Fred and Loathing on The Internet

America's Default Rifle

2026-Sep-29

Seeing how the precedent has already been set for blog posts being dedicated to an actual person rather than a media object, we might as well keep going in that direction. We have more to say than just reviews seeking out the nostalgia of forgotten sitcoms, action movies or GOP presidents (and failed presidential candidates). Let’s do a blog post about an inanimate object. Let’s write not about a person, nor a place, but a thing.

The book that brought this ‘thing’ to my attention is American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 by Cameron McWhirter and Zosha Elimson. A publication from 2023 that has stirred the item in question out of the recesses of my nostalgic musings and into the forefront.

The rifle itself is the item. Or I suppose the ‘AR’ weapons platform. That’s what is getting the blog treatment. Well unofficially. This was a somewhat fabulous book that presented a lot of new information on the development of the rifle. A whole lot about how unliked the lightweight small caliber AR platform was by the military and gun manufacturing elites. I prefaced my qualification of the book's fabulousness with the word ‘somewhat’ because I don’t have my full confidence in the new stuff I learned from this book. There were a few things I did know about prior to reading this book that did come out slightly wrong. At least from how I’ve heard it told in several other non-fiction books. Seeing these gaffes made me reconsider every new thing I learned from this book. I wondered how every new interesting tidbit could have been just as slightly mistold as the blemishes of the truth I noticed.

It would be a disservice to say there’s not a whole blog post of stuff worth talking about learned just from this one book, flawed as those new lessons might have been presented. Eugene Stoner, the progenitor of the titular rifle of the book, himself is a very memorable character that stands out from the others in this two-act book. A whole post could be made about the life and times of this peculiar man who made a huge contribution to the US side of The Cold War by tinkering in his garage. The trends of the gun industry and culture ebbed and flowed around this steady-as-clockwork engineer throughout his career.

Before we can get to what was learned from both halves of this two-part book, I wanna talk about the precepts I had about assault rifles that I thought the authors would do more to clarify. Now, nobody around here on the fredlambuth.com staff is what you would call a ‘gun nut’. Gun nut adjacent though. Quite often. It comes from having our offices in Texas.

Although there is a lot of encyclopedic knowledge shared amongst us about the science of how these weapons work and of the history of their usage among armies or civilians. Hell, there is plenty of small arms experience to be found among the crew. Firing guns. Loading them. Cleaning them. However, none of us ever forked out the money to have the responsibility of owning a pistol, shotgun, rifle or any specialty gun offered to them.

Around here, the guns are well researched but they are purely abstract. Mostly found in video games or movies. Especially video games. Once the modern military first-person shooter became ubiquitous (which I would ballpark around 2007), the oodles of real or theoretical military rifles were seen by millions. When talking about weapon choice or customization in a FPS game set in the real world, it had to be ‘modern’. WW2 did not offer much variety in weapons. There was basically one type of SMG, automatic rifle, pistol, and rifle for each army of the Axis or Allies. Why bother learning much more than the category.

Long time players of Call of Duty 1-3 (the ones set in WW2) need not bother to remember the United States soldiers used a Thompson SMG chambered in .45 because they just had to know to pick the only SMG available to the American team in online games. Same applied to when they played as the Germans. The MP44 was just the German SMG. That was not the case in any shooter stepping into the post-Cold War world of projectile throwing weapons! With the first wave of popular ‘modern’ war shooters, a player could shop around until they find their digital firearm niche. With eventual sequels to these shooters set after the modern era of assault rifles, they could paint their exotic weapons ( like a SCAR-H) in cheetah print pink.

Battlefield 2, the sequel to Battlefield 1942 or Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare are clear examples of the video game sequels that leapt out of the early days of small arms variety and into the plethora of the weapons available to the 2000’s military cause celebre that replaced The Cold War: The Global War on Terror. The choices available for assault rifles numbered in the dozens once these types of video games reached the modern era of warfare. The nationalistic split between the M1 Garand vs the Kar 98 vs Nagant of WW2’s battle for Europe was old news in video games in the second half of the 2000s. For whatever reasons, WW2 games in general were on their way out by the mid 2000s.

The M16 (NATO) vs AK47(Warsaw Pact) rifle debate actually tested in the flare ups of The Cold War was left unsettled as the war ended. They both presented good arguments for their continued use as the goto rifle for armies, insurgents, or for anybody that wants to project a lot of man-killing bullets in a short amount of time. This generation of rifle rivalry was mostly sidestepped in the FPS genre. There was no mega-successful FPS set in Vietnam or Grenada where a digital stand-in for each rifle could be used to duke it out in player vs player matches online.

Counterstrike, the original mod for Half-Life in the late 90s, was an uncommon entry among shooting video games at the time that did illustrate the AK vs AR debate. Among FPS games in the late 1990s, the traditions of super fast run-n-gun shooting style remained. With one generic weapon of each type (pistol, shotgun, sniper, etc) rather than twelve types of basically the same assault rifle. Counterstrike was one of the first to popularize the idea that shooters could be about picking one of three basic types of weapons, with minute differences. Such as magazine size, reload time, or horizontal/vertical recoil. Ultimately each weapon had about the same amount of killing force and each could be used the same way. This was not a ‘rocket launcher vs sniper rifle’ debate. It was more or less, what’s the best weapon in all conditions debate.

