Archive for the 'AR-15s' Category

Via SOFREP, I had missed this tip by John Lovell.  I like John and not only does he make useful videos, he seems to be a genuinely nice guy, unlike some of the trainers out there.  At any rate, he makes use of height-over-bore to show you how to zero your carbine when you don’t have access to a 100 yard rifle range at that particular time.

Dean Weingarten at Ammoland.

On May 6th, 2017, an armed man was sitting on his front porch in the 400 block of Glenburnie Drive in Houston, Texas. He had a concealed carry permit. His brother says that he goes to the range often. He was on his porch and had another firearm with him. An AR-15 type rifle.

Three men attacked him in a drive-by shooting at about 2:15 a.m. He fired back, hitting all three. They car they were in crashed, and all three left the vehicle to continue the attack.

The homeowner kept up his defense, shooting back and hitting all three men again. Two died, one at the scene, one at the hospital. One of them was in critical condition.

Over 40 shots were fired, but the home defender was not hit. Not once.

Those who wish a disarmed population tell us that AR-15 rifles and other modern sporting rifles are not useful for self-defense.

Here is the report.  No one actually believes that use of an AR-15 is unnecessary or ineffective for self defense.  They’re lying if they say that (unless the conversation is buried in details of long range threats where you need something like an AR-10).  When a person says that, he means that he doesn’t believe that you should have access to AR-15s and that only the state has a righteous monopoly on the use of force, even if you’re defending your life or the lives of loved ones.

Just as we saw in the case of Mr. Stephen Bayazes, who killed one home invader and sent two others to the hospital, he found a reliable semiautomatic rifle with a standard capacity magazine an indispensable tool of self defense.

In another episode of semiautomatic rifle use, an attacker in Hawaii found that no one was capable of effecting self defense.

Hawaii police officers are continuing their search for a suspect who fired an assault rifle at a group of people standing outside a club in Waikiki, killing one and seriously injuring others.

Hawaii News Now reports (http://bit.ly/2xrcAAB ) the shooting happened Saturday morning near Club Alley Cat. Police say a man fired about 10 rounds at the group. A 22-year-old man was taken to the hospital in critical condition and later died. Two other victims, a 27-year-old man and a 31-year-old man, were taken to a hospital in serious condition.

The report says “assault rifle,” and of course it wasn’t a legitimate assault rifle with select fire, and perhaps it was an AK design rather than an AR design.  Who knows, certainly not the reporter?  Either way, the people he attacked didn’t even have a pistol for self defense, or if they did, it was being carried legally.  Not in Hawaii.

Hey, how’s that gun control stuff working out for you, Hawaiians?

Guns.com has the scoop.  I haven’t seen any reviews of the gun yet.  I’d like to see some serious, critical work to vet this gun and others made by Diamondback.

But the great thing is that their rifles – including this 6.5 Creedmoor AR – are less than $1300.  That’s right.  An AR 6.5 Creedmoor < $1300.  Competition is a wonderful thing.  Diamondback is selling their rifles for under $1300, and that includes their rifles that handle larger cartridges than the 5.56mm (e.g., 6.5 Creedmoor and .308, which are both still short-action rounds).

If you are a firearms manufacturer who fabricates ARs, you seriously need to recalibrate.  You need to ask yourselves if you really want to be in the business of manufacturing ARs if your MSRP is significantly more than $1300.  This is the sweet spot.  Because if a prospective buyer can buy yours for more, or a Diamondback for less, he must ask himself whether it’s wise to throw away his money like that in order to have yours.  The calculus is simple, and you absolutely must begin to match the cost of the least expensive manufacturer, or if you don’t, you’ll have to find a niche market because of some features or quality you have that others don’t.  Where do you think the real financial margin is in this calculus?

Diamondback Firearms can be found here.

CNS News:

A California gun store owner was reprimanded by the cops after waving an AR-15 cardboard cutout outside of his business to draw in customers, according to a report by ABC10 News in Oceanside, Calif.

Brendan Von, a Marine veteran, started waving the large, cardboard sign in front of his store, “Firearms Unknown,” last fall during Black Friday shopping. The store told CNSNews.com today that it uses the sign “on a regular basis.”

According to ABC 10, some people assumed the over-sized gun-sign was real, prompting complaints and even a visit from the local police.

A local woman told ABC 10 that she believed the sign was over the top.

“It looks like a machine gun, it is pretty aggressive,” she said. “I think he’s doing too much, but then again, they do have the freedom to do that.”

“A couple people just going by, flipping me the bird,” said Von, the store owner.  “Either scolding me or yelling some type of obscenity.”

