evolution of the platform progressed quickly from there. Lamb and other Delta Force soldiers upgraded internal components like extractors for greater reliability. They added free-float handguards to improve accuracy. They slapped on Picatinny rails to mount other accessories. The AR platform became lethal for everything from long-range engagements to close-quarters battle.

And don’t forget the 600 meter shots Travis Haley made in Al Najaf.  I’m sure there are a lot of M1 aficionados who would argue with the conclusions of the article, but the AR-15 platform has proven to be one that has killed hundreds of thousands of enemy fighters in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, from field shots to CQB.