No doubt you should shop it. AR's are coming down in price as stocking levels are high compared to demand. It's definitely a buyer's market.
What kind of AR is the more relevant point. Just like bolt and levers, the features on that specific gun slant it's performance in a specific direction. A nice English double magnum with express sights is pretty good on rhino and elephant, but squirrel, not so much.
So, just the same as buying a car, you need to be specific about what the gun is going is going to do. That means specifying what range - how far it's going to be really used, and what target. Paper is different than live game or humans. A long range paper target rifle doesn't exactly fit the bill with you are really needing a short range defensive carbine.
Brands mean nothing until you specify range and target. If you plan a two mile commute with nothing more than your lunch, saying "Cummins Diesel 3/4 ton Dodge!" makes no sense. If that is what you want regardless, OK, plenty do, but it goes to the range and target goal. There is none - it's more a situation where impressive possession is the real goal.
After that, the AR needs to be considered in it's own light. It does not work or act like a manual action arm, it's a self loading action, and it conforms to self loading guns which work a great deal more differently. One specific issue is that all self loading actions open the chamber while there is still residual gas pressure in the barrel, and they will all pass that gas into the action - blowback, delayed roller, piston, or DI. Regardless. And cleaning them means doing so to maintain function, which may not be as clean as you think. An issue M16/M4 will fire 300 rounds with no necessity of cleaning. In fact, Colt has tested them and the mean rounds to failure is up past 3,000 to 5,000 rounds. That the soldier carries only 300/500 rounds at a time is significant, and that daily maintenance is required to clean the weapon from the normal environmental crud that builds up should be understood.
What it boils down to is that the AR gets shot 5-10 times MORE than the average manual action rifle, and the caliber has a lot to do with it. Add in $8 a box ammo on the shelf and it's a different game - you can shoot 500 rounds of ammo in a long range day where the larger cartridges in bolt and lever guns tend to inhibit it.
Being able to shoot three times more ammo ups the probability that the occasional bad round will be fired more frequently. What would be one out of a hundred with a bolt gun at the range becomes five out of five hundred ripping thru magazines.
The gun isn't at fault for that - yet the AR gets a lot of blame because of it and the shooting community doesn't step thru the math to understand what's happening. They take the limited experience and low consumption results of a manual gun and insist the self loading gun meet the same expectations. And when it's pointed out that their .22's do that, they give them a pass because "it's just a plinker and can't be expected."
Things are different with self loading guns, put previous experience and expectations developed with manual actions aside. AR's are not the same and can't be treated the same.
You will enjoy being able to tear a bolt down in 30 seconds or less, quite the difference compared to taking out the bolt of a Win 94 - which is nearly a gunsmith level exercise requiring hours. AR's are really different and extremely user maintenance friendly. They are in fact the hallmark design and have influenced every combat rifle design since then. Once familiar with how they work, you understand a lot more about self loading actions and how they work, which is a completely different world compared to manual actions. It's exactly like putting a gas motor in a horse drawn buggy, or switching from dial telephone to digital programmed.
Welcome to the future, shooting won't be the same again. You just stepped into the modern age of firearms, ironically it started about 100 years ago, and the AR is nearly 50.