“It kind of frustrated me that somebody would call [the police] and make a false statement like that, knowing that it is a cardboard sign that is very flimsy,” he said.

According to the ABC report, Von said the police asked him to stop or change the sign and after he refused, the police left.

The sad part about this isn’t so much the woman to whom we have to say, “Get thee to thy fainting couch.”  I would expect this from California.

The sad part is that the LEOs would actually ask him to stop.  When he refused, they had no recourse except to leave, since demanding what they did was illegal.

Then again, I confess that I’ve come to expect this from LEOs too.

How sad.

AJC:

After some 60 hours on the run, a pair of escaped Georgia inmates wanted for gunning down two correctional officers were caught Thursday night in Tennessee. The pair’s capture was as dramatic as their brazen escape – complete with a home invasion, a police chase, a shootout and a civilian armed with an AR-15.

[ … ]

They stumbled out of the woods and ran into a man in his yard armed with an AR-15. He held the two at gunpoint until authorities arrived.

Did you know that Patrick Hale used an AR-15 to hold the criminals?  It’s good he didn’t have to engage in a gun battle like Mr. Stephen Bayezes who had to use an AR-15 and engage in a massive gun fight with criminals to save his life and the life of his wife.

But remember boys and girls.  The controllers want you to know that no one actually needs an AR-15.  If something bad ever happens, just call 911 and wait for about fifteen minutes if you live in an urban area, longer if not.  In the mean time, just run and hide, I guess.

Gil Horman writing for American Rifleman gives us eight reasons to invest in a 9 mm pistol caliber carbine.  It’s an interesting article that ends with this.

Whenever possible, it makes sense to invest in firearms that can fill multiple roles instead of just one. The 9 mm PCCs fall into this category. These platforms are ideal for informal plinking, target shooting, home defense or riding along as a trunk gun. I’ve heard that a good sized part of what is driving the new interest in these guns are the new divisions in 3-Gun and other competitions that allow the use of 9 mm carbines. Imagine spending a day honing your shooting skills at a match, getting home, giving your carbine a quick cleaning and then staging the gun you know inside and out to defend your home in case of an emergency. That’s about as flexible as a carbine gets.

Now here’s one gigantic reason not to.  I don’t shoot 9 mm.  For those of you who do, I would certainly consider investing in a 9 mm carbine, but when all the pistol rounds in your safe are .45 ACP, .357 Magnum or .38 Special, it makes no sense to invest in 9 mm.  Another way of saying it is that I’ve tried to begin minimizing the number of calibers in my safe while maximizing the total count.  I think this will pay dividends in the future.  Actually, I lied.  I also have 5.7 mm, but that’s my special vice, something to which I treat myself, sort of like a little bit of “Maker’s Mark” on rare occasion.

Now, if you want to talk about a .45 ACP carbine, that’s another story.  I’ve got my eye on one, but at the moment it’s too pricey.

The Telegraph:

The National Rifle Association says the AR-15 is America’s most popular rifle, used safely by millions of people for sport, but it also has a dark reputation as the weapon used in dozens of mass killings.

Initial reports suggest it was the gun used in the attack on a congressional baseball practice in Virginia on Wednesday.

And it was the weapon carried in some of the attacks whose names are burned into America’s memory: The Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and San Bernardino.

[ … ]

Although it has no fully-automatic mode, it is still marketed as coming from a lineage of military-grade arms.

It is modelled on the M-16 used by the US Army and Marine Corps, and carried by thousands of troops around the world.

Even for people who have never served, it offers a sense of joining the war effort.

“It speaks to the fact that there are a lot of young men in the US who will never be in the military but feel that male compulsion to warriorhood,” Tom Diaz, the author of The Last Gun told The New York Times. “Owning an assault weapon is a passport to that.”

Yea, that’s it.  Let’s change its cosmetic features where it doesn’t look like it has a lineage with the Stoner system of arms and then “young” men won’t feel the compulsion to join warriorhood.

God.  Who do they get to write crap like this?  Do they pay them actual money?  By the way, the shooter in D.C. was a bitter old progressive who watches feminist tripe on television (one of his favorite shows was the Rachel Maddow show – Good Lord, what kind of a man watches shit like that?).

Oh and another thing.  No one died at Sandy Hook. Prove me wrong.  Show me a death certificate.  Just one.  I dare you.

Task & Purpose:

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales hates the M16 family of rifles, and he won’t stop until everyone knows it.

Scales has spent the last few years railing against the standard-issue infantry rifle as little more than a lighter but less effective version of the infamous M16 model that left so many American troops dead in the jungles of Vietnam (In response to Scales’ condemnation of the M4 in the pages of The Atlantic in January 2015, Task & Purpose’s Christian Beekman mounted a vocal defense of the rifle).

