I am of the opinion that we owe a lot to Bushmaster. Bushmaster broke the Colt monopoly on AR15’s. I talked to Springfield Armory, in their pavilion at Camp Perry. Springfield Armory claims they were the first to make and advertize a non Colt civilian AR15. However, Colt sent them a cease and desist order and was going to sue them into bankruptcy if Springfield Armory did not pull their AR15’s from the market place. At the time SA was a small company, Colt was of course fat with Government procurement money, and given the disparate of resources, even though the lawsuit was baseless, Colt was going to win. SA agreed to a legal agreement never to manufacturer AR15 type rifles.
However, Bushmaster took on Colt, not only for the basic AR15, but for the M4’s, and won in court. The Colt monopoly was effectively broken, availability increased dramatically and prices dropped. The AR15 was designed to be an easily manufacturable rifle, but Colt had artificially kept supply low and prices high.
For Across the Course Highpower shooters, it was the civilians who created the basic modifications that made the AR15 a competitive target rifle. The Army Teams loved their match M14’s and were absolutely not interested in modifying the NM rules to allow AR15’s to compete. You look at Camp Perry pictures from the early nineties back to the 70’s, every civilian service rifle shooter has an MIA. The Army disallowed features such as free floating barrels, improved sights, etc. These were features that civilian gunsmiths had introduced that made the AR15 a dynamite target rifle. Somewhere in the early 90’s though, someone high up decided that the Army teams were going to use the AR as it was the issue service rifle, and that decision lifted the flood gates. The Army adopted and improved on the existing technologies, by the mid 90’s the Army teams were winning everything with AR15’s, and in 1996, the Marine Corp last used M14’s as across the course service rifles. When, in 1997, I asked Marine Corp Rifle team shooters how the AR transition was going, several members said “ About the same in off hand, better in rapid fire, a little worse at long range”. And this was fundamentally true in everyone’s experience. You picked up points and X’s in rapid fire with the AR15 that you could not make up at long range with the M14. All the top shooters are within a point of each other at 600 yards, so you have to clean the rapids with a high X count. It is a lot harder to shoot high X counts in rapid fire with the 308, you get kicked out of position.
AR15’s were so scarce that in the late 80’s early 90’s I used to get into arguments about AR15’s slamfiring. At the time everyone had heard or seen Garand/M1a’s slamfires, but no one had ever heard of an AR15 slamfiring. At the time, conventional wisdom totally discounted primer sensitivity as a factor for slamfires. There was no such thing as primer sensitivity. Primers were primers, they were all round and shiny and the sensitivity was the same for all of them, what ever that was. The only allowed causes of slamfires were “high primers and worn out receiver bridges”. Since the AR15 did not have a receiver bridge it was therefore impossible to have a slamfire with one with factory ammunition.
Now enough AR15 slamfires have occurred that the phenomena is acknowledged, but there are so few Garands and M1a’s in competition now, that you will have arguments with those who do not believe these mechanisms can slamfire.
I bought it because I wanted a quality, compact, semi-auto centerfire for truck duty, walking around, camping, or other general purpose use where I wanted a rifle along, but wanted compactness and magazine capacity. They were pretty rare back then (compared to now). I think some people (not me) were already enjoying envisioning themselves in Red Dawn or other SHTF scenarios, but not in epidemic proportions like now.
