Sometimes You Just Have to Troll

I spent a lot of yesterday learning about AR-type rifles. Now that I have two of them, I need to be up to speed. I guess I’m trolling, but the more I learn about these things, the more I think they’re like Porsche 911’s.

Porsche invented a very ugly platform about 80 years ago: the VW Beetle. It was fine for poor people who wanted to get to work, but that was about it. They turned it into a sports car, it had lots of handling problems, and instead of admitting they screwed up, they continued making rehashes and claiming the problems were actually virtues. It seems like the AR works the same way.

It’s nothing like the 1911. John Moses Browning made it nearly perfect, and it is still wildly popular a century later. Just like his .50-caliber machine gun. Just like his lever guns. Just like the Hi-Power. Just like a bunch of stuff he created.

As for the AR15, I’m not sure where to start.

Okay, how about this? AR15’s are still not too reliable. Enthusiasts will say, “THEY ARE, TOO! YOU JUST HAVE TO MAINTAIN THEM!” Okay, well, I have a whole bunch of other guns which go off reliably every single time whether I clean and lube them or not. Some of those guns, like the AR15, are civilian versions of military rifles. If they don’t require nannying, and the AR15 does, isn’t it fair to say the AR15 has a problem?

I like typing “AR15” more than “AR-15,” by the way. I don’t care if it’s wrong.

When I bought the other guns, no one gave me special lessons on how to keep them working. No one said, “If you don’t want your AK to bind up, you need to use this special grease on the gas tube.” No one said, “Once a month, you have to scrub your K31’s bolt with toothpaste.” I just put ammo in them and fired away.

When I bought my AR15 from the manufacturer, which had ample reason to give me the impression it was reliable, the guy who sold it to me took me all the way over to the accessory display and told me I had to buy a very unusual wire brush for cleaning the chamber. He said reliability problems were almost always caused by failure to clean the chamber.

He expected his product to not work, and he was doing damage control in advance. The manufacturer!

On to the next issue. Can someone explain the charging handle to me? Who puts a charging handle directly in front of a shooter’s face? How is that smart? Pulling it back with the left hand is very awkward, and you have to move your eyes off your target. Also, I’m not an engineer, but it sure looks like the handle could be fired into a shooter’s face if it caught on the bolt carrier.

How about the bolt assist? This is a device that helps you ram your cartridge into the chamber when it doesn’t want to go. The very existence of the bolt assist tells me Mr. Stoner knew there was something seriously wrong with his gun. An AK-47 doesn’t have a bolt assist. A Ruger 10-22 doesn’t have a bolt assist. I have to wonder if there is any gun on earth, apart from the AR family, that has a bolt assist. If Stoner chose to put this weird device on his gun, he must have known the gun was going to give people problems.

Today I learned there are AR15’s without bolt assists, and you can even get one with the charging handle on the side of the receiver. I must not be the only person who thinks something is amiss.

The AR15 has a little projection on the receiver for the purpose of knocking spent casings away from your face. What does this tell you? It tells you the gun originally shot hot brass into people’s eyes, and the answer was to put a bump on the gun so the brass could slam into it, remove some paint, and bounce off into the grass. That seems strange to me. I have no other guns with brass deflectors. Amazon sells a special pad you can glue to your brass deflector in order to keep the brass from eating your AR’s finish.

The word “kludge” means a clumsy solution to a problem. A kludge fixes the symptom, not the disease. Most repairs made with duck tapes are kludges. Duck tape is the Excalibur of kludge artists. The brass deflector on an AR15 is a kludge, and the special brass deflector protection pad is a kludge on a kludge. It’s a second-order kludge.

I’m going to put electrical tape on my gun. Duck tape is the wrong color.

What else? AR triggers are bad. Not mediocre. Bad. You can say this is because it’s a military weapon, and they chose reliability over accuracy, but if that’s the case, why does a K31 have a magnificent trigger? Lots of guns, including military weapons, have nice triggers fresh from the factory.

What about the AR’s incredible, unparalleled usefulness for self-defense? Unfortunately, it does not actually exist.

Let’s say someone breaks into my house, intent upon stealing the growing collection of parts I discarded in order make AR-style weapons work. If I have a choice between my $800 (base price) AR15 and my $400 AK-47 with cheap steel-cased ammo, which will I choose?

Wrong. I’ll choose the AK-47. Here’s why.

1. Reliability. The AK-47 WILL go off. No question about it. I dont have to clean it. I don’t have to oil it. I don’t have to buy just the right ammo. It’s going to shoot every time I pull the trigger. Won’t the AR15 go off, too? Probably. I estimate the chance of a malfunction at one in several hundred, as compared to one in thousands for the AK-47. I have had guns fail to fire, many times. It’s a real thing. If the odds are one in 500, that’s just too high when my life is on the line.

2. Better terminal performance. The .223 round or 5.56 or whatever is great, but it’s easier to stop than a 7.62 soft point and it won’t penetrate things like walls and furniture as well. If you’re in my house without permission, I want to be able to hit you wherever you are, no matter what you’re wearing. If I have to shoot through a chair, I don’t want to worry that the hard parts will save you. If you’re standing behind a wall, I want to know that I can kill you through two layers of drywall. The AK-47 is just plain better for these jobs.

