At long last I'm joining the AR ranks!

[Phaedrus/69]

As a young kid I was basically a rifleman. I grew up out in the country and started in one long guns about the time I could walk. Dad had an FFL and we always had 60-80 personally owned firearms. Had my first BB gun at 4 or 5 and my first .22 shortly thereafter. I didn't actually shoot pistols much at all since dad wasn't much into them. I got a Ruger single action .22/.22 Mag revolver for 8th grade graduation and while I had fun with it I still roamed around with my 10/22 every day. Didn't shoot much with pistols til my early teens.

Once I moved to "the Big City" though I switched to nothing but handguns. Nowhere to hunt and not many places to shoot a rifle. For the last 25 years I've owned almost nothing but handguns and pistol caliber carbines.

Still, I've wanted an AR since I was a young boy! I remember reading Shotgun News and The Shooter's Bible back in the late 70's and early 80's. I had two obsessions then: The M16 and the HK91/93!

Well, it took me 45 years to getting around to it but I finally put an AR on layaway. Nothing really fancy, just a CORE15. From a lot of reading over the last two years it seems like they're pretty decent guns. Bud's has a pretty good price on one with no sights and a 15" Keymod rail. Pretty much the basic gun I want. I like rails but all I want to stick on it is a light, a VFG and a RDS.

In the last 20 years I've owned exactly one rifle- a Browning A-Bolt Synthetic Stalker in .308 Winchester. As much as I loved the gun I don't hunt anymore and didn't have a lot of use for it. So I traded it in on a .45 ACP sidearm a few years back. So this AR will actually be my first rifle in a while!

Hopefully it's gonna be a good shooter. I'm pretty eager to get back into rifle shooting again after two or three decades of mostly being a pistolero!

 

[bannockburn]

Phaedrus69

Good choice on the AR. My first rifle was a 10/22 and it still is the tack driver it was when I first stated shooting it. I know what you mean by being an urban dweller with few and far between choices in regards to finding a rifle range, let alone places to hunt at.

 

[Phaedrus/69]

There are a couple rifle ranges within 15 miles of my place. Not as simple as the ten minute drive to the indoor range at the LGS but doable. I live in South Dakota so to be honest I'm probably not that far from a section road or corn field, either. I won't shoot a rifle every week like I do with handguns but I should be able to get out once or twice per month.

I hunted when I was a kid. We had about 100 acres in farm country, tons of deer and antelope, pheasants and turkeys, too. I kind of drifted away from hunting in my early 20's, just got too busy with work and married life (although the latter didn't last long!). Fishing was a bit easier to find time for and as Dad got older he preferred to fish since walking the fields was getting too hard on him. He passed a few summers ago and I'm not sure I could imagine ever going hunting again without him.

If the new CORE 15 turns out to be reliable and I like how it runs & shoots I'll probably consider setting it up for home defense.