Wednesday was no different. Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Scales decried the Department of Defense’s post-World War II small-arms programs as “inferior.” Thousands of American troops “have died because the Army’s weapon buying bureaucracy has consistently denied that a soldier’s individual weapon is important enough to gain their serious attention,” said Scales in his prepared testimony.

“A soldier in basic training is told that his rifle is his best friend and his ticket home,” he told assembled lawmakers. “If the lives of so many depend on a rifle why can’t the richest country in the world give it to them?”

[ … ]

To their credit, DoD officials are moving slowly but surely to outfit ground forces with new weaponry. In November, the Marine Corps’ 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines began conducting pre-deployment exercises to evaluate the M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle as a replacement for the M4, which replaced the M16A4 in infantry battalions in 2015.

“It is the best infantry rifle in the world, hands down,” Chief Warrant Officer 5 Christian Wade told Military.com of the IAR at the time. “Better than anything Russia has, it’s better than anything we have, it’s better than anything China has. It’s world-class.”

This is a weird article.  As soon as the author is done with Scales, he launches into a discussion about how the DoD gets it with the USMC work on the IAC – which I would point out, is a 5.56 mm gun.

This is the same, tired old rhetoric we saw half century ago, and the alleged problems Scales likes to cite have all gone away.  McThag summarizes.

The M16A1 and its M193 ammunition stopped being the standard more than thirty years ago and was replaced with the M16A2 and M855.

The M16A2, where almost every part was revised, isn’t even the standard today; that’d be the M4A1.

M855, even, is on its way out with the advent of M855A1.

In a nutshell, everything that was causing problems in 1969 has been revised and replaced.  The bore diameter didn’t cause those three guys you constantly cite to die with broken rifles.

It’s far more likely the lackluster quality control from the mighty UAW workforce at Colt had more to do with it than the design.

To former Major Ehrhart; the infantry half kilometer was “lost” to artillery.

Remember combined arms?

Well, the max effective range of the small arms overlaps the normal range of artillery.  So, yes, the infantry half kilometer demands a larger bore size, I suggest 60mm for starters.  Willard even posits that the reason we’re having problems in Afghanistan is the enemy has figured out where our small arms peter out and won’t close; because to close is to die.  If to close is to die, then it means our weapons do work.

Don’t use logic on Scales.  He won’t listen, or he’ll cite the battle of Wanat, where we ensconced a platoon of soldiers in a valley after letting enemy fighters prepare for a total of one year to attack them with a battalion size force.  Scales blamed that one on the M4 too.

And don’t tell Scales that the Army doesn’t teach soldiers to shoot anymore.  He won’t listen.  Because shut up.

If you want to have a larger bore weapon, then buy one.  I have a larger bore rifle than the 5.56 mm too.  But remember that you always give up something to get something, and that all decisions concerning weapons selection are a compromise.

As for Scales, who exactly pays this guy to continue to work the Stoner system over with false rhetoric?

Breitbart.com:

Enter Marty Daniel of Daniel Defense. Marty told Breitbart News that the Second Amendment must be protected because it is sourced in our Creator. He juxtaposed Second Amendment rights with the gospel and said that he views it as his job to protect both because both flow to us from God.

Marty said, “We are in business, we believe, to be a supporter of the gospel. And, therefore, a supporter of the Second Amendment. In other words, not only do we have these Second Amendment rights because God gives them to us but also the gospel.” Marty went on to stress his conviction that Daniel Defense “[supports] the freedom of the gospel by supporting the Second Amendment.”

I like this a lot.  This sounds like things I’ve said before, and I said them because I believe them very deeply.  I appreciate someone going public with a statement such as this one.  Mr. Daniel didn’t have to do this – he chose to do it of his own volition.

But for me there’s a problem.  There is another Biblical requirement that bears on his guns.  It is the requirement to be wise with your wealth and how it’s used.  Money is wealth, and wealth is time off of your life.  Quite literally, when you purchase something you are giving part of your life away that could be given to your children.

For Mr. Daniel, this is a requirement on me, the customer, not you.  As for me, I would recommend that you get your costs a little better under control before I can purchase a Daniel Defense firearm.  There are a lot of carbine makers out there, and the numbers are increasing virtually weekly.  I was talking with my oldest son Josh just the other day and we were remarking that the choices seem unlimited at the moment.  The bad ones will be weeded out, but the good ones will be your competition.  Spending $2000 – $3000 for a carbine is out of the question when I can purchase one for less that works reliably and won’t fail when I really need it to function, and shoots 1 MOA.

I think you’ve got the attitude right, but you still need to work on the nuts and bolts of the price point.