People say the AR15 is more accurate. I put this to the test this week, and I got 5 MOA, which is abysmal. I can add a $250 barrel and fix it, I guess, but as of this moment, the gun appears to be no more accurate than an AK-47. But that’s a side issue. What if the AR shot 1 MOA and the AK shot 5 MOA? Who cares? Inside 100 feet, shooting at a large, i.e. human, target, 5 MOA will do just fine. Before people got all excited about accuracy, hunting rifles typically shot something like 4 MOA, and people were very happy to use them on deer.

So if I need to defend myself, the AR15 gives me less reliability, the same capacity, less ability to incapacitate, and no more accuracy.

“You can tune your AR15 so it’s just as reliable as an AK-47!”

Here’s a question no one will be able to answer: why?

It reminds me of what people say when they want to convince you cats are real pets: “My cat is just like a dog!” Why didn’t you just buy a dog, then? No one ever says, “You’ll love my dog! He’s just like a cat!” This is true for the same reason no one ever tries to make fake vegetables from meat.

Of course, my AR15 is not set up for personal defense, so if I had a home invasion, I wouldn’t care about its problems any more than I would care about my .38 Special’s problems. If it had any, which it doesn’t. I’m not going to use either gun to defend myself.

I’m no expert, but I think the AK-47 is still way better than an M-16 or similar gun on the battlefield.

I can hear people gasping.

Okay, the AK-47 is still more reliable than the M-16, after decades of trying to fix the latter gun. It’s cheaper to produce. It’s much easier to operate. You may have a problem with the heavy 7.62 ammo. Fine. Make AK-47’s in a different caliber. It has already been done.

Even with the heavier ammo and the slightly reduced accuracy, the AK works just fine up to 300 meters. With a different cartridge, couldn’t that be extended? The cartridge is the whole reason the AK doesn’t hold energy at longer distances.

There are a lot of things I don’t know, and maybe I’ll feel totally differently in a year, but this is how things look to me right now. It will be interesting to look back and see how my opinion has changed. If it does.

Would I still buy AR rifles if I had it to do over again? Yes and no. I would not have an AR10, because there are bolt guns that do the same thing better for less money. I would definitely buy the AR15 again, and I will explain why.

It’s fun. I think this is the reason most people buy them. When you buy an AR15, you enter a world of modification and problem-solving which is very enjoyable. If the gun actually worked when you bought it, you wouldn’t have any of this fun. It’s a blast picking out and installing parts to get different results. I guess it’s like buying an old leaky Harley and making it run right.

The gun is also very versatile. You can change the caliber. You can change the barrel type. You can try new triggers and optics. You can turn your AR15 into a defensive gun, a pig-hunting gun, a target rifle, or just about anything else.

If you own an AR15, you become part of a sort of club. You get opportunities to talk to other AR15 owners, mostly about fixing the gun’s problems. It makes you feel more like part of the firearms “community.”

It’s a toy. That’s the bottom line. It seems to be a very flawed weapon, but as a toy, it’s hard to beat.

I could see rigging one gun up for targets and varmints and another, in 6mm ARC, for deer and long-range shooting.

I just can’t imagine defending myself with one. A Glock would be better. A Glock would go off.

AR15-armed intruder: I HAVE YOU NOW! I’LL JUST CHARGE MY $3000 DANIEL DEFENSE AR15, LOOK THROUGH MY $1500 RED DOT SIGHT, AND PULL MY $250 GEISSELE TRIGGER! WAIT! WAIT! IT’S NOT IN BATTERY! HANG ON WHILE I BEAT ON THE BOLT ASSIST!

Me, armed with $400 AK-47 and cheap Russian ammo: BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

AR15-armed intruder: [hacking and wheezing] I got it in! Now you die! I will RAIN tiny bullets on you! BANG! [casing sticks in chamber]

Me, armed with $400 AK-47 and cheap Russian ammo: [mag swap] BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

AR15-armed intruder: [gurgling] I…I spit at your rifle! Rack-grade…surplus…

Me, armed with $400 AK-47 and cheap Russian ammo: [mag swap] BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

The M-16 and similar guns seem to be awfully popular with armies around the world. Is that because they work, or is it because America arms a lot of people? I don’t know. Googling around, I see a lot of “experts” who still criticize AR guns. Some say H&K has a much better offering.

The complaints about Vietnam-era guns are well-founded. I just read an article that said “80 percent of 1,585 troops queried in 1967 had experienced a stoppage while firing.” The article says many stoppages involved failures to extract. When this happens, your spent (or live) casing is stuck in your chamber. You can’t just eject it and start shooting again. At best, you’ll have to shove a rod into your gun’s barrel and knock the round out. This may not work, and you may have to take the gun to an armorer with special tools.

Eighty percent!

Failure to eject still happens today. There is a Youtube video of a guy whose round was so tightly ensconced, he had to use a special fitting to connect a grease gun to the barrel so he could force the cartridge out with high pressure. When it emerged, it hit a wall and made a deep hole. It was jammed in the rifle pretty good. Has that ever happened with an AK-47?

Imagine how you would feel if RVN soldiers were converging on you, and a casing got stuck in your chamber.

I’ll just publish this and let it ferment for a year. Maybe I’ll come back and say I was wrong about everything.

Doubt it.