One of the realities of warfare is that combat troops carry rifles already adopted in the citizen’s market for arms. The AR15 was originally sold by Colt to people as a truck rifle for taking care of varmints on the ranch. The “sniper rifles” used today in Iraq are nothing more than hunting rifles you can buy in any town. The small arms market in the US has driven the military for over 200 years.
All of that changed in 1986 and 1994. In 1986 the odious “Firearm Owner’s Protection Act” (FOPA’86) was enacted, limiting manufacture and transfer of new machine guns to police and military. What has happened is a sudden decline in interest in developing these guns, and now the police and military are somewhat stuck. FOPA’86 was just an extension of NFA’34 (National Firearms Act of 1934) which placed huge (at the time) taxes on transfer and manufacture of certain weapons. What this means is the US will never have another John Moses Browning; the collective brainpower of thousands of tinkerers in the US goes unused.
The 1994 Assault Weapons Ban (AWB’94) did much the same thing. By eliminating the citizen’s market for certain firearms, Congress has kept manufacturers out of R&D for guns that would also feed the military. Full capacity magazines can’t be made and sold any more, so now they’re getting spendy for everyone.
If you think I’m making all of this up, check out John Farnam’s Quips for last week. He’s reporting on what the military has known for a long time:
The immediate hold up is the fact that no domestic manufacturer wants to make this new rifle, if they can only sell it to the government. With no prospect of civilian sales, there is zero interest in t his undertaking among American manufacturers, like me.
Men and women of the US military are on the front lines today with weapons that don’t make the cut. They know it, we know it, and now you know it. Let your congresslave know it.
