Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Minuteman Rifle

From a reader:

Mr. Rifleman,
Like you, I enjoy the classic guns.  I have an M16 clone. However, a lot of gun store employees and other guys say I need an M4 for more tactical training and operations.  What are the ins and outs?


Great question!

The M16A2 and M16A4 are excellent rifles.  Civilian clone rifles are similarly excellent.  Many major manufacturers produce 20" barrels and they and others make good A2 buttstocks. An M16A2 or M16A4 clone makes an excellent minuteman rifle.  Let's dig into this deeper.


Advantages
M16 clones have longer barrels. Longer barrels means greater velocity from the rounds.  This translates into better effectiveness. 

Greater velocity also translates to longer effective ranges.  For outdoors, an M16 clone rifle can make effective hits out to 800 yards with quality ammo. 

The rifle length gas tube, accompanied by the A2 stock result in an even lighter recoil impulse. The .223 / 5.56 is not a hard recoil round to begin with, but when you lighten recoil further, it means better control for follow up shots.  People spend lots of money to reduce the felt recoil on their M4 carbines.

Although longer barrels do not translate into greater accuracy, a longer sight radius will lend to greater accuracy. This is true for irons - optics will yield similar results in either rifle.

Reliability is much better in the M16 variants due to the afore-mentioned rifle length gas tube and A2 buffer tube. A properly lubricated M16 Clone rifle firing brass cased ammo can easily go 1000's of rounds between malfunctions.


Disadvantages
Vehicle ingress/egress will be more troublesome with a 38" rifle. In your SHTF fantasies, how many include lots of vehicle operations? If you imagine that will be a big part of it, you haven't done a lot of research into human catastrophe.

CQB considerations will have to be made.  Marines have been stacking up on doors and making entries with M16A4 rifles for nearly two decades, so it's certainly possible. Also, if you still adhere to dynamic entry instead of Israeli Limited (ILE), you're just wrong.  The M16 clone is not at any disadvantage when using ILE. 


Maximizing
To get maximum effectiveness from your M16 clone rifle, do the following upgrades:

Trigger - get a good trigger.  The Rifleman suggests Geissele.

Optic - a red dot, low power fixed scope, or a variable power scope all do well with this setup.  Plus, they look dead sexy. 

Free float - free float your barrel.  If you don't want to gunsmith much, Daniel Defense, Troy, and Midwest Industries all have free float rails that can attach using the factory barrel nut without removing the front sight post.  The Rifleman has a MI rail on his main M16A4 variant. 

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