To begin with, this is your president. This ought to be one of the most shameful things ever said by a sitting president.
"Do you have any words to the victims of the hurricane?"
BIDEN: "We've given everything that we have."
"Are there any more resources the federal government could be giving them?"
BIDEN: "No." pic.twitter.com/jDMNGhpjOz
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 30, 2024
We must have spent too much money on Ukraine to help Americans in distress. I don't…… [read more]
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.
We wonder if Herschel has made the pilgrimage to Stoner’s gravesite. OTOH, we probably shouldn’t joke about this; avoiding a pay cut from Herschel seems prudent right now.
Source: Includes several videos and info on 8 or so AR model variants. One of the videos is a very interesting interview about his work and the weapons he developed.
Indiana’s own Eugene Morrison Stoner cut his teeth in small arms as a Marine Corps armorer in World War II and left the world some of the most iconic black rifles in history.
Born on Nov. 22, 1922, in the small town of Gosport, just outside of Bloomington, Indiana, Stoner moved to California with his parents and graduated from high school in Long Beach. After a short term with an aircraft company in the area that later became part of Lockheed, the young man enlisted in the Marines and served in the South Pacific in the Corps’ aviation branch, fixing, and maintaining machine guns in squadrons forward deployed as far as China.
Leaving the Marines as a corporal after the war, Stoner held a variety of jobs in the aviation industry in California before arriving at ArmaLite, a tiny division of the Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corporation, where he soon made his name in a series of ArmaLite Rifle designs, or ARs, something he would later describe as “a hobby that got out of hand.”
If you don’t do anything else today, watch this video entirely. It’s well worth your time. There is also information presented by Stoner that doesn’t fit the narrative, so it’s a good history lesson.
Do you think it would have been fun to have worked with him? I do.
I’d go for “developer” more than “inventor”; the AR-10 wasn’t “invented” in quite the way the AR-10 was, since as you say, it was an adaptation.
But enough of one – and he did enough of the work – that he deserves a lot of the credit for the AR-15 specifically, if not the basic gas impingement/folding-receiver/etc. design elements.
I stand by what I said. The DI system was Eugene’s. I’m willing to go this far. I’ll call Sullivan the “draftsman/designer” if you stipulate that Eugene Stoner was the one who “engineered” the weapon. They all worked for Stoner and did what he told them to do.
There is a difference between being an engineer and designer. The AR-15 belongs to Eugene Stoner.