What I most remember from those days was that most CTs would pick the M4 (an AR), and the Ts would pick the AK47. The former had less recoil. The latter dealt more damage but the recoil kicked high quickly after the first round being fired. Counterstrike or the Rainbow Six games on the PC were likely responsible for me learning the names and looks of weapons that were contenders outside the AR vs AK contention. These games were where I learned that the Steyr Aug was the name of the assault rifle the European bad guys would have in action movies. It’s also the game that taught me that the FAMAS was not a futuristic weapon made up just for Metal Gear Solid on the PS1.

Instead of determining an actual victor of the ‘best rifle’ debate after the war moved on past The Cold War, the arms industries of the world tried out new rifle designs. USSR or not, they came up with new rifles to sell to armies looking for something sexier than the usual AR/AK. Old gunsmithing ideas were tried again with newer, more resilient materials. Some far-out ideas were being tested out in the firing range, with some new things actually converting into sales, in small numbers to a few militaries or police forces around the globe.

Armed services in disparate countries, including the US, were trying out the new fancy looking rifles. Never in full scale numbers though. The bulk of the infantry around the world was still using the rifle or carbine variant of the tried and true AR or AK schema. Once the Global War on Terror posed the rifle question for American weaponmakers, it seemed some space age looking weapons appeared to be always just around the corner. A new generation of firearm technology to replace these now ‘classic’ rifles and carbines. The ones most militaries had been reliably using for decades by that point. That future for these rifles seen in the choices of Call of Duty or Battlefield games just never seemed to arrive.

The AR, the weapons platform developed by the American gunsmith Eugene Stoner for the US Army as a service rifle met the requirements then and still does today. The requirements for this weapon derived from assessments about what the soldier of the post-WW2 future should be carrying. The M1 Garand likely proved to be the most effective general issue infantry rifle in WW2. Its ability to fire rapidly elevated it among the other service rifles. Other long guns definitely could fire more accurately or at longer distances. Those advantages proved to be not useful when most combat happened at ranges (>300m) where the M1 was more than accurate enough.

In the twilight era of the Cold War, the years between WW2 and The Korean War, a lot of assessment was made to see just what was effective on all that stuff the US military industrial complex put out to fight the Germans and Japanese. The big question was, “what contributed the most towards winning the war?” Committees, agencies and whatnot looked over every aspect to learn the larger lessons about why the Allies had won the war. Among the wonderful debriefing there was after the war about using electronic intelligence gathering or proximity fuse, there was the uncomfortable truth learned about how most GIs used their weapons in battle.

Most American soldiers in WW2 were indeed shooting their guns. However, it was not in deliberate shots with conservation of ammo or concerted accuracy. More often it was close range situations where volume of fire was the most important factor in how rifles were used. The bulk of American soldiers were spraying and praying. Laying down a lot of suppressive fire to extinguish each and every target. That is a little bit of a charitable description of how the post-war assessments were found for the behavior of your average GI. The long and short of the assessment was that the rifle of the future should put out a large volume of fire, and be effective for killing humans in the hands of somebody with little to no weapons training.

Eugene Stoner tried to solve this problem by making a rifle that an average GI could fire indiscriminately and still be somewhat effective. Given the slightest amount of training, and willingness to fire, somebody could do a lot of damage with Stoner’s invention. This invention is basically the rifle’s internal parts, and their specific material conditions.

Basically his invention lives on today in all AR rifle’s ‘receiver’. That is the necessary part which moves the ammunition from the magazine into firing position, fires the round, and finishes by expelling the spent ammo casing. To ‘cycle the action’. All operations performed by using the spent force of firing the rifle bullet to move everything into place. In theory chaining together motion as long as more ammo is fed and no jams occur. The M16 is the government name given to the rifle bought by the US government. The US Army uses a whole bunch of ‘AR15’ rifles in its arsenal.

As long as those AR firing mechanisms are in there, you have yourself an AR rifle. The AK does something similar, but rattles a lot more because the mechanisms that move all the loading, firing, and expelling push against one another physically. It will ultimately have to use heavier materials and will have heavier recoil than an AR, which uses a gentler firing mechanism of the spent round’s channeled gas.

All those F2000s, L85A2s, CZ-805, and SAR-21s from those shooter games. They looked cool yet they did not do enough extra to replace the AR or AK. I’m not a gun nut, so perhaps they did do amazing things. The ugly truth about these sleek looking weapons is that the world’s militaries keep buying ARs and AKs instead. Nobody has figured out yet how to make a better light weight rifle that puts out a large volume of fire, but doesn’t cost too much.

Earlier I had mentioned that the book was a two volume affair. That second half was the civilian repercussions for the AR15’s legacy. How a weapon made to be efficient at killing even in the hands of a neophyte soldier performs in the hands of an irate American looking to kill a lot of bystanders quickly should be obvious. Looking at the numbers of mass shootings, it becomes obvious it is the most convenient weapon available to the US consumer looking to commit mass violence.

Of course, there are plenty of arguments to be made that the AR15 type rifles provide something necessary that no other ‘legal’ firearm could. How eager you are to hear those arguments might make you not want to face the fact that the AR15 is a superb choice for mass murder. Somebody wanting to commit mass homicide in the near future would be hard pressed to find a better choice for making killing wounds on another human. Why, this rifle is the choice of the military industrial complex for the common footsoldier. Why wouldn’t the savvy civilian consumer come to the same conclusions?