Stalking the Varmint Cong

I keep thinking about getting my first AR15. Only I think I actually want an AR10.

It’s confusing. I used to think the correct name was M16, but it turned out…wait, let me see if I have this right. Okay, “M16” is military for AR15, but apparently, an AR15 in a bigger caliber is actually an AR10. I may be wrong. I figured this out from a blog comment.

In any case, for a long time, I’ve wanted a semi-auto rifle suitable for distances over 200 yards. Why? I can’t believe you have to ask. It’s just so obvious that I need one.

I bought a PSL, which is…it gets confusing again…based on the AK74, which is based on the AK47. The PSL shoots 7.62x54mm rounds, which are sort of like 30.06 ammunition. It’s a lot of fun, but it has limitations.

First of all, the PSL is really crude, so you have to do a certain amount of work on it to make it function. For one thing, you have to replace the trigger group. If you don’t, you end up with trigger slap, which means the trigger kicks forward after each shot, so hard and so fast you can’t feel it. At the end of the day, you notice that your finger is sore and you’re shooting badly. That’s no good.

I put a Red Star trigger in the gun, and since then, it has never worked right. The other day, it occurred to me that I might have installed the hammer backward. Or, rather, not backward. Some aftermarket triggers (one, at least) require you to install the hammer backward, which is more than a little confusing. I need to take the gun out and check, but in any case, it is not working. When it did work, it shot well, but not really well. Supposedly the accuracy drops when the barrel gets warm. On top of that, there used to be lots of cheap top-quality Soviet ammunition available, but now it’s gone, so you have to suffer with dubious surplus probably made in people’s garages in the former USSR and Hungary and China.

I bought a K31. It shoots well, but the scope is permanently out of alignment with the barrel. I bought an aftermarket mount to make a Burriss scope fit the gun, and at the most extreme adjustment, it’s off by six inches at 100 yards. I could fix it by jamming a piece of a Coke can in there, but I’d rather have something that works without being subjected to Sanford and Son modifications. And the K31 is not semi-automatic.

Someone suggested the 6.5mm Grendel version of the AR10. This is an interesting thing. The stupidly named Grendel is a caliber invented by a guy named Alexander. Apparently he was not happy with the .308, because it slowed down too much at long distances. The Grendel is still supersonic at 1200 yards, according to highly reliable Internet forum blatherings I Googled. Can that be right? That seems like a long way. Anyhow, it shoots farther than the .308. Sort of.

Unfortunately, Mr. Alexander registered “Grendel” as a trademark, effectively killing industry interest in it. As I understand it, you can make Grendel ammunition and Grendel rifles all day, but you can’t call them “Grendel,” or else you get sued. This makes it hard for other people to join in the fun, so the popularity of the round may be doomed. Once that happens, you might as well have a Commodore Amiga in your gun case. I cite the sad demise of .440 Cor-Bon as an example.

Les Baer (genuflect) makes an extremely similar gun called the .264 something or other. Word on the street is, Mr. Baer got mad at someone who works with Mr. Alexander, and he decided he did not want to deal with them, so he made a gun which will chamber the Grendel round, and he did not trademark anything. The problem with this is, his gun is a Les Baer, so it costs approximately 3 googol dollars or the ratio of Barack Obama’s ego to his achievements expressed in shares of Berkshire Hathaway, whereas you can buy a licensed Grendel rifle for the low price of the weight of Col. Jeff Cooper in rubies. In other words, the new round is a big economic boon to Mr. Baer, but not to anyone else. In fact, it is so unhelpful to shooters, it was pointless for me to mention it.

I don’t know a whole lot about long distance shooting. It amazes me that a 6.5mm bullet can hurt anything. But I suppose it can, because people buy them. It’s close to the same diameter as a .25 caliber pistol round, which is like being shot with an unusually spunky BB gun.

Hmm…it looks like the Grendel is actually an AR15, which somehow manages to combine low recoil with long distance punch. But the AR10 is available in .260 Remington and 6.5 Creedmoor, which are better than 6.5 Grendel at long distances. I think. Maybe.

Man, this is confusing.

The reality is, I am extremely unlikely to find the opportunity to shoot at anything over a hundred yards away. You have to get pretty far out to need a caliber that shoots well at six hundred yards, and I have a feeling that will never happen in my lifetime. But does that really matter? Of COURSE not.

I don’t know why this little bullet would shoot well at long ranges. Maybe it’s long and thin. My dim memories of studying physics tell me the performance of bullet should be limited by the amount of mass in the channel in front of it, compared to the mass of the bullet, so a longer bullet ought to hold its speed better at long ranges.

I am pretty sure I know less about rifles right now than I did before I started studying this topic.