Archive for the 'AR-15s' Category

The call it the Saint.  For the moment I’ll hitch a ride on The Firearm Blog, and then criticize some of their commenters.

Patrick R reviews the gun for readers, and generally has nice things to say about it.  It seems to fit into the low to medium cost AR-15, and it’s always good to have competition.  It makes everybody better.

Patrick discusses what he perceives to be the accuracy of the gun, but as you read this, remember my claim.  A few shots cannot reveal the true accuracy.  I reject claims of 1 MOA, or 0.75 MOA from any gun manufacturer or shooter unless the sample size is large.  Any gun manufacturer or shooter, not just SA.  The placement of shots for any gun should be able to be represented by a standard distribution – excluding variations caused by the shooter – with a standard deviation that is small enough to be less than the mean (because a standard deviation larger than the mean only makes physical sense and is only allowed when the mean can go negative, which cannot happen in this case).  Three shots, or five shots, means that the sample size is too small to accomplish this and meet the central limit theorem.

It has a keymod rail, and the commenters savage this rail system, and Patrick even says there are better options.  Well, I don’t know about that.  It depends.  It’s weak and tends to break, say the commenters.  Well, I have some exposure to a RRA competition rifle, 18″ SS fluted barrel, with a slotted rail that is much lighter than others (right, I understand that we aren’t reviewing the RRA competition rifle).  Most readers have a black gun with a quad picatinny rail.  Me too, excepting that awful boating accident where all of my guns, including this 3-gun competition gun with the light slotted rail, went to the bottom of the lake.  I cried a river of tears over that accident.

It’s forend heavy because of that quad rail, isn’t it?  Just say yes.  You know it is.  Don’t lie to yourself.  My former Marine son Daniel’s experience in Fallujah put him at odds with heavy equipment, including heavy forend guns.  He dislikes the quad rail for that reason.  He told me “The first thing I would do with that gun is remove the rails and replace it with something light weight.”  I wonder how many of TFB commenters who think the lighter rail system sucks had to raise it and conduct room clearing operations for 24 straight hours in Fallujah while they were dehydrated in 120 degree heat, with nothing to eat, people shooting at you, and stomach cramps from drinking the local water?  That’s what I thought.

Look, I’m not saying that you have to have a quad rail.  I’m not saying you have to have a lighter rail competition gun or a keymod rail.  I’m not saying you have to have or do anything at all.  I’m saying that you find the tool that works best for you for the purpose you intend, learn it, take care of it, and appreciate it.  Rarely should you listen to the counsel of folks who make categorical statements.  A heavy quad rail is okay if you don’t intend to conduct long term operations of any sort with it, and it can handle all sorts of attachments that you might want.  A lighter rail has the advantage of not over-rotating the gun when attempting target acquisition moving laterally (not over-rotating is the main reason behind the thumb-over-bore grip that has become so popular).  Each tool has its own purposes.  I’ve actually seen complaints by people when they used their butt stock to beat up something and it broke.  Folks, your gun isn’t a hammer.

The gun doesn’t have a floated barrel, and I wonder how much that affects accuracy (it does some by adding a fundamental node [or an eigenvalue] in the vibration, we just don’t know how much).  But there is one feature that will be problematic for Springfield Armory.  The top of the rail is polymer, and melts with heat generated from long term operation of the gun.  This absolutely must be fixed or that’s a fatal flaw.

Ammoland:

At our Urban Rifle (Carbine) Courses, most students bring ARs, as you might imagine, but we see dozens of other types/brands, some of which I was heretofore only marginally aware, so many are the companies, worldwide, making small arms today.

But my colleagues and I, Dave Spaulding, Tom Givens, Mas Ayoob, James Yeager, Frank Sharpe, Manny Kapelsohn, Jeff Chudwin, Clint Smith, Freddie Blish, et al continue to see repeated handling errors, which during a genuine encounter for which we train, will be fatal!

Some students pick it up right away. Others fumble repeatedly. Most “get it” eventually, training themselves to avoid common AR rifle handling errors!

We instruct students to grab the 30-round magazine (which most use) with the support-side hand as they would a pop-can and smartly insert it into the magazine well. Then, strike the bottom of the newly-inserted magazine. Then, grab it and tug downward, trying to pull it back out.

When the magazine stays in place, it’s good to go.

Conversely, when it comes right back out again, it was never locked in place correctly!

I’m not trying to cast doubt on experts and their recommendations for gun handling, but perhaps this has to do with poor quality guns and poor quality magazines.  But I’ve put thousands upon thousands of rounds through ARs, and I’ve never once had a magazine fail to seat, and I don’t routinely strike the magazine on the bottom.

What about your experience with the AR?

At this reddit/guns post?

By mounting the light directly on the barrel, he’s adding a secondary harmonic, possibly exacerbating a primary node or creating an anti-node, or creating nodes completely out of sync with other nodes, and fundamentally changing the way the barrel vibrates.  Someone needs to tell him to remove the light and figure out another way.

Informative video.  In the end, if you make it that far, I think they reach the right conclusion.  AR-15s (and their parts) have become so reliable that it makes little difference now.  The point of diminishing returns is reached very soon (the sweet spot is < $1500).

This reviewer has a lot of love for the RRA rifle.

Rock River Arms’ new Fred Eichler Series LAR-15 Predator joins a growing number of AR-platform rifles and carbines specifically configured for the serious coyote and bobcat hunter. Sporting a medium-weight 16-inch stainless steel barrel, it represents the top of Rock River’s current four-model line of ARs specifically configured for coyote pursuit.

It was developed and field tested with the extensive help of Fred Eichler, host of the television show Predator Nation. The Fred Eichler series embodies not only the basic functionality of the AR platform that has made it so widely popular with predator hunters in the first place but also an impressive set of individual custom touches that elevate it to a pack leader among this category of guns.

Anyone who is at all familiar with AR-15 rifles understands why they are virtually perfect predator hunting tools and why predator hunters were early leaders in the mass migration of AR-platform carbines and rifles from the world of tactical, military and law-enforcement applications into full status as “modern sporting rifles.”

This is an interesting article, but this bit caught my eye.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding out in the world about the relative “inherent accuracy” of long barrels and short barrels. In reality (all other things being equal), short barrels are inherently more accurate than long barrels because they are stiffer, don’t flex and vibrate so much while bullets are passing through their bore and experience less muzzle displacement shot-to-shot due to variable harmonics.

In other words, the vibration amplitude isn’t as great with a shorter barrel.  This is a very interesting point, and one that I’ve overlooked before.  Although it could also be observed that the longer barrel is necessary at times to get the full potential out of the muzzle velocity of the round.

In the picture above I have to think they are shipping that rifle with a Pmag or Hexmag if you bought it today.

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.