The wheel of history turned so that it was the Stoner system, modified by the designers of the Colt company, that got into the US military at the most critical moment - during the conflict in Vietnam. By coincidence of a number of circumstances, which we will discuss later, the testing of the new weapon turned out to be very harsh, and in some cases even tragic. See here for more details ar15 bolt catch.

And to this day, the memory of the problems with the first series of the "evil black rifle" has been preserved among the people - sometimes in the form of anecdotes, and sometimes in the form of a belief that this rifle is too demanding to maintain.

More than 50 years have passed since that moment, and rifles and carbines of the ar15 bolt catch type are still in the service of the most powerful, financially secure and generously funded armed forces in the world. There are 500,000 M4 carbines alone in the US Army, and another 80,000 are held by the Marine Corps. Over the years, gunsmiths have brought this system to perfection, having achieved an impressive indicator of the duration of fire without delays or failures from the M4 carbines - an average of 1691 shots with a regular army cartridge М855А1! This is a lot, and by any standard. Well, infantrymen returning from theaters around the world find the M4 carbine a reliable and effective weapon - and, according to polls, there are no less than 89% of them.

But no matter what the anecdotes may claim, the vast majority of the US military has no desire to change their M4 to another model of personal weapons. And even employees of special forces, who have much more freedom in this regard, are satisfied with the same M4A1, "tuned" for their own requirements and tasks. The ar15 bolt catch  is also the most popular self-loading system among civilian shooters - there are about 10 million owners in the United States alone! Outside the American continent, this system is also well known and no less beloved by both civilian shooters and security forces.

Among Its Undeniable Advantages:

Modularity. A huge number of modifications, improved parts and accessories.

Easy to self-assemble, upgrade and maintain.

Good accuracy of army weapons and excellent - specialized.

A design that allows you to keep the weapon on target when firing.

High Reliability Of Modern AR-15.

The latter is worth mentioning in particular, since it is this issue that usually causes the most controversy. Tests of all kinds of AR-15 are carried out constantly - both by manufacturers and sellers of weapons, and by the armed forces, government agencies and individuals. AR-15, inventing torture and torment for them, from which a true weapon lover's blood runs cold. On Youtube you can find a considerable number of videos shot without editing, "in one go", where the shooter buries the rifle in the ground, drops and throws it on the ground, drowns in the mud or pours sand directly into the insides of the weapon and the magazine - after which his rifle continues to shoot , as if nothing had happened.

It is not surprising that such qualities were quickly appreciated by both domestic shooters and weapon lovers. And after in the summer of 2014 commercial cartridges of 7.62x39 caliber practically disappeared from sale, and most of the owners of civilian versions of AKMs and SKSs were left without ammunition, many seriously thought about switching to the "NATO standard" - fortunately, the cost of cartridges is quite comparable, and opportunities in terms of modernization, tuning and bringing weapons to perfection on their own mind, the AR-15 platform gives an order of magnitude more than conversion Soviet samples. And the choice here is much better - we are offered new, modern, technologically advanced weapons made according to the standards of the 21st century, and the army deposits that have not been repaired, restored and converted more than half a century ago.

This article was written in order to answer at least the most common ones. In no case do we pretend to be complete - on the AR-15 platform it is already quite possible to defend dissertations and write weighty volumes of encyclopedias, but we hope that at least the main points that arise when choosing such a weapon will be discussed in detail in the first part of the article. And in the second, we will deal with the assortment of the most interesting models of the AR-15 type offered in our market and the difference between them.