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From military weapon to cultural symbol: how the AR-15 has defined the US gun debate
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Sure, but the rifle in question is not, and has never been a military weapon. The premise is that this is a "weapon of war", as the redcoats like to describe it.
Besides, the "assault-style features" are purely cosmetic and have no bearing on the functionality of the rifle.
I'm assuming you know who Eugene Stoner is. If you do, you would also be aware that he designed the AR10 in a competition to be a replacement for the M1 Garand. You'd also be aware that the South Vietnamese liked it so much that they asked him to design a smaller version, which resulted in another team at Armalite scaling the AR10 down in addition to Stoner himself designing a new cartridge based on the Remington 222 (IIRC). Smaller weapon was a lot easier for the smaller stature of the Vietnamese to handle and also caught the attention of Curtis LeMay for use as survival equipment for his pilots.
If you don't know any of that, perhaps you should educate yourself. A great place to start would be the Library of Congress interviews with Eugene Stoner, where he lays out the exact history I described above, which are on YouTube.
Stoner's AR-15 and the AR-15 of today are pretty different. Now it's a genericized term for a firearms platform.
Think of it like a PC. It's about parts being mostly compatible. Lots of parts are interchangeable, though not everything matches. For instance the ammunition dictate the barrel and bolt size, and the buffer tube determines which stocks can be used, etc.
The common feature on pretty much all of them is the lower receiver, which is different than it was for Stoner and for military guns.
AR-15 receivers don't accommodate a part that's required for full-auto or burst fire, and modding them to accept the part is a super duper ultra felony - even if you don't put the part in.
Oh - and the weapon from Armalite used for pilot survival is a COMPLETELY different firearm. It's the AR-5, and was a 22 hornet takedown rifle that is not useful for combat at all. You can buy one today in .22lr called the AR-7 or "Henry Survival Rifle."
The "AR" designation just means they were designed by the Armalite Rifle company - the AR-17 was actually a shotgun designed for bird hunting.
Point of fact: AR-15 is actually a trademark owned by Colt. That's why there's the Ruger AR-556, and the S&W M&P 15 Sport II, which are marketed as AR-15 style rifles. Kinda like Styrofoam; people misuse the trademark (esp. styrofoam cups; such a thing has never existed) regularly, but it's still owned by the Dow Chemical Corp. (Or was; I think they sold that division off to E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co.)
The trademark probably won't last too much longer though, as it's become genercized AND Colt wasn't the inventor of the product or the name. They also no longer manufacture civilian AR-pattern rifles, so they're on really shaky grounds for defending the name.
Bayer lost the trademark for Aspirin. Xerox almost lost the trademark to their own name, and had to actually start advertising their products as "photocopiers" instead of "Xerox machines."
I'm not talking about the Armalite AR-10. Myself, other gun rights activists, and redcoats (gun control proponents) are talking about weapons patterned after the Colt AR-15, which is exclusively semi-automatic.
Fucking LOL
This is what American Civil Religion does to your brain, kids
You're gonna live in fear and you're gonna LIKE IT
honestly it's morons like this who will fuck things up for everyday gun owners who aren't fuckups. Of course, the number of fuckups with firearms is astounding, just based on the idiots leaving their firearms in unsecured cars.
You're in fear when you don't have a gun?
Oh, you're a fetishist. I get it now. Anyone who disagrees with the addition of more firearms to a country that already has more guns than people is a redcoat to you. An enemy. Not your fellow citizen, not prior service people who look at firearms as tools of war and see that in our goddamned news every fucking week now... no, we're your enemy, because we value life more than esoteric interpretations of 200 year old dogma.
Y'all give two fuckin' shits about a well regulated Militia.
If they're just cosmetic and have no bearing on the functionality, does that make whoever uses them a lamewad cosplayer?
I wanna say Mall Shooter (like Mall Ninja), but...
Yes, thank you for this demonstration of pedantism.