Living with the AR-15

Living with the AR-15
The Complete Guide to the World's Most Versatile Rifle for Civilians

by Robert H. Boatman

Copyright 2007
Softcover
79 pages
93 B/W photos
Personally Signed to YOU by the Author

$15.00 (+ $5.00 shipping)

Marvel at the ingenuity, adaptability and elegance of the world’s most useful firearm.

Next time someone argues for diversity, show them your AR-15!

Simply put, the AR-15 is one of the most versatile guns ever invented, making it the ideal general-purpose rifle - easily configured for home and community defense, disaster survival, small- and big-game hunting, varmint shooting, pest control, and subsistence hunting. It’s also a great gun for target shooting, competition and training, plinking, and just plain fun. It’s an easy gun to handle and shoot, perfect for less-experienced women and children, with advanced capabilities to satisfy the most expert rifleman. Unless you have a whole house full of guns, each designed specifically to fill one of the many specialized roles an AR-15 can cover on its own, you really can’t get along without one.

The little black rifle stumbled badly out of the starting gate, and the lessons that had to be learned to get it up on its feet were paid for with blood. Not the cheap blood of politicians, the expensive blood of soldiers. Though costly to identify, the problems were easy to fix. A few minor design enhancements, a little logistical readjustment, a supply of new ammo, and a few thousand dead Americans later, the AR-15/M16 was fit to do battle with the Kalashnikov, and its qualities of light weight, fast handling, low recoil, and fine accuracy began to be appreciated. Today, the AR-15 aka M16 is the heart of small arms weapons systems fielded not only by all branches of the U.S. military but most non-communist countries around the world.

Robert H. Boatman
Chapter 1, Living with the AR-15

I have known a lot of clever politicians and quite a few accomplished duck hunters, but have never seen these respective aptitudes coexist in the same individual. Politicians have neither the fortitude nor the endurance required for duck hunting, and their incessant pontificating tends to frighten the ducks away. Of course, an expensive shotgun held awkwardly in the hands of a politician, with his finger on the trigger and his muzzle covering his constituents, is a common photo-op and journalistic staple. As an empty cliché, it’s right up there with the requisite political pledge to always tell the truth.

Robert H. Boatman
Chapter 9, Living with the AR-15

Robert Boatman briefly covers the background of the little black rifle that almost wasn’t, then dives right into a detailed examination of the modular design and what you can do with it. If you have ever wondered if the AR-15 could possibly live up to its reputation, or if you’re an AR-15 owner who wants to learn the best configuration for your gun, you owe it to yourself to read Living with the AR-15.

Here’s the Table of Contents from Living with the AR-15:

1    The Little Black Rifle that Almost Wasn’t: Get your calculators: bad ammo in = dead soldiers out
2    How It Works: The plumbing and springs
3    Target Shooting: The value of marksmanship now to staying alive later
4    Varmint Hunting and Pest Control: They are targets that reproduce themselves
5    Small Game and Subsistence Hunting: Better than a pocketknife and a ball of twine when you’re shipwrecked
6    Big Game Hunting: ARs are not only .223s
7    Home Defense: The ammo is the thing here
8    Community Defense and Disaster Survival: Where the AR really shines
9    Competition and Training: Get yourself some schoolin’
10    Gun Games and Plinking Fun: All work and no play…
11    A Learning Gun for the Beginning Shooter: The new .22LR
12    Learning to See: See as far and as accurately as your rifle can send a bullet
13    Duck Hunting: It all depends who’s the duck
14    Summary of Calibers and Uses: The gun of a thousand faces
15    “Assault Weapons Ban”: Vote early and often… for your AR-15
16    A Word to the Wise from Louis and Max: Awerbuck and Joseph sum it up

A cutaway model lets you see how the AR gas system works, and a quick field-stripping reveals the other secrets of the rifle, including its ease of transformation from one kind of gun to another. The cutaway in the photos is an ArmaLite AR-10, and the AR-15 works exactly the same. The model being field-stripped is a Colt Sporter AR-15 carbine, and every other AR-15 comes apart the same way.

Separate the upper and lower parts of the receiver and you’ll see how easy it is to mix and match. (There may be a few incompatibilities between some makes on certain models, so ask before you buy a new upper to fit on your existing lower.) You can change the configuration of your AR just by changing the handguard on your existing upper. You may want the minimum you can hold on to, you may need a handguard that’s designed to help dissipate the barrel heat from sustained firing, or you may want one with more rails than Grand Central Station in the 1940s so you can add every accessory you’ve ever read about. For more radical changes, you can replace your entire upper with a new one that has its own purpose-built configuration, barrel profile and length, or is chambered for an entirely different cartridge.

Robert H. Boatman
Chapter 2, Living with the AR